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1959
Shattuck
Berkeley, Ca. 94704
(510) 644-4464
...Gravity's Gallery!
Steve Nechodom (the coffee/juice drinker) is a traditional glass blower specializing in functional glassware. He truly believes that strong glassware for your kitchen and dining room functions as a clarifier for all your eating and drinking habits. It makes what you eat and drink both beautiful and healthy.
Plasticizers and phthalates from plastic cups and bottles (not beautiful!) can leach into the water you drink – and just imagine what happens to that plastic if you put a hot beverage in it (not healthy!). Most plastics have softeners in them that are seeming more and more dangerous as evidence builds after thirty years of mass public usage. Canada has found them dangerous enough to ban their use in pacifiers and baby chew toys. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission, while patting us on the head and telling us not to worry, has requested a voluntary change of formula for those baby items made by US manufacturers. Their patronizing, yet still worrisome, report on the subject can be found here. These are problems that we are
struggling with as a society. Since big business and a business-loving
government make it difficult to find solid, trustworthy evidence,
we choose to err on the side of caution and rationality. It’s
time to go back to a tried and true technology that is proven to
be non-destructive to homo-sapiens. *** ...Gravity's
Galley! Did someone say Thanksgiving Coffee Company's fair trade, organic espresso hand pulled through our newly rebuilt 1977 Conti "Le Grand Danieli" C-7 espresso machine,(A.K.A. Le Machine) then served in hand blown glass?!
*** James Lane (Barrista/juice maker) is a thirteen year veteran of the organic Juice and coffee industry. He has been witness to the rise and fall of many a bullshit company espousing the healthy effects of organic beverages and then turning around and extracting that “organic” juice from the nipple of a plastic machine holding some kind of concentrated beverage with preservatives added “for your safety” and finally dumping those beverages into a plastic cup with a plastic straw stuck in it. James, a big fan of the run-on sentence, believes that the only things that can pull this petroleum addicted species (homo sapiens) out of its seemingly endless spiral of self-destruction are organic foods served in hand blown glass, wind and solar power, and of course stepping away from the TV, giving up the car for a bike and doing all your traveling by sail. ...Ummmm. He also knows that it’s highly un-likely
that anyone can make these kinds of dramatic changes in their lives
all at once, but even small, incremental changes on a local scale
are moves in the right direction and ultimately
have dramatic societal effects.
Check back for our forays into Organic Juices and Fair Trade, Organic Coffees! We won’t stop until we’ve cleaned up our act – and given you a place to do the same… ***
Our
Gallery hours are:
Both James Lane and Steve Nechodom
are didgeridoo
Wow, just like that it's been 2 years since Dena and I wrote the above and boy are things different! Not in philosophy, mind you, but at least now I can tell you how not to do the aforementioned business in (funky like) Berkeley, Calif or any where for that matter. Now, you would think that the beautiful city of Berkeley, Calif. would want something like an all organic, fair trade juice and coffee, hand blown glass internet gallery. Right? Well, first of all one has to
go about categorizing such a thing and from the get-go we've had
a problem with that very question: what is it? It (Gravity Feed) is not a cafe. Although there is a bar to belly-up to, there is no real "usual" to be had. Hell, our menu is as variable as, well, the seasons on an organic farm. I must admit my first thought was just to do it the old fashioned way. You know, barge into a neighborhood (that already has that kind of thing) and just go for it. Offer the same thing that everybody else has but make it all organic and charge twice as much simply because it's better, better for your health, better for the environment, better for the workers of the world, and almost guaranteed to be better tasting. But we believe that that way of doing business is not only rude, it's kind of stupid and, in the long run, very expensive. So to solve that problem we, over a year, slowly discovered what the neighborhood needed and ultimately provided it in its organic form. You can't deny the vowelous flow of Wi-Fi Internetjuice Confectionary, which was the "Super-Duper, Semantics Switch-a-Roo" plan that we tried (and failed) on the Powers That Be (PTB). They, the PTB, just stared at us from the other side of that drab-gray counter and said, "What is that?" So, we now know what the Gravity Feed is not. ...Whatever.
Freshly spun * organic juices served at our beautiful hand-made table. ... But after months of struggling with the evil PTB they in turn did us the favor of making us define ourselves, thus re-defining (for me) what I thought was simply a bureaucratic red tape machine. In fact, it turned out to be a very clever way of making me define what it was I really wanted to do from the beginning. I think I get it.
As of the writing of that letter (1/2004 and updated again through out the year) the Gravity Feed has become a beautiful place to come see two and three dimensional beautiful things made with the hands of human beings, a place to listen to great music, surf the Internet on fast, updated computers and disseminate the uncensored information that you chose. If you're cool, I'll pour you a cup of Thanksgiving Coffee because I think they are the best all organic, fair trade, 0 emission coffee company there is and now that the beautiful city of (funky like) Berkeley, Calif. has decided it's ok for me to do so I'm going to charge for that coffee but just as those aforementioned computers are the best deal in town to surf-fast (the only way to go) at 3bucks and .50cents every hour, the same deal goes for the coffee. I'm only going to charge you a buck for that because that's how much a cup of coffee should cost, but hey, my tip jar still looks hungry so drop what you can. *** ***
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