In honor of the heat wave currently ravaging the Northeast, I give you Whole Foods, where K and I used to spend extra-hot evenings, “borrowing” air conditioning (97th St. and Columbus, New York City). 
Not surprisingly, Whole Foods’ restroom is very green and recycle-y, beginning with the fact that you get to it behind the composter in the eating area (see below for a photo of the signs that help you navigate this environmentally-friendly process). That’s right: after you eat at Whole Foods, you have to separate out compostable items — paper, food scraps, etc. — from actual trash. I actually think this is a wonderful idea, because I get all up in arms and terribly sad whenever I think about the Great Pacific garbage patch, but it’s still hilarious to pick through your giant bowl, scooping out spoonfuls of the mint-flecked quinoa salad you didn’t like and plopping it in the compost bin. Anyway. Restroom. Not much going on in here — after all, Whole Foods a grocery store, no matter how fancy and expensive its wares are (although, Wegmans does have a pretty fancy-ish restroom for a supermarket). The floors are some nameless cream-beige-gray color. The walls are hastily painted concrete blocks in a slightly different shade of nameless. But then, my friends, the pops of bright green remind us that Whole Foods hates on the Great Pacific garbage patch as much as I do. There’s a big plastic green bin exclusively for recyclable paper towels, and the toilet has a GREEN FLUSHER. I guess this means it wastes less water, but imagine if you could get designer flushers on your toilet at home, in all sorts of nameless and not-so-nameless colors. “Hey, Mr. Plumber. Emerald is the Pantone color of the year for 2013 — so can I get that on my toilet instead of recycling green?”
Those were fun evenings at Whole Foods. K and I would head over right after work, fill up giant bowls of food from the prepared section (soba noodles! seaweed salad! mango salad! gross crunchy healthy vegan nasty salad! Indian food! and those weird berry cobblers that we’d look at but not get…). We would generally not like half of what we put in our bowls, and most of the salads were dripping in oil. After we ate, we’d sit at the table for hours, reading, writing and talking, and dreading the moment when we’d have to leave and go back to our blistering hot apartment; our glasses would fog up the minute we walked outside, and we’d walk as slowly as we could back to the 96th Street subway station, trying not to sweat through our clothes before we got there…but why bother, because after 30 seconds on a subway platform on a 95-degree day, you’ll be dripping with sweat anyway. I still wonder how I survived several brutal, heat wave-infested summers in Manhattan without my epidermis melting or my organs baking. Seriously, don’t talk to me about how hot it is if you haven’t lived in NYC without an air conditioner for FOUR YEARS. Unless you live in Las Vegas. Then you can talk all kinds of smack about how I don’t know what hot is.
Restroom Rating: [rating=2]
Porcelain Press 