Students at the Natural Gourmet Institute in their "Pates and Terrines" class.

In a Manhattan culinary academy, apron-clad students from around the world listened to their chef instructor narrate how to prepare a classic: pâté.

But unlike the conventional French recipe, the ingredients were not duck or chicken liver, but rather sundried tomatoes, sunflower seeds and rosemary. Or, in another vegetarian variation, porcini mushrooms and walnuts.

“It’s easy to make something taste good with butter and meat,” said student Kristen Saberito, who previously carried trays of salami, corned beef and French fries at the deli she worked at for four years. Vegetarian food, she said, is a much greater challenge, which is why she enrolled at the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts.

Students at the Natural Gourmet Institute in their "Pates and Terrines" class.

At the Natural Gourmet Institute, “we’re making alternatives to non-vegetarian food that pleases the same way even if it doesn’t taste the same way,” said Jay Weinstein, the chef instructor, after his “Paâtés and Terrines” course at the Institute, located in the bustling Flatiron district of New York City.

There are at least eight vegetarian or natural culinary schools in the United States. Like the 33-year-old Natural Gourmet Institute, many originally catered to a more niche audience of health restaurants and individuals with special dietary needs. Now, however, healthy cuisine that contributes to well-being is becoming stamped in popular culture. Michael Pollan’s just-released “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual” has been spotlighted on Oprah and in a New York Times article that appeared on the paper’s most e-mailed list for several days.

Enrollment at the Natural Gourmet Institute has increased by 15 percent for each of the past three years, bringing the current enrollment to 224 students. Enrollment at raw and vegan Living Light Culinary Arts Institute in the coastal Fort Bragg, Calif., went up 13 percent between 2008 and 2009, pushing the total enrollment to over 700 students. And, at the vegetarian Natural Epicurean Academy of Culinary Arts in Austin, Texas, e-mail and phone inquiries about the program have gone up by 30 percent over the past year, according to community relations coordinator Jamie Perkins.

The Natural Gourmet and other vegetarian and natural cooking academies are expanding their course offerings to reflect increased student demand. While the School of Natural Cookery in Boulder, Colo., has been open since 1983, it recently only began to substantially increase its course load. In October, it launched an online series of courses, with 200 videos — a collection founder Joanne Saltzman said is still growing. The “Main Course,” which is spread over four weeks, advises students on a range of food preparation, including basics such as “Sauces” to the less commonplace “Improvising Natural Desserts.”

“We believe that plant-based dishes are not up to par and need more training than animal food,” said Saltzman. “Some people assume that vegetarian food is simply food without meat, and this is not the case.”

Reflecting a growing demand for health-conscious personal chefs, the Natural Gourmet Institute will offer a course for entrepreneurial chefs in September, helping students develop their own businesses.

While most of the schools offer conventional classes such as “Knife Skills,” they also provide an insight not present in classic cooking academies: the relationship between food and disease prevention and treatment.

“We concentrate on the relationship between food and health,” said Natural Gourmet Institute Vice President Merle Brown, sitting in her office framed by books such as The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved and Living Raw Food. “Most students are not looking to do restaurant work, but make a difference in the way that people eat.

At the Natural Gourmet Institute, classes such as “Food and the Immune System” and a “Food and Healing Lectures” series are part of the school’s core six-month curriculum. At the Natural Epicurean, students of the two-year program take “Fundamentals of Cooking for Disease Prevention,” learning the benefits of ingredients such as sea vegetables and natural sweeteners, while students at the School of Natural Cookery take courses such as “Energetic Nutrition.” The Living Light Culinary Arts Institute offers “The Science of Raw Food Nutrition” in order to help students learn about blood sugar and weight management.

“There’s a movement away from just solving health problems with standard American medicine,” said Karen Fraser, the student services manager at Living Light Culinary Arts Institute, which offers both chef certificates and workshops.

In recent years, Fraser has seen more students — and their clients — turn to raw and vegan food as part of their treatment plan for Type 2 diabetes, which most experts argue requires a diet low in fat and high in fiber.

In the past year, according to Fraser, more restaurants have been demanding the style of food preparation that the academy teaches — with many so-called “meateries” from large cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York sending one of their chefs to receive training that was once reserved for specialty restaurants. Fraser has also noticed more requests for healthful-cooking personal chefs.

Gabriele Riva, who manages the three Nobu Japanese restaurants in New York City and one in Los Angeles, enrolled in a raw food workshop at the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute in October in order to bolster his food preparation techniques.

“I was able to open up possibilities and see what I can do with more ingredients. I learned a lot,” said Riva, whose menu includes several vegetarian items.

Christy Morgan, a 2006 Natural Epicurean graduate and vegetarian personal chef in Los Angeles, said she’s seen a large increase in clients in the past six months.

“At most culinary schools, they just teach you techniques,” said Morgan, who also authors the popular “The Blissful Chef” blog. “I learned so much about the human body and physiology, and how food affects our minds and spirits.

By Gayathri Vaidyanathan

Younghui Kim, 38, floated in the dark waters of Bio Bay in Fajardo, Puerto Rico. Tiny flashes of light went off around her, as tiny water creatures called dinoflagelletes lit up at the slightest friction, like stars on water.

“It was a very peaceful moment,” said Kim. “And I thought, ‘Ah, I’d like to make a skirt that lights like just like this Bio Bay.”

And she did.

Her Stir-It-On skirt, the latest piece in her interactive wearable collection, is made up of layers of deep blue fabric. Within its folds, light-emitting diodes light up with the gentlest of touches detected through a sensor.

Kim laughed as she thought of wearing it on the New York subway.

“It’ll be like Bio Bay,” she said. “People will bump into each other and light up. Sometimes I think about these things and smile because I can see it in my head.”

Kim’s creations are simple but point to a new era in design, often labeled smart fashion. At its forefront are young designers who grew up on the creations of Hussain Chalayyan, a runway designer who has inspired a new generation of interactive design.

But these clothes are not of a metallic-cyborg-meets-Spock variety. They are high fashion couture that has consistently made appearances on runways since 2001 when wearable technology first burst on the scene.

Some are more art than high fashion, but they hint of a future where clothes are more than just a covering, when they become performance pieces that promote social interaction.

Di Mainstone, 33, who calls herself a “future fashion researcher,” is at the forefront of this field at the Eyebeam gallery in New York.

Her journey started four years ago in a shared studio space in London where interactions with architects, dancers, filmmakers and engineers launched her into interactive design.

Soon, she made the Skorpions kinetic garment line in collaboration with XS Labs in Montreal.

The heavily quilted Skorpions dress moves on the skin, parasite like. Flaps lift slowly as the garment breathes and molds itself to the human body beneath. It is a creature that lives on the skin, a second shell independent of the wearer.

“We treated the dresses as living sculptures that breathed and moved of their own accord,” said Mainstone. “It was an exploration into performance, creating dresses that had their own behavioral patterns.”

Mainstone’s clothes are interactive and modular, part of the aesthetic movement that promotes social interaction and play. She experiments with these ideas of interpersonal connectivity through clothing at the Eyebeam gallery in New York.

“We are so reliant in today’s society on the Internet,” said Mainstone. “We are missing out on true face-to-face connectivity. As a child, we play, we move, we touch each other. As we get older and more immersed in urban society, this becomes difficult to access.”

But with a new crop of designers like Mainstone, interactive fashion that creates new avenues for social interaction may become the norm. By combining the latest in materials and technology, these designers create fluid pieces that border on the edge of performance art.

Her inspiration, as for so many others in the field, is Chalayan, a U.K.-based fashion designer who has experimented with the intersection of fashion and design.

In 2007, Chalayan placed 15,000 light-emitting diodes inside a dress to create an ethereal glowing garment. His 2008 collection had dresses embedded with Swarovski crystals. A laser light illuminated the crystals to create a breathtaking array of light and color.

Wearable technologies have existed since the 1970s, when Dr. Edward Thorp, a mathematics professor, embedded his shoe with a computer to help him cheat during blackjack.

At this point wearable technology “just seems inevitable,” said Zack Eveland, 29, an adjunct professor at Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in New York City. “You are already seeing it.”

“People are carrying around sophisticated technologies—cell phones, iPods—and the idea of wearable technology is getting closer and closer.”

Eveland said that works like Mainstone’s will have a future in the performance arena. And in the short term, less interpretive and more do-it-yourself designs, like those of Alison Lewis, 34, will dominate the market.

Lewis is a self-described “romantic technologist,” a blond-haired, shoe-loving, techie diva who sees a future for do-it-yourself wearables in a wavering economy.

She wrote Switchcraft, a book that instructs crafters on how to create, among other things, a cell phone-embedded pillow and a motorized voodoo doll.

Smart fashion of the future is likely to promote physical interaction, because it is currently missing in our society, according to Lewis.

“We need to get back to making things again,” said Lewis, who comes from a long line of crafters. Her grandmother Alice Driver Merriman’s work is displayed in the Smithsonian.

After Lewis displayed her wearables at a recent event in New York, people gathered to stick a metal pin into the gray voodoo doll. It writhed.

“Whenever I teach somebody, the first thing they do is create something that connects them with someone else in their lives,” said Lewis. “It is something innate to human nature that we are still trying to figure out.”

I am teaching English at Sichuan University for the summer. It’s my first trip to China, and what I’m feeling is sensory overload.

Young Chengdu women step daintily over the ubiquitous spit scattered across the ground as they clutch parasols to protect their milky complexions from tanning. In East Asia, whiteness is next to godliness, at least for the ladies. Not one native eye widens as bare-bottomed children pee in the middle of the busiest downtown street. A tour guide on a later trip explained that Chinese parents dress their children in these crotchless pants for easy relief.

The lack of personal space is daunting at first, as is the dearth of Western-style toilets. In the English teachers’ dormitories where I stay, the toilets are squat-style holes in the ground, and the showers are directly above the toilets. After losing few bars of soap down the toilet, I soon get over my awkwardness, then am humbled by visits to some of my students’ homes. In one apartment, the toilet is in the kitchen, right next the stove.

Sichuan's famous hotpot cuisine

. Each table holds two inset bowls full of scalding, pepper-red soup brought to a boil with the twist of a knob. The fiery broth is not replaced for each new customer, but sits in the bowl all day to be repeatedly reheated.

Long tables heavy with raw tripe, tendons and unidentifiable meats and vegetables flank the restaurant’s walls, waiting to be cooked in the bowls at the table. At one end of a table, dozens of people line up to pile their plates with little burgundy-colored hunks of meat. Moving closer, I see they are sauce-covered rabbit heads, with eyeballs and spiky teeth still intact. The program coordinators say that the rabbit heads are a delicacy, and they both dig in. None of us English teachers are adventurous enough to try them. The hum of eating and conversation is periodically punctuated with the sound of people hocking spit onto the floor.

After about a week of ultra-spicy meals, blisters form inside and around my mouth, and my stomach is a mess. It hurts to smile, speak or eat. I am taken to Sichuan University’s hospital. The place seems eerily empty, quiet and in desperate need of a good scrub. Drops of what look like dried blood are speckled across the floor on the way to the doctor’s office. The doctor is a plump, middle-aged woman. After a brief examination, she says that because of the spicy food, my foreign constitution and the humid weather, my body has shang huo. Literally translated, that means “on fire.” She prescribes a few mysterious medications that work immediately.

Many of our Chinese students have misconceptions about the United States. One young boy insists that every American home has a swimming pool. Another adult student cannot believe that the bicycle is not the main mode of transportation. President Bush-bashing is prevalent and, strangely enough, usually accompanied by negative statements about Falun Gong and “that evil rebel cult leader, Li Hongzhi!” Religion is never discussed, but the students all worship basketball, bootlegged American movies and anachronously, Michael Jackson.

Later in the summer, during a trip to Chengdu Panda Research Center, one of the English teachers is excited to learn that for about $10, foreigners can buy the photo op of a lifetime. Squirming baby pandas are placed beside delighted visitors; then the camera flashes go off. When it’s my turn, severe-looking handlers bring a panda out of an open-air pen and roughly slam him down on the bench. I reach over to lightly touch his wiggling body. For a moment, he is still.

On our last trip of the summer, we go to visit the temples and monasteries of Emei Mountain. The name Emei refers to eyebrows and, from afar, the two gentle peaks do resemble the lines of elegantly arched brows. We need to take a long, early-morning bus ride. As the bus climbs through the amethyst dawn, the stinging breeze rubs my face. Passengers bounce hard against cracked and fading vinyl seats. Along the roadside lie broken bowls, perhaps remnants of hurried meals eaten while waiting to be driven up or carried on the bent back of a stranger. With each turn, I am afraid the bus will fly off the mountain. A light rain comes through an open window, and begins to powder my arm. The bus winds further up the road, like a tiny figurine of metal and flesh. Almost there.

Enjoying the heat

By Tania Barnes
A stocky man appears from the shadows, wearing a fat gold chain and speaking in a thick accent. For $25, he offers to beat me.

This isn’t a fight club: it’s Royal Palace baths, a Russian bath-house, or banya, on the edge of Brighton Beach where Russians and intrepid foreigners pay $40 to roast inside wooden rooms heated to as much as 200 degrees F. They also thump themselves with veniki, oak branches. It’s all to improve circulation and health.

The spa is one part paradise to two parts kitsch nightmare, decorated in the faux lux style so beloved by Mafia kingpins and chain Italian restaurants: the main room, replete with large aqua pool and plastic patio furniture, is done in fake marble, its vaulted ceilings held up by fat Roman columns.

“Welcome to Royal Palace!” two beautiful women - skinny jeans fitted snugly into boots, gloss-slicked lips, eyelashes like the sharp points of a star - greet visitors in Russian at the entrance. The Betty and Veronica of Brighton Beach, with mismatched personalities: the blonde is cool, taken with some secret text exchange on her phone; the brunette chatty, making jokes with customers and reminding them to tip.

The name, Royal Palace, is fitting: “We like everything royal,” my Russian friend Masha says. No matter that the Russians killed their own royal family. “Yes,” Masha demurs, “but we like what they like.”

The banya itself is a kind of torture, but there’s pleasure in it, too. Here is the Russian national psyche: suffering is edifying, and the banya’s cleansing fire makes you pure again. Through pain, pleasure — the two are never far apart.

You Have Back Pain?

On a Saturday afternoon, aging men built like kegs, their great stomachs protruding beneath towels slung around their necks, lounge around the pool in the main room. They drink beers and snack on vobla, salt-dried fish. Their younger counterparts scour the room for girls, who smirk on the sidelines, crossing and uncrossing their legs. The room smells, not unpleasantly, of chlorine, fish, and freshly laundered towels.

Three men circle the room, masseuses competing for clients. They are insistent: “slushai, slushai,” they say. Listen, listen. They promise a discount if you pay them directly, cash, no need for the front desk to know. You have back pain? They’ll work the spongy discs between your vertebrae to get the blood flowing again. Headaches? They’ll find your pressure points and release the tension. There’s no problem they can’t fix.

Children run in occasionally, complaining of hunger, thirst. A tow-headed boy, skinny as a wild dog, pleads with his father: “papa, papa, papa,” but the man is too busy walloping his wife to hear; the leaves of the venik falling to the ground in clumps. “Khorosho?” he asks her, good? Da, da, she says.

It’s my first time, and so I go where everyone goes: the Russian steam room. There are also Finnish, Turkish, and Roman saunas, each heated to a different temperatures with dry (Finnish) or wet (Turkish) heat, but no one seems to go in them much.

After a few minutes in the sauna, I’m so hot I can barely speak. Masha implores me to wrap a towel around my head; the Russians are all already wearing shapky – felt hats – to protect their heads from the heat. I can barely understand what she’s saying; the blood is thudding in my skull.

A group of men in their 30s catch sight of me, this WASPy American girl suffering their Slavic inferno, and laugh, “It’s nothing yet!” one of them says. He decides I’m an amusing specimen. “We’ll get undressed,” he smiles, “then it’ll really be like Russia!”

I put my head down and listen to feet squish across the floor in sandals and flip-flops as people come and go, wishing each other “s legkim parom” – a good steam. After a spell in the heat, Russians go out into the snow to roll around or, as here, dunk themselves in frigid baths. The ritual lasts hours, whole days: steam room, snow-roll or ice cold bath, maybe to the pool for a swim and a snack, then back into the steam room again. In between, the women rub honey and salt over their faces, and some slick on a mint green paste. When they leave, their skin is as smooth as the flesh of a peach.

Failed Escape

I sneak out of the steam room, hoping to find some relief in a tepid shower. But one of the men from the group catches me, and shakes his head. “You have to go in,” he says, gesturing toward the glowering green square of ice water in the corner. I demur, but it’s no good: things must be done the proper way. I jump; the pain is as if I’d hurled myself against a glass table. I claw my way out and collapse on a stone bench.

Back in the steam room, a young man enters: the executioner. With a ladle and a few deft flicks of the wrist, he flings water, scooped from a bucket, on the hot stones inside the small oven. The stones hiss and growl as they release steam into the air, producing heat. Then the man – from Tajikistan, he tells me later - waves a towel around in great lazy circles, jostling the angry atoms of air.

Surely this is some circle of hell. But the men assure me: “the heat is half what it would be in Russia!” They soften at the look on my face. “You’re doing well! The American we brought only came in here once. When we told him to go in the cold water, he said, ‘you guys are f__ing nuts.’ ”

Plenty of visitors to Russia have thought as much. In the first written account of the banya, recorded in the Russian Primary Chronicle of 1113, the Apostle Andrew visits the area that was later to become Russia. Observing the bathhouse ritual, he remarks: “They [the Russians] lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. They think nothing of doing this every day, and actually inflict such voluntary torture on themselves.”

After five hours of torture, I’m exhausted, banya-drunk. Its only 8 p.m., but I fall asleep upright at the table while waiting for my “salad in a glass,” a Moscow-priced ($10) juice made from red peppers, lettuce, tomatoes and carrots. “Ah,” Masha says, looking at me, “and that’s how you know you’re done with banya.”

But nowadays it’s easier to find a $500 outfit than a painter in the park. Vying to capitalize on the street’s renewed popularity, major fashion retailers are elbowing out the old cafes, butcher shops and fusty antique stores.

Fashion businesses are in search of “branding opportunities” and strong retail performance per square foot, Brod said. Over the last three years average Bleecker rent prices have risen sixfold, from $50 to $ 300 per square foot. Soaring New York real estate prices are a factor, but so is the skyrocketing popularity of a Bleecker address.

TV’s discovery of Bleecker is one big reason. After Sex and the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker ate a creamy retro cupcake at a beloved local landmark, The Magnolia Bakery, the tour buses began circling. The lines outside the tiny bakery swelled into inhuman queues. Soon, upscale clothing retailer Marc Jacobs, salivating over the youthful crowds, rented a shop right across the street.

“Our goal was to take advantage of the huge concentration of young people who flooded into the area, especially with the Sex and the City show,” said Debbie Lee, a Marc Jacobs assistant manager.

Now Ralph Lauren, Banana Republic and Abercrombie and Fitch have glommed on to Bleecker too.

The short, pedestrian-oriented street of 19th century brownstone and tenements still exudes an image of hip, young and free - but not poor. In a parallel explosive demand for downtown apartments, some of the newest residents are well-heeled young people and families, realtors say.

In mid 2005, the average three-bedroom apartment in this area sold for nearly $2.4 million, up 46 percent from the year before, and condo prices, at $1,223 per square foot, were up 47 percent, according to the proprietary database ValuExchange TM, which conducts the largest survey of Manhattan real estate sales.

“The Village has become a very desirable place to live,” said Betul Ekmekci, an agent for the residential brokerage Halstead Property. “Young people feel that they will have freedom of expression here, so they choose to live the Village myth, even if that will cost them more.”

One sees fewer artists around, Ekmeckci noted.

“Now they have moved to Williamsburg and Staten Island because they can’t afford the rent.”

Elaine Abelson, a history professor at the New School, a university located nearby, sees the shift the same way.

“The area is having its face reclaimed for the upper middle class, so it is in the process of gentrification, and that means that you have to satisfy modern, commercial needs,” she said. “It is not Bohemian any more.”

Some independent shops still thrive, especially those selling hand-crafted, vintage or imported merchandise. Lori McLean, whose jewelry shop is located on nearby Grove Street, finds that her delicate charm necklaces and funky bracelets are still desirable for heavy wallets, bridging the old-hippie face of the neighborhood with its wealthy newcomers.

Woe betide any merchant, though, whose wares have been dubbed passé.

For Sani, the 62-year-old Indian owner of “Fabulous,” the new climate is simply a plunge over a cliff.

“There is no tomorrow for me, I can’t make plans for it,” he said melancholically. ” I take this hard road day by day.” The shop has been in his family for 30 years, and the traditional Indian clothing he sells there was once gloriously famous locally. Now his solitary saunter in his empty-of-people store is like that of an old man on a deserted street.

“After 9/11, things got even worse for us. I think people now prefer to shop from the big names and not from me,” he said with finality. “But it’s my home. If I close that will be it. I’m not moving out.”

Toosh, another local clothier, has posted prominent signs offering 50 percent discounts. “My boss says the business is dead right now,” said a worker there, adding that the full time staff had been cut from four to two.

Outside, pedestrians rush along the sidewalks as the sun sets, far more likely to be toting shiny shopping bags with embossed logos than protest placards or poetry books. After all, New York never sleeps. Maybe it’s way too busy reinventing itself.

Journalism major Eddie Ebbert, 21, wore a mohawk to his interview for an internship at Esquire. His mother had suggested he get a new, more conventional haircut, but he refused.

“If you’re not going to hire me because of my hair, I’m not going to work there,” he said.

Three interviews later, no one had mentioned his hair, and he got the position. The first day of the internship, Ebbert, his mohawk still intact, showed up in a button-down shirt and pressed pants, following the example of his 35-year-old boss.

Generation “Be Yourself”

Since Gen Y entered the workforce, conflict over casual or self-expressive dress has been a major issue for older managers, for whom the depoliticized mohawk might still appear countercultural. Millennials – as those born between 1980 and 2000 are sometimes called — may bring creativity and enthusiasm to the office, according to experts. But they also show up in flip flops, jeans and “extreme” hair.

These under-30s value self-expression at work more than any earlier generation, according to psychologist Nicole Lipkin, co-author of “Y in the Workplace.” “This generation has been taught to express themselves no matter what.”

But self-expression through clothes or hair shouldn’t overshadow the dress code at work, Lipkin added.

“The people who are going to be successful are those who respect the culture at the corporation,” she said. “In the creative industries, it’s a different story, but in more formal industries, there are presentation standards that need to remain in place. It’s hard to trust someone who looks like a punk.”

The New Punk Professional

Daniel Martinez, a stylist at Astor Place Hairstylists in New York’s East Village, has cut mohawks for many young professionals.

“Because it’s trendy, you can be taken seriously,” he said. “You can look punk rock but keep your nine to five.”

Mark Heiner, owner of New York’s Slate Salon, said clients who requested mohawks were men aged 20 to 40. During consultations, Heiner asks clients where they work and how extreme he can cut their hair.

“Guys in this area want to wear it conservative for work, and funk it up for night,” he said.

Different definitions of “extreme” might account for some of the conflict over appropriate appearance at work. Older employees distinguish punk from professional based on whether a candidate wears a mohawk or a crew cut. But for Generation Y, the group a few years older than millennials, that distinction isn’t so rigid.

Employers have to change management styles to fit the new work ethos, Huntley writes in “Y.”

“They are going to have to keep a long leash on Generation Y employees, or risk losing them altogether,” she writes. Whether or not that means loosening company dress code from “business casual” to “business anything goes” is still uncertain.

Alexandra Levit, author of “They Don’t Teach Corporate in College: A Twenty-Something’s Guide to the Business World,” sees a trend toward casual dress.

“Regardless of the work environment, I think that millennials are more likely to wear what is actually considered very casual (jeans, tee-shirts) as opposed to the more traditional casual of khakis and button down shirts,” Levit wrote in an e-mail.

But she advised young employees against wearing mohawks to work.

“Look at how everyone else is dressed, and aim to fit in as seamlessly as possible,” she said. “In the business world, the goal is not to make a statement with your dress.”

Corporate Crackdown

Just as Gen Y was getting comfortable wearing jeans at the office, the recession has turned dress expectations and behavior more conservative.

“I have seen organizations cracking down on all sorts of behavior that they let slide before, because they feel more in control now,” said Levit.

Young people today should look conservative in order to get or keep a job in corporate America, said Gretchen Neels, the founder of Neels & Company, a business etiquette consulting firm.

“In this new economy, it’s folly to express yourself by [wearing extreme hair] and tick off your employer,” she said. “For the past 10 years, employers have bent backwards for the millennial generation. Now, employers are less inclined to accept an employee who looks so different so as to be disruptive.”

Still, some millennials, like intern Eddie Ebbert, disregard expert advice and pull off extreme hairstyles at work.

After wearing his mohawk for several months, Ebbert tired of it, and got a buzz cut instead.

“Every six months I try something else,” he said. “With the mohawk I had style, but now I’m classy.”

Amanda Kersey studies journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter

“Kanpai,” says Jessie Nelson, the bartender at Satsko sake bar in Alphabet City, as he clinks his small sake glass to mine, then to the bar, and sets it to his lips. I do the same, shakily hitting the bar, wondering if that is tradition or just an odd tic he has. Tradition, it turns out. By hitting the bar with the glass you show reverence to the house that is serving you. We both sip. What I taste isn’t what I was expecting. Far more complicated than what my younger self had dropped into beers and gulped down, this sake was light, floral. This was something to get excited about. There is a world of sake beyond the house bottles most of us have come to know.

Sake, or Japanese rice wine, is growing in popularity in the United States. Sales have nearly tripled in this decade, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Sake bars are cropping up, and demand has produced several sake-only stores: True Sake in San Francisco –the first – followed by Sake Nomi in Seattle, and Sakaya in Manhattan. Japanese restaurants are handing patrons sake menus that rival the length and variety of wine lists at expensive French restaurants.

Yet Americans don’t know much about the “drink of the gods,” as it is called in Japan. Let’s say you’re ordering fish, a dish you might pair with a white, fruity wine. Sake virgins might do well with Nigori, unfiltered sake, Nelson suggests. If you want to drink something bigger, dryer and more like a red wine, then you choose a Junmai - pure distilled rice without added alcohol, or a Shokubai.

But it gets more complicated. Sake, like wine, has different levels of refinement and class. Grades are determined by how much of each grain of rice is removed. “You have fewer impurities; [the fats and proteins that surround the starchy center] tend to contribute to flavors that are undesirable,” explained Sakaya owner Rick Smith. The house sake at your local sushi bar is usually domestic, and served hot – to hide its imperfections, and strong alcohol taste.

As an example of sweeter sake, Nelson pours first the house, a Nigori Shochikubai, which came in a green bottle bigger than a bowling pin. Since Nigoris aren’t filtered, the saccharine liquid was almost thick, like corn syrup. In contrast, the higher-tier sake Kamoizumi, a Nigori Ginjo, is much more refined. Though still opaque and white, it is subtly sweet at first taste, then dry at the end.

A young couple walks in. They order a tasting of three hot sakes and sip cautiously, pulling the clay bottles out of the perfectly warmed water and pouring generously for each other, just as it should be done. They talk about friends, jobs, and then agree they prefer the middle one, the same higher-quality sake I tasted. These are the people who are starting to discover sake. Nelson says that this is the crowd that comes in on nights and weekends, looking to find something new, something different than a beer.

Different occasions and types call for hot, cold, lukewarm or room temperature sakes. While Nelson would not have hot sake with a meal—he would rather nurse it on a cold night — some sake sommeliers will use the same bottle at different temperatures for different points of the meal. Changing the temperature can endow one bottle with many different flavors and mouth-feels. In Japan, “in certain local sake pubs, there are people whose specific job it is to warm the sake to a specific temperature for that sake and also for a particular customer,” according to Smith. Beginners should take the sommelier’s temperature recommendation– and maybe wait until they are regulars to start asking for it hitohada (lukewarm).

Another hurdle: remembering what you drank, without having to learn Japanese. “The main way in which you get to know these things,” Smith says, “is the same way you get to know wine; you just build up a reservoir of experience.” He even suggests “taking pictures with your phone, or writing down things about it that struck you as being pleasant or unpleasant.” There are also usually translated names underneath the Japanese title: Heaven’s Door, Otter Fest. Nelson has simpler advice. “The only way to really know this stuff,” he said before finishing off a glass, “is to drink a lot of it.”

A bottle you buy is lovely, perhaps even arty. The tiny cups are used in Japanese culture to encourage sharing, Smith said. “The small cups are made that way with the intention of being refilled over and over again,” he said. “What you do is you fill your companion’s and they in turn fill yours. It’s meant to encourage bonding and be a sharing experience.”

My sake tasting at Satsko ends with a glass of Wakatake (in my notes, walkie talkie, which makes me like it even more). It’s floral, oaky and creamy, much more complex than anything I’d drunk with a sushi dinner. “Kanpai,” Nelson and I say together, and this time I deftly clink my glass to his, then clink the bar. The couple in the corner looks at us with curiosity, probably wondering if we both have odd tics.

At first sight, Le Petit Paradis resembles many preschools. On a recent weekday, a girl in a blue smock stood at an easel, her lips pursed in concentration. She brushed broad strokes of red paint over a large white paper.

“Madame Michele!” she shouted, pointing to the painting. “Rouge!” Michele Epstein, the lead teacher at the school, looked at the fat red strokes. “Très bon, Lina,” she said.

Across the sun-filled room, boys sat at a table juicing an orange. Nearby, children rolled play dough into flat ovals. They sat in specially crafted chairs and pressed flower-shaped cookie cutters into the dough.

But this bilingual French preschool on the Upper East Side of Manhattan holds the additional distinction of being eco-friendly.

The red paint Lina used was organic. So were the oranges that the boys pressed into juice and sipped from tiny cups. Teachers and children made the play dough earlier in the week using all-natural ingredients: flour, salt, oil, water and cream of tartar. The school’s tables and chairs are made from wood harvested from healthy forests in a sustainable manner—and so are the toys.

“The idea for a green preschool just came to me one day,” said Christina Houri, the school’s founder. “I saw the Al Gore movie and I liked his ideas. I thought that kids should benefit from this. They are the ones who will suffer if we don’t teach them today to care for the Earth.”

Le Petit Paradis incorporates the idea of environmental education—a movement growing across the United States—into many of its daily activities. The school's 25 students are a small group compared with the thousands of students who attend 127 certified-green schools in 33 states, according to the U.S. Green Building Council.

In 2007, the council, just one organization that certifies buildings as eco-friendly, launched the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design to certify schools. For a school to acquire certification, it must meet certain requirements, such as ample natural light, water conservation and efficient heating and cooling. Such schools often follow a curriculum that teaches students about the environment and how to protect it.

Valerie Werstler, an administrator at the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., said that building green schools is the “educationally appropriate thing to do.”

“Now is the right time to teach kids to care for the environment before bad habits develop,” she said.

That philosophy is spreading. Wild Lilac Preschool opened in 2006 in Portland, Ore., and has 45 students this year. The children learn their lessons in two former homes that were built in the early 1900s: Students ages 3 to 5 go to the Iris House and the 2-year-old students go to the Daffodil House.

Helene Hanson, its founder, said that the school’s kitchen is totally organic. That means everything kids eat there—oatmeal, bread, broccoli or potatoes—fits strict standards. The students have their own backyard garden that supplies some of the fruits and vegetables they eat while at school.

Hanson said the green aspect of her school is a big draw for parents in the area.

“A lot of families have composts and chickens,” she said. “It’s a crunchy, progressive place. People here feel that our school is a pretty natural extension of what they are doing at home.”

Children’s Garden Preschool in Minot, N.D., was named the first licensed eco-friendly preschool in the state. The school received its license from Early Development of Global Education, a nonprofit organization that promotes environmental awareness and education.

School founders Sara and Shaun Bentrup practiced recycling and used eco-friendly cleaning products in their own home. When they started the preschool, it only seemed natural that they would apply their green philosophy to the school.

Those are values Houri of Le Petit Paradis shares even though the eco-friendly aspect of the school is not the chief concern of all parents—a fact she said suggests that going green may be part of the wider, unspoken appeal of these kinds of schools.

Being eco-friendly is as natural as speaking French for the children at Le Petit Paradis, said Houri. So natural, that some parents may take it for granted.

Tara Filipacchi’s twin 5-year-old daughters, Mia and Illia, attend Le Petit Paradis primarily to practice their French, which is their father’s native language.

“I’m not the most green mother, but I do recycle and I try to save electricity, said Filipacchi. “I like that the school is teaching my daughters to be more aware. They always want to turn off the lights and use the back sides of papers. It’s cute.”

Alexander Ploss sends his 5-year-old daughter, Helena, to the school for the same reason. That the building is eco-friendly is an “added bonus.”

Filipacchi, Ploss and others, who pay thousands of dollars for their children to attend such schools, tend to be progressive in their attitudes and are often highly educated.

While the organic snacks at Le Petit Paradis were not a main draw, Ploss, who practices healthful eating with his daughter at home, said it would definitely be a problem if anything but healthful snacks were available.

Ploss said that he and his wife never thought of explicitly teaching their daughter about the environment. It’s just a habit.

“It’s not always a conscious choice,” he said. “I don’t have a car because I don’t need one. It takes 45 minutes to walk the 30 blocks from my home to the school. When I think about it, it’s definitely better to spend a quiet time walking with Helena.”

Michelle Plair (foreground) pampers her tiny clients at Wonderland Kids Spa in Brooklyn.

By Brenda Iasevoli

In the garden dining room of a New York City restaurant recently, a 5-year-old boy with spiky brown hair sawed cherry tomatoes in half with a plastic knife.

“Tomato one, tomato two, tomato three,” he said, as he plopped the halves into a stainless steel bowl. Then he wiped his hands on his white apron, leaving pink streaks behind.

Nathan Steinfeld and four other chefs-in-training were preparing crustless quiches made with egg, fresh mozzarella, heavy cream, tomatoes and dried herbs. The venue was Mini Chef, a cooking program for kids in New York City where classes are $40 a pop.

“It’s such a great sensory experience,” said Alyssa Volland, founder of Mini Chef. “You smell, you touch, you feel. And because kids are making the food from scratch, they’re more likely to try it. It’s fun and rewarding for them.”

Foodie parents—those with an ardent love for and interest in good food—are trying to cultivate the same refined taste for food in their little ones. Such parents refuse to subject themselves, or their kids for that matter, to eating chicken nuggets and fries just because these are deemed kid foods. Instead, they help their kids to develop a taste for more adult fare.

So, how are foodie parents living in a fast-food world to accomplish such a seemingly impossible feat? They’re blogging about their experiences, writing cookbooks and, yes, sending their kids to cooking school.

To help parents cultivate in their kids an appreciation for fine food, cooking schools for children as young as 3 are popping up across the country. There aren’t any recipes for bagel pizzas at these schools. The mini chefs make their own dough from scratch.

At Young Chef’s Academy, which has more than 80 schools in the United States, kids prepare dishes like Southwestern tortilla soup and Maryland crab cakes. Kids Culinary Adventures in San Francisco, teaches kids to grow their own basil for pesto. And during a recent class at Kids Cooking Co. in Dallas, young chefs prepared steamed tilapia with carrots and zucchini and lemon broccoli risotto.

“My kids will eat foods you’d never expect toddlers or a 6-year-old to gobble up (salad, even) because they’ve made it,” Kelby Carr, founder of FoodieMama.com, wrote in an e-mail. “There are foods my kids have refused to even try until they prepared it themselves.”

Carr said she started FoodieMama.com because she realized that many other mothers out there care about good food as much as she does. She wanted to create a place for them to share tips and recipes.

“There are many fellow moms who actually take their kids to restaurants without coloring books,” Carr wrote, “who don’t ask ‘Is this kid-friendly?’ when preparing dinner, and who cook with their kids, and who want their kids to understand the value of fine food prepared and enjoyed slowly.”

Hugh Garvey, a features editor for Bon Appétit magazine, and journalist Matthew Yeomans founded Gastrokid.com to share with parents their success raising kids with sophisticated palates. Their blog was born out of the frustration they felt over not getting to go out to fine restaurants after they had kids.

In a September 2008 post, Yeomans bragged about his 3-year-old daughter Zelda’s taste for langoustines (large prawns, to the uninitiated).

“One lunchtime in Mezes (a fantastic little inland port on the Bassin du Thau)” Yeomans wrote, “she nailed three of the beauties plus half a portion of calamari a la Romana. Daughters and expensive (if good) taste—I guess they go hand-in-hand.”

But for some parents, getting kids to eat any food, never mind a beady-eyed crustacean, is no easy feat. Garvy and Yeomans know this; that’s why they started Gastrokid.com, which includes recipes and tips for the frustrated foodie parent. There’s also a “Gastrokid” cookbook due out in August.

Don’t expect sneaky recipes that hide veggies in mac and cheese a la Jessica Seinfeld’s cookbook “Deceptively Delicious.” Garvy and Yeomans scoff at such underhandedness. A mac and cheese recipe on Gastrokid.com contains prosciutto, tomatoes and sage.

“Why would we dumb down our cooking just because we have children at the table?” said Yeomans. “Kids are naturally adventurous. They are keen to trying new flavors, like pickled garlic, that you’d never dream they’d eat. If you can teach children the language of good taste, of eating well, then hopefully that’s an appreciation they will carry with them throughout their lives.”

Garvey takes this one step further. Not only will his kids eat the prosciutto, but they know where it came from. On a trip to a farm in the English countryside with his wife, 4-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter, Garvey insisted they all come face to face with their dinner.

“Meeting the piggies didn’t keep my little ones from eating them at lunch,” Garvey wrote in an article for Bon Appétit about the trip.

The kids at Mini Chef in New York City were invited, but not pressured, to try the mini quiches they made.

“Yuck,” one boy said after smelling the quiche.

“You know what?” said a girl with pigtails after picking off a tiny crumb from the quiche and popping it in her mouth. “I don’t like this.”

Spiky-haired Nathan bit into the quiche, his eyes closed, as if he were hoping for the best. He ate two.

Nathan’s mother, Carmen Steinfeld, smiled and snapped pictures.

“He’s a picky eater,” Steinfeld said. “But now he’s much more willing to eat what I call real food.”

The woman came to Lou Marinoff with a dilemma. She was in her early 30s and had a lucrative career in finance, but her dream had always been to go to medical school. She had to decide whether becoming a doctor was worth disrupting a well-established life.

Marinoff, a pillar in a growing area known as philosophical counseling, suggested that the woman consult the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text that uses a system of coins and hexagrams to offer answers to life’s puzzles. The book helped her determine that life as a doctor would be worth the trouble. So she quit finance and embarked on a career in medicine.

That woman did not have psychological problems, Marinoff said. “To begin with, our clients are functional and rational,” he said. Philosophical counseling, he continued, is “therapy for the sane,” when the sane need a little help with day-to-day life.

While the theories of Sigmund Freud have dominated the mental health arena for the past century, Aristotle, Plato and Socrates are gaining in popularity among those burned out on psychoanalysis or put off by its stigma. The expanding client base includes ordinary people as well as high-powered businessmen, doctors and lawyers.

Lou Marinoff takes time in between classes at the The City College of New York. Marinoff wrote "Plato, Not Prozac!", which aims to teach people how to use philosophy in their daily lives. (Photo by Mary Johnson/CNS)

Marinoff, 58, the chair of the philosophy department at The City College of New York, wrote the seminal work on the subject in 1999. “Plato, Not Prozac!” has gone on to be translated into 27 languages and has sold almost 1 million copies worldwide. The same year his book was released, Marinoff and several colleagues established the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, which offers voluntary certification programs and now claims to have more than 300 certified philosophical counselors in 32 states and 17 countries. That number doesn’t come close to the 110,000 licensed professional counselors in the United States alone, but adherents contend that growth has been steady.

Philosophical counselors are generally academics who see a practical application for the thoughts of Friedrich Neitzsche or Immanuel Kant. These practitioners can’t prescribe medication, and they shun open-ended therapy that dredges up the past, in favor of short-term goals that focus on the present and future. “We’re not excavating,” Marinoff said. “It’s got less to do with childhood and more to do with how you see the world now.”

Another important distinction lies in semantics: Practitioners don’t like the word “patients.”

“Clients!” admonishes Lauren Tillinghast, when a visitor drops the p word. The preference goes beyond the personal; philosophical counselors aren’t recognized in any state as mental health professionals.

Lauren Tillinghast, 41, launched her own practice in 2006 and says she now sees about 15 clients a week. Most are women in their 20s and 30s seeking greater assertiveness and self-confidence, for whom Tillinghast espouses “thinking well.” She analyzes beliefs and actions, and helps to solidify moral values. She supplements her philosophical probing with the words of 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas or early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Christine, a client who requested to be identified by first name only, is particularly fond of one quote by Geoffrey Warnock, the late British philosopher, who said: “To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for.”

A bad breakup had driven Christine, a 46-year-old golf professional, into traditional therapy. But after four months, she grew tired of “going and telling the same God-awful story and having them stare at me and tell me it’s OK.”

So Christine tried Tillinghast and has since radically changed how she approaches romance. Now she analyzes why she likes someone and whether that person is good for her. “It’s been such fun thinking about morals and values, and I realized they were all over the map, and they were never really defined,” Christine said. “She’s good at opening the mind.”

Sometimes, however, philosophical dilemmas are more complex than a relationship gone sour, says Samuel Zinaich, a philosophy professor at Purdue University Calumet about 30 miles outside Chicago. Zinaich offers philosophical counseling to inmates at the Jerome Combs Detention Center in Kankakee, Ill., where he employs Aristotle’s practical syllogisms to help prisoners make decisions that will enhance self-control or self-worth. “It’s been quite an eye-opening experience,” said Zinaich, who claims that several clients have made significant progress.

Across the Atlantic, Dr. Richard Levi, a physician and the chair of rehabilitation medicine at Umeå University in Sweden, has been using philosophical counseling for patients with spinal cord injuries. To help them cope with the emotional distress of physical devastation, Levi and his team offer individual counseling and a philosophical “cafe,” which allows for group discussions on topics such as what freedom or health means for the wheelchair-bound. “We know that life is not like Disneyland. Now what can you do with this insight?” Levi asked. “It’s not psychological. It’s not psychiatric. It’s a fact of life.”

However, not everyone shares his enthusiasm. David Kaplan, the chief professional officer of the American Counseling Association, warned that anyone who fails to meet the group’s exigent accreditation requirements cannot claim the title of counselor. Kaplan added that state certification, currently elusive across the nation for the philosophical set, is a lofty goal. “There are dozens of groups that want official recognition from the state,” he explained, adding that the process can take up to 20 years to receive a first state license and then 40 more years to gain recognition in all states. The American Art Therapy Association, for example, has been trying to get a license for decades, with no luck.

Plus, Kaplan added, many counselors who have received the accreditation of his group already employ philosophy in their work. “How is what they’re doing different?” Kaplan asked.

But Libby, another of Tillinghast’s clients, argues otherwise. “I probably would have been better off talking to the walls than to the psychologist,” she recalled of her experience in traditional therapy.

In contrast, 10 months with Tillinghast have helped her conquer issues related to sexuality, self-confidence and anger. “She works with me to help me to learn and look at things in a new way,” Libby said.