Earth Month at Rockoly

Earth Day is April 22, and the first one was held in 1970. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin proposed a national teach-in on the environment after seeing the damage from a huge oil spill off Santa Barbara, and the date was chosen deliberately: it fell between spring break and final exams, when the largest number of college students would be free to take part.

About 20 million Americans turned out, roughly a tenth of the country at the time. The United States Environmental Protection Agency was created later that same year, and the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts followed. Earth Day went global in 1990 and is now marked worldwide.

Three Earth Month menus, each 60 minutes and led live by a chef:

• Pickle Party. Turn kitchen scraps into a pantry full of pickled vegetables. You bring your own produce and we send a list of suggestions in advance, so this one ships nothing at all. Add a wine pairing.
• Smokey Veggie Burger with sweet potato fries. A plant-based patty packed with superfoods and topped with avocado, with an optional Green Goddess sauce. Add a tasting of three beers.
• Edible Terrarium. Candy rocks, chocolate pudding, crushed cookies and sponge cake layered up and topped with hand-molded chocolate succulents, mushrooms and bug-shaped fruit snacks. Add a kombucha pairing.

All three are vegetarian with vegan options, and gluten-free versions are available.

Food, and more of it than people expect. The two menus that ship arrive in grocery-sized portions with enough in the bag to eat beyond the workshop itself, sized to feed a family of four, and family or partners can join on the same screen at no extra cost — so the burger or the terrarium is dinner rather than a tasting.

The Pickle Party is the one with a shelf life. Your team finishes the hour with jars of pickled vegetables made from produce that was already going soft in their own fridge, which is the argument of this whole page in a jar. Every event also ends with a group photo, and the chef and host hand out sustainability tips along the way, so a few of them tend to survive the afternoon too.

Acid. Most of the bacteria that spoil food, including the one behind botulism, can't grow below roughly pH 4.6, so once a vegetable is sitting in a sharp enough brine it simply stops going off.

There are two routes there. A quick pickle borrows its acid: you pour hot vinegar over the vegetable and it's ready in hours. A fermented pickle makes its own, because salt water holds spoilage organisms back while Lactobacillus bacteria already living on the vegetable eat its sugars and produce lactic acid. That's what gives a proper dill pickle and a jar of sauerkraut their sourness.

The word itself comes from the Dutch pekel, meaning brine. Pickling is also the most direct thing you can do about food waste in your own kitchen: the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that around a third of the food produced for people is lost or wasted, and a good deal of that is limp vegetables in the bottom of a drawer. Our Pickle Party is built around exactly those.

Some of both, and we would rather be straight about which is which.

The genuinely green parts: the Pickle Party ships nothing, because your team cooks with produce already in their own kitchens, including the scraps most people throw out. The menus are plant-forward by design and the burger is fully plant-based. And a virtual event means nobody drives to a venue and no caterer packs a hundred disposable trays.

The honest part: a one-hour workshop is not a sustainability program. What it does well is make the subject concrete and a bit fun, so that zero-waste cooking stops being a slide in an all-hands and becomes something your team has actually done once. That's a fair return on an hour in April, and a date on the calendar is a far easier sell than another voluntary lunch and learn.

Most of it is habit rather than sacrifice:

• Shop seasonal and local where you can. Produce in season needs fewer inputs to grow and less distance to travel.
• Plan meals around what's already in the fridge, and store things properly so they last. Most waste is food that was bought with good intentions.
• Pickle, jam or freeze whatever is about to turn. Stems, peels and stalks are ingredients, not trash.
• Move a couple of meals a week toward plants. Animal agriculture carries a far heavier land, water and emissions cost than the plant foods it replaces.
• Cook in batches and use the heat well: right-sized burner, lids on, oven off a few minutes early to coast on residual heat.
• Buy with less packaging and store in containers you already own rather than new plastic.
• Grow herbs on a windowsill. It's small, but it's the one people actually keep up.
• Compost whatever is genuinely left so the nutrients go back into soil instead of landfill.

Our Earth Month workshops teach the first three directly, which is why the Pickle Party asks your team to raid their own fridge instead of waiting on a delivery.

Not here. The chef leads every step live, and these three menus are unusually forgiving: pickling is chopping and pouring, the terrarium is assembly and decoration, and the burger is one patty and a tray of fries. There is no real way to ruin any of it and nothing is timed against anyone.

Scattered is fine too. Groups run from 3 to 600 or more, with very large teams split by department or across days, and we run on Zoom by default with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and WebEx all supported. Dietary changes — vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher, no alcohol — cost nothing when we know in advance, and all three menus are vegetarian to begin with. Kits ship free within the US and go out to Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Australia, India, South Africa and Mexico among other countries; anyone who would rather not take a delivery works from a shopping list. The Pickle Party asks everyone to shop their own fridge anyway, which quietly solves the delivery problem altogether.

Every rate includes your personal chef, a dedicated event planner, gratuities and all service fees. The Terrarium and Burger rates also cover ingredient delivery; the Pickle Party doesn't need one, because your team is cooking with what they already have.

That last detail is also a scheduling advantage. Three weeks is the usual lead time on a cooking event, and almost all of it is shipping — so the Pickle Party, which ships nothing, is the menu you can still get on the calendar when April 22 is closer than it should be. Rush dates on the other two are sometimes possible depending on chef availability.

A $250 deposit holds the date, paid by credit card, ACH bank transfer or check. Cancel 21 or more days out and you are refunded what you paid less any nonrecoverable costs already committed; 8 to 20 days out you choose between a 50% refund and a 100% Rockoly credit; inside 8 days payments are nonrefundable, though one complimentary reschedule is yours if you ask 14+ days ahead. Every event carries the Love Your Event Guarantee: your team should have an amazing experience, and if your Rockoly event doesn't live up to expectations, we'll make it right. Fill out the form on this page and a planner will get back to you, or call (617) 939-9732 or email events@rockoly.com.