Visiting Google's Cafe Thoreau

I haven't visited Google's headquarters, but I've heard about the various cafe's (i.e. cafeterias) on their corporate campus. If I were to visit the Google campus, I would ask to be directed to Cafe Thoreau. This cafe doesn't yet exist, but maybe it should.

Cafe Thoreau serves healthy, low-cost vegetarian food cooked primarily by solar cookers. The variables that are maximized at this cafe are low-cost and health. Taste, however, is not sacrificed.

Meals at Cafe Thoreau can be cooked using the Villager Sun Oven, which can cook as many as 1,200 meals per day. On weekends, when Googlers are presumably not working, the Villager Solar Oven could be loaned to different community events in San Francisco and surrounding areas.

At Cafe Thoreau, all served dishes have detailed listing of their ingredients. Why? People out there have different food allergies. They're entitled to know what they're eating.

Here's the interesting part. Google can harness the wisdom of the crowds to come up with the best recipes for foods served at Cafe Thoreau. I've got a couple of great recipes to submit. Honest. Check in at http://www.google.com/cafethoreau in a few weeks to submit your own recipes.

By this point you might be wondering why this cafe is called Cafe Thoreau and not Cafe Gandhi. I've been wondering about that, too.

By any measure, Gandhi is who the cafe ought to be named for. Gandhi's gift to the world is so huge, we are just beginning to appreciate it.

But look who Gandhi read. (See the fourth paragraph down.) Henry David Thoreau latched onto ideas eternal in value and resonant within the hearts of all who walk the Earth (as well as those who crawl, swim, and fly.)

Last year the editor-in-chief of PCWorld, Harry McCracken, walked off his job rather than bow to pressure from someone who told him what was permissible or not permissible to write in the magazine. It's almost guaranteed that Harry McCracken has read Thoreau. I'm going to thoroughly enjoy sitting down for a meal with Harry sometime at Google's Cafe Thoreau.

To walk into the future you need vision, courage, smarts and a good cafe. At this cafe the food needs to be well done. Not just "cooked" well done. Well done in thought, too.

And then we all move forward.

Phil Shapiro
The blogger is an adjunct professor of education and a technology commentator in the Washington DC-area. He studied engineering and philosophy in college and is the author of a chapter titled, "Some Thoughts on the Economics of Education Delivery" in the new book Education Technology: Critical Perspectives and Possible Futures. He can be reached at: philshapiroblogger@gmail.com

Prior blog postings -

YouTube Reaches a Billion Video Views per Day

After Lightning Strikes, One iMac Becomes Two

It Feels Like Freedom is Coming

Book Review - Google SketchUp for Dummmies

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