​Chances are if you're a Whole Foods shopper, you have at least some level of commitment to eco causes. Be it a concern for your overall carbon footprint or simply wanting lots of organic options. For that, we applaud you. Then again, maybe you just like their ice cream selection. That's cool, too.

But what about that pesky fossil fuel burning trip to and from the store? Fresh Food Bike can help with that part of the equation (should your used vegetable oil powered Mercedes be in the shop) by bringing you all your perishables via their stylin' IZip Store eBikes.

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Alyssa White

White Putting Up The Window Sign For Her New Shop

​If you've never had a properly made cup of matcha, the frothy, powdered green tea popular in Japan, Alissa White, owner of the just-opened Matcha Source Shop in West Hollywood, is on a one-woman mission to make sure you finally do.

Since launching her online store in 2006, White has been preaching the glorious ways of the matcha life to tea bag-obsessed Westerners. But despite the overload of search-engine friendly health buzzwords on the Matcha Source website (words like "detox" and "weight-loss" never get us excited about any food), it wasn't the tea's purported health benefits that initially got even White hooked. "Matcha fascinated me from the get go," she says. "It's so magical and beautiful, with the tea literally so green it looks like [paint] pigment. And the taste was so extraordinary and unlike anything else I'd had before."

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Guzzle and Nosh

Jams from Akasha at a previous installment of Artisanal L.A.

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Friday marks the beginning of the Christmas season, but just because it's time to deck the halls doesn't mean you should risk getting decked in the face. Those Black Friday sales can be downright vicious. So why not skip the bum rush and support your local purveyors of craft goods? The next month has three fêtes where you can purchase your loved ones something handmade -- without the risk of sporting a black eye at your next holiday party. And in case you just have to shop on Black Friday, we've gathered a few notable food-centric shops in town. Turn the page.

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paulswansen

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Not wanting to deprive the rest of the world from exorbitant prices for locally grown goods, Whole Foods will open a store in Scotland this week, the first of its chain to open in the area. The store will open in Giffnock, a city near Glasgow. Londonites seem to love themselves some natural, organic Whole Foods products, so maybe the brand will catch on in Scotland too. According to Daily Finance, though, Whole Foods is anti-union, which may not bode well in the eyes of the Scottish.

At least 400 items sold in the Giffnock store will be from Scottish farms and vendors, something the multi-billion dollar company prides itself on. Residents also told Daily Finance that they're excited for the new job opportunities in the less-than-thriving area.

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jgarbee

Bar Keeper Cocktail Gift Box

​You may recall that about this time last year, Bar Keeper owner Joe Keeper introduced several clever holiday gift boxes created by L.A.-area mixologists. Each contained recipes by the likes of Marcos Tello and Matt Biancello, plus the spirits and bottled mixers required to make the recipes (bitters, flavored syrups), along with a presentation bonus like retro cocktail stirrers or the appropriate glassware. A pretty clever gift for the "celebrity" bartender-obsessed on your list. Or as Keeper described them to us, a great way for him to bring local bartender flavor into his shop's carefully edited global spirits collection.

More interesting, perhaps, is that the challenges of working with L.A.'s cocktail-induced celebrities aren't all that different from movie star version -- at least in terms of those strict liquid diet requirements.

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Firebox.com

Gamepad Chopping Board

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The original Nintendo controller -- so simple, so rectangular -- is a touchstone of nostalgia for many of us, a reminder of a time when two simple red buttons were all you needed to jump, shoot, and beat Bowser at Mario's own game. UK company Firebox takes us back to the time of Nintendo thumbs with its Gamepad Chopping Board ($23), designed like the ever classic controller.

It's not an exact duplicate, as the designers carefully and artfully considered what exactly you would be controlling: where the original Nintendo logo was placed, you have a cartoonish sliced carrot instead. And rather than the "Select" and "Start" printed on the controller, you have the slightly less motivating verbs "Slice" and "Dice."

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Craigslist

a cheeseburger bed

​If you're the sort of person who eats out way too often at Umami Burger, frequently invokes Thomas Keller's well-documented love of In-N-Out as justification for your fast food burger fetish, and spends your weekends in close proximity to your charcoal briquets and hand-ground prime chuck, then you may to check out this recent Craigslist ad. For a mere $1,000 (that's only 83 80 Father's Office hamburgers), you could sleep on a custom-made 84 inch by 38 inch tall bed shaped like an actual cheesehamburger.

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Tattly

Julie Rothman's food tattoos

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If you watch a lot of food television or are one of the lucky few who have actually gotten a reservation at Michael Voltaggio's Ink, you may have already made an appointment with your local tattoo artist to get a groovy new food tattoo. But if you don't want permanent ink -- or are too young to get one without your parent's permission -- you may want to try a temporary version. Lucky for you, these days you have more options than what you fish out of a box of breakfast cereal.

Like these pretty awesome temporary tattoos from Brooklyn artist Julie Rothman at Tattly: cool drawings of common kitchen utensils that you can take off if you want to. Because while having a 2 foot-long tattoo of a Bob Kramer knife on your thigh might seem like a good idea now, it may seem less so a few decades from now at the suburban assisted living facility.

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Marqui Akins

Ruth Reichl

​As you probably know, Ruth Reichl was recently in town for a launch party at Mozza for Gilt Taste, the shopping-as-literature site of which she's the editorial advisor. We caught up with her over coffee at José Andrés' Tres: frilly patisserie, coffee urns, decor like Monty Python meets Versailles.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to you to learn that Reichl is both extremely charismatic and articulate, a formidable combination. She also looks a good decade or two younger than she is, the vicissitudes of Gourmet and Si Newhouse notwithstanding. She sits crosslegged on the couch like a middle-schooler. It is difficult not to stare at her hair, which would make Steven Tyler weep with jealousy. What did she talk about?

What you would think, only better: the launch of Gilt Taste, her take on the L.A. food scene -- Reichl was once, after all, the Los Angeles Times food section editor as well as that paper's restaurant critic -- as well as her upcoming movie and a bit about food TV. So turn the page.

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Sur la Table

spoon as paint stick

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Shopping for cooking gear can be breathtakingly expensive. Copper pots! French sauté pans! Espresso machines! But sometimes it can be pleasantly cheap, especially if you like to hang out at hardware stores and garage sales and thrift shops. Sometimes even the fancy cooking stores have stuff that you can actually buy these days, like these seriously fun nonreactive silicon stir sticks from Sur La Table. Do they do anything a normal wooden spoon doesn't already do? Of course not, but they're cool and they won't melt or scratch pots and they're $6.95.

Another thing they have going for them is that kids love them. "It's just like a paint stick. Awesome," said one such kid recently, when dragged into the store in search of far more boring stuff. "Jackson Pollock," murmured the other kid appreciatively, the one who still throws spaghetti on the ceiling to demonstrate Newton's law of something-or-another, despite repeatedly being told that it is not a good way to test the doneness of pasta. In any event, a good way to get your kids to stir the risotto.