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The miracle of the (veggie) oil

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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/31129/full/31129/the-miracle-of-the-veggie-oil/ The miracle of the (veggie) oil Friday, December 15, 2006 | by joe eskenazi The waning winter sun glints off Rabbi Daniel Isaacson’s dark glasses as he roars down the onramp to Highway 580. Within a matter of moments his 1985 Mercedes 300 Turbo Diesel has achieved a velocity every bit as rapid as one would ever hope to attain on an Oakland motorway, effortlessly flashing the casual power that brings to mind the more benevolent incarnations of the phrase “German engineering.” And right as we hit the exit to Martin Luther King Jr. Way — yes, there it is. That smell. A mouth-watering smell that, ever so briefly, overpowers the normal olfactory backdrop of faux leather and faux wood in what was one hell of a glamorous car 21 years ago. For just a second, we were both in mom’s kitchen, right before the latkes hit the pan. Actually, if Rudolf Diesel had his way, all of his eponymous engines would emit the savory odors of frying foods. The motor he unveiled at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair ran on peanut oil — but the petroleum industry made its move and diesel fuel is now a multi-billion dollar business. But not a dime of it comes from Isaacson. The 33-year-old Conservative rabbi and congregant at Berkeley’s Congregation Netivot Shalom indeed drives a diesel car. But for the past year, he has not spent dollar one at a gas station. In fact, for many months he hasn’t spent any money on fuel at all. And that’s because he runs his hulking, two-ton Mercedes on the vegetable oil left on the bottom of the wok at one of Oakland’s finest Vietnamese restaurants. And they’re all too happy to let him cart off the grease for free. The rabbi’s decision to go veggie stems from a relationship with Judaism that compels him to respect the environment in the same way he respects the Sabbath and kashrut edicts. Isaacson, a yarmulke-wearing man, does not believe that one “puts in” his or her Judaism several hours a week at shul. And while you obviously don’t need to be either Jewish or religious to be an environmentalist, Isaacson is all of the above. Environmental responsibility and spirituality are not mutually exclusive in his worldview. “Sensitivities to our impact on the world, what we do, what we buy, what we conserve, these are all spiritual questions,” he said while cruising to “the gas station” — Le Cheval restaurant in downtown Oakland. Isaacson is a shortish, compact man with a ready smile who is probably still being asked for his I.D. at the supermarket when he buys his Shabbat wine. His black yarmulke blends in with his dark hair, and he wears Berkeley’s Sunday uniform of a loosely fitting polo shirt, faded old jeans and hiking boots. Just as Isaacson blends into his South Berkeley neighborhood, so does his car (though it has no bumper stickers). It is a stately, navy-colored marvel of mid-1980s engineering with the exception of its cream-colored hood (Isaacson got into an accident several months ago, and selected a new one off a junked Mercedes. He later noticed his new hood came with a few bullet holes.) But once the rabbi raises his innocuous car’s bullet-riddled hood, it becomes exotic. Even those who find changing a tire to be beyond their automotive abilities can’t help but notice what appears to be a Day-Glo Nalgene water bottle mounted in the front right of the engine. This is a filter: Vegetable oil is a solvent and large chunks of what the rabbi calls “petroleum gook” have broken free from the car’s pipes and are now trapped in the bottle. Isaacson decided to “change his oil” when he landed a job as a Jewish chaplain for a hospice and was required to drive considerably more than 100 miles a day to visit the sick and dying. And he just didn’t feel right contributing to the sickness and death of the planet with that much fuel consumption and exhaust. And then Congress bent to President Bush’s demand to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve for oil drilling. Isaacson had been keenly negotiating with a Los Angeles seller on the Mercedes, but the Congressional vote spurred him to blurt out, “I’ll take it!” Well, that’s not entirely true. The rabbi still haggled the seller — a Jewish guy, incidentally — down $800 to $3,200. He drove the Mercedes to an L.A. specialist who converted it into a veggie car for $700; Isaacson dropped off the vehicle on Friday afternoon, spent Shabbat at a friend’s shul, and picked it up on Sunday. He motored to Costco, bought a massive case of vegetable oil and poured it into his tank right in the parking lot. He made it back to his Berkeley home on one tank of Mazola. The foot-high mound of prawns two kitchen workers are peeling with jaw-dropping speed is all one needs to see to understand why hefty five-gallon jugs of used vegetable oil are the only takeout the rabbi will ever get at Le Cheval. The plastic containers Isaacson hauls off resemble gargantuan cousins of supermarket milk jugs, and the used veggie oil within bears a striking resemblance to flat Coca-Cola. The rabbi pulls up in front of a friend’s garage in a leafy South Berkeley side street. This is his own personal refinery. Actually, the “refining” process for used veggie oil is about the same as the aging process for whiskey — you just have to let it sit around in a vat. Isaacson leaves the five-gallon jugs in the corner of the garage for around two weeks while the random bits of snow pea and water chestnut sink to the bottom. The rich odor of fried Asian food envelops the garage as Isaacson cranks a lever and pumps the flat Coke out of a 55-gallon drum ($20 on Craigslist) and into his tank. And yet veggie oil isn’t just friendlier to the nose than regular fuel. It’s friendlier to the environment in its extraction and its emissions. And it’s safe for Isaacson to take a few five-gallon containers in his trunk for a road trip — in fact, you could put a cigarette out in vegetable oil. (Biodiesel, a refined fuel derived from vegetable oil, ignites at 350 degrees Farenheit — which any reader of Ray Bradbury knows is only 101 degrees lower than the temperature at which this newspaper will burst into flame. Regular gasoline ignites at 43 degrees below zero. Don’t put your cigarette out in it.) At $3.70 a gallon, biodiesel is about a dollar more expensive than regular fuel. But, then again, its price is not dictated by the whims of anti-America and anti-Israel fanatics. When Isaacson last year committed to running his car on vegetable oil, he swore he’d get it done by Chanukah. There’s an unavoidable parallel regarding the oil — and, he notes, that while the Israelites might have enjoyed an oil miracle, the rest of us have to deal with sustainability issues. Plus, the temptation to fry up latkes and then use the runoff to power his car was too good to pass up. No word on whether the oil gave him eight times the mileage he predicted. Isaacson waves his right hand around, encompassing the spacious, super-luxurious-by-1985-standards interior of the car his wife calls the “Latke Wagon” (and he refuses to). “I want people to know that this is possible.” By “this” the rabbi means you can live out your spiritual and environmental ideals and still live well. You don’t need to be rich. You don’t need to have a lot of free time. You don’t need all too much garage space. You don’t even need any bumper stickers. And you most definitely don’t have to call your car the “Latke Wagon.” “No, no, no,” says Isaacson, shaking his head. “It’s too cutesy.”

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