Someone from southern France can tell you pizza is a derivative of pis ­sa ­ladií¨re, a thin sheet of dough spread with onions cooked down to a golden, intense mush, then tic-tac-toed with anchovies and black olives. If you tell that to an Italian, men will come to your door carrying what look like violin cases. All I'll say is that, on their home turf, both are exceptional, whereas in North America it ain't necessarily so.

Pizza has been dumbed down like hamburgers and fried chicken to the point where you forget how it should taste. Doughy and bloated, topped with spurious tomato sauce that tastes like watered-down ketchup and bland, gluey cheese, much of it now squats fatly in the junk-food category.

It shouldn't, and Rocky Mountain Flatbread Company is not only proof that it doesn't have to, but that you can simultaneously eat pizza and indirectly help the planet. Not only does it use organic ingredients, the company's entire culture is geared to all those important green buzzwords like local and sustainable. If you ever have to take Al Gore or David Suzuki out for a meal, look no further.

The company hails from Canmore, Alberta, a pretty little town with convivial coffee shops, a great secondhand bookstore, and postcard views of the Rockies that remind you of this planet at its best. The Vancouver location has two rooms: one with a bar and the other with a view of the pizzas going into the wood-burning oven. And, if it's warm enough, an outdoor patio.

The place is rec-room cozy, the only visual clanger being a backlit advertising sign that seems to have wandered in from a sports bar. (On that topic, washroom advertising incenses me like ads before movies do in both cases, I'm a captive audience. But the writing on the wall at Rocky Mountain Flatbread is reminders about organics and sustainability, which stifles any complaints.)

A kids' play area contains, among other things, a little stove made of wood. Children are very important here and, if you're delightedly child-free, avoid early Sunday and Monday evenings (5 p.m. to 8 p.m.), when five-year-olds' enthusiasm can reach hypersonic levels.

The company also prides itself on community involvement; for instance, this spring they celebrated 30 Days of Sustainability with a "family climate-change event". It's all on their Web site ( www.rockymountainflatbread.ca/ ).

But moral goodness isn't enough in Vancouver. The food has to cut it too and this does. Dubbing these flatbreads aligns them more with pita and roti, but they're not so thin that you leave hungry. The 10-inch feeds one (maybe with a slice to take home for breakfast), and the 13-inch does for two and gives you the very sensible option of being able to order half one kind and half another.

We picked BBQ mesquite chicken and rosemary-lemon chicken, both well seasoned with generous, moist chicken chunks, not the wizened shreds you often get on pizza. Ditto for the house-cured orange-maple wild salmon on the Ocean Wise pizza. If anything makes you realize the value of local ingredients, it's these pizzas with their clear, intense flavours.

Right now there are 13 variations, weighted only slightly in favour of carnivores; the prosciutto, Italian sausage, and other meats are all organic. On the veg side, toppings for the Country Harvest include artichokes, spinach seared in garlic, and nut-free pesto. Several others incorporate brown mushrooms for added depth of flavour.

You can buy some varieties frozen at Choices, Capers, and other environmentally conscious grocery stores. You can also call ahead and swing by for pickup, or have your order delivered through www.gowaiters.com/ .

I haven't yet wandered beyond Rocky Mountain's pizza, and when we've been there it seems most people don't, although there are salads that burst with health, antipasto, soups, and hand-cut pastas. There's also a decent booze selection and drink specials.

So, the tab. While the price gap between organic and conventionally grown is shrinking, it still exists. But consider this: Rocky Mountain Flatbread tops out at $21.75 for a 13-inch pizza. According to Boston Pizza's Web site, it charges between $18 and $23 for the same radius but thicker. Ocean Wise versus open wide. Your call. In optimistic moments, it's cheering to think that all "fast food" restaurants will be like this one day.

Rocky Mountain Flatbread Company 1876 West 1st Avenue, 604-730-0321. Open daily, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. or later.