Sunday, April 13, 2008 | Food, In this Issue...
SP Ted Turner on going green

Expect to see more green—and not just on your plate

 

CREDIT:Thomas James
Ted Turner

CHANGE YOUR TUNE


Restaurateur George McKerrow Jr., a 30-year restaurant industry veteran whose successes include Long Horn Steakhouse and Ted’s Montana Grill, shared several “going green” tips with restaurant owners that can also be adopted by any concerned citizen:

MORE WITH TED

Following the GRA meeting, The Sunday Paper was able to pull Ted Turner aside for a private conversation:

Why did you start raising bison?
They were highly endangered. That story about how close they came to extinction really touched me. I always thought if I had an opportunity to own land I’d try and raise bison on it. So about 30 years ago, I started with three bison and now I’ve got 50,000.

Doesn’t eating bison conflict with protecting them?
Mainly what we eat is the excess males. When they have calves they have half males and half females, but in order to maintain your herd you only need one bull for every 10 cows. Twenty-five years ago when I started, there were 70,000 bison in the United States; now there are six times as many and it’s because we’re selling the surplus ones.

How does “going green” impact your herd?
We don’t give them any steroids or hormones. We try to raise them as naturally as possible. Most of them do go to the feedlot—for a short period of time compared to cattle—but we try to raise them as close to organic as we can.

Can a “green” business be profitable?
Sure. A lot of things that are green also save you money.

 

MOUTH OF THE SOUTH

A sampler of Ted Turner’s tastiest quotes
“What are you? A bunch of Jesus freaks? You ought to be working for Fox.”—to CNN employees who had ashes on their foreheads in observance of Ash Wednesday, in 2001.

“We'll give the other bozos a chance to talk back. They look like idiots anyway.”—on opponents of abortion during a speech about a TBS program advocating abortion rights, in 1989.

“Most of the people will have died, and the rest of us will be cannibals.”—discussing global warming in an interview with PBS host Charlie Rose that aired April 2.

Source: Associated Press, The New York Times

“In order to get things turned around before the world turns into a burned-out cinder, which is where we’re headed, it’s going to take government, individuals, foundations, the scientific community, the educational community, everything we have.”—Ted Turner



By Hope S. Philbrick

    Change is coming to restaurants throughout Georgia. Expect to see more green—and not just on your plate. Members of the Georgia Restaurant Association who are concerned about the environment, sustainability and eco-friendly business practices recently launched the Green Foodservice Alliance to develop strategies and motivate others to think and act in environmentally active ways. At a kick-off breakfast meeting dubbed “The Green Restaurant Revolution” on Monday, March 31, at the Carter Center, restaurateurs Ted Turner and George McKerrow Jr., founders and business partners of Ted’s Montana Grill, talked with more than 150 Atlanta-area restaurant owners about the restaurant industry’s role in conservation and environmental stewardship.

    Moderated by Denis O’Hayer, a reporter for 11 Alive News specializing in government, politics and local affairs, Turner and McKerrow participated in a lively dialogue about how restaurant owners can take small steps that will ultimately make a big impact on global challenges. Turner also shared some strong opinions about how these global challenges came to be.

While Turner serves as chairman of Ted’s Montana Grill, he’s also a media entrepreneur, environmentalist and philanthropist. Through the Ted Turner Foundation, he supports efforts for improving air and water quality, developing sustainable energy resources, safeguarding environmental health, maintaining wildlife habitat protection and developing practices and policies to curb population growth rates. Through Turner Enterprises Inc., he manages more than two million acres and a herd of more than 50,000 bison. Underlying all his endeavors is a strong dedication to conservation and the environment, as evidenced by his answers to some pointed questions:

When did your commitment to the environment begin?
It started when I was a little kid. For some reason I was fascinated by the natural world: animals, plants, insects, reptiles and the whole thing. I read books about it when I couldn’t even read, just looked at the pictures. It started when I was a small child and never varied, continued to grow as I learned. I like to learn and nature is just a huge subject, just endless, and for me it’s completely fascinating.
I was so interested in the environment and natural world that it just came along with me everywhere I went. There was not an epiphany where I dropped to my knees like St. Paul; it wasn’t like that.

Why did you enter the restaurant industry after all that you’ve done?
I used to feed people’s curiosity and their thirst for knowledge with CNN and the networks, and I figured now I’ll just feed them food.

Did you have particular suggestions on the day-to-day operational level?
George really was the instigator from the very beginning of going seriously green with the restaurants and of course I supported it wholeheartedly. But he has been in the restaurant business all his life and I hadn’t been. I’d been in communications, and the materials that are used are totally different. It’s a different set of challenges, and he was much better equipped to lead the charge. Also, he’s the CEO of the restaurant chain; I’m chairman, but I’m not there 12 hours a day.

You source your own bison. How is that working?
It’s working fine. The problem with bison is that people didn’t know how to prepare it. It has less than half the fat and cholesterol than beef so if you cook it the way you do a beefsteak it dries out too much. By serving it in a restaurant where we can fix it the right way and show people how good it really is—not just good for you, but it tastes a lot better than beef in my opinion. That’s just one opinion. You have to try it yourself—stop by Ted’s Montana Grill.

Why is localization important?
The average food item in the United States travels more than 1,000 miles from where it’s grown to where it’s consumed. Does that make sense? No wonder we’re in trouble. It’s just not good for business to have to do that. If you ordered dinner sent from California to here and had to pay the transportation cost, it’s just ridiculous. Imagine paying for Evian water all the way from France. Fly it over in an airplane. Why don’t you get it a first-class seat? Only costs $5,000 to get a case of water!

I drank bottled water for a while. I quit because I educated myself on it. Whatever risks there are to the public water, most of the bottled water in plastic isn’t any better anyway. So I’m drinking tap water. There are some places where you can’t drink tap water, overseas in some countries, and I don’t want to give myself a disease, but the tap water here in the United States is eminently drinkable.

What interventions are needed to help save the environment?
Humanity is facing such a crisis at the current time, caused by mainly two things: First, the increasing number of people. When I was born in 1938, just 70 years ago, there were two billion people on earth. Now there’s 6 and a half billion—three and a half times as many people! There’s one-tenth as many elephants. Many less songbirds. Human beings are just overwhelming the environment, and that’s really what’s leading to problems like global warming and the hole in the ozone layer. The second problem is that we’re using more stuff. In America, the average home today is twice the square footage it was when I was born. In 1938, the average family was lucky to have one car, now we have two or three cars per family. Now everybody just stops by the grocery store every day or two or stops by the fast food place to get something—you’ve got a 200-pound person driving in a 4,000-pound car to get a quarter-pound hamburger! In order to get things turned around before the world turns into a burned-out cinder, which is where we’re headed, it’s going to take government, individuals, foundations, the scientific community, the educational community, everything we have. We’re going to have to work together very quickly and have a new renaissance of intelligent planning for the future or we’re not going to have one.

The simplest thing in the world is to go down to the bookstore and get Lester Brown’s new book, “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.” It’s easy to understand, lists all the problems and all the solutions.

Would legislation help?
Government shouldn’t be doing it with mandates, but they should be doing it with incentives. Georgia has no incentives for clean energy. We’re so far behind the rest of the country it’s unbelievable. States like New Jersey, California, Florida, even Texas are on top. Texas has more wind power now than any other state in the union and has incentives for it. We need a change of heart in the state government of Georgia.

We’re running out of time. Twice as many kids in Atlanta have asthma today as did 20 years ago. We’ve got coal-burning plants generating electricity to air-condition our houses that are twice as big as we need.

The night Al Gore conceded the election to Bush, I watched that and I cried because I knew we picked the wrong guy and we would pay dearly for it. And we have. We have wasted eight years as far as the environment. We didn’t go along with Kyoto; we’re the only country that’s not in it. We went out and started a war; we should have been fighting a war against global warming rather than a war against the Iraqis. But we have an opportunity this fall to change our government again and we better elect people that are smart instead of dumb. We’ve had enough of dumb. SP