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Cooking Green
Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen -- the New Green Basics Way
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By Kate Heyhoe
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Choosing local, organic foods benefits your health and the planet's. But how you cook is as important as what you cook: cooking itself is an under-reported yet substantial greenhouse gas creator. Now, Kate Heyhoe shows you how to think like an environmentalist in the kitchen. Without changing your politics or completely disrupting your routine, you can reduce your impact on the planet by rethinking how you cook, shop, and consume food. Using your favorite recipes, you can bake, broil, and grill in greener ways, saving fossil fuels and shrinking your “cookprint.”
Excerpt
“Cooking Green breaks new ground, deserving a place in every environmentalist’s library. In simple language full of do’s and don’ts for mindful cooking and eating, author Kate Heyhoe gives you all the information you need to shrink your cookprint, along with more than 50 recipes to get started. Not only does it thoroughly and thoughtfully present the new green basics of cooking, it provides the reasoning behind the recommendations, so as the climate changes, you can too, and so can your personal habits.”
author and pioneer in
America’s green movement
“Let’s save the planet one bite at a time! With Cooking Green, Kate Heyhoe gives us eaters the tools we need to preserve our natural resources while improving our dinner.”
author of The Real Food Revival
“I founded a children’s cooking school 20 years ago and am thrilled to incorporate the new term cookprint into all of our classes thanks to Kate’s vision and knowledge. With this clever and resourceful cookbook we can teach thousands of kids (and their parents) new ways to keep their bodies, minds, and their world a safe and healthy place to learn and live!”
children’s cooking expert
and best-selling cookbook author
ALSO BY KATE HEYHOE:
Great Bar Food at Home
The Stubb’s Bar-B-Q Cookbook
A World Atlas of Food
Macho Nachos
Harvesting the Dream: The Rags-to-Riches
Tale of the Sutter Home Winery
Tale of the Sutter Home Winery
A Chicken in Every Pot: Global Recipes for the
World’s Most Popular Bird
World’s Most Popular Bird
Cooking with Kids For Dummies
FOR TW:
You get me energized!
Thanks for lighting up my life, every day, in every way.
Thanks for lighting up my life, every day, in every way.
xoxoxox
Kate
Introduction
Did you know . . . 12 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions (or 14,160 pounds of carbon dioxide per household) result from just growing, preparing, and shipping our food.
For a few years now, my green radar has been telling me that buying local and organic isn’t enough. I suspected that, as a cook, I could do more to combat climate change. Lots more. The result: a treasury of practices that are as simple to integrate into daily life as changing light bulbs, yet focus on every step of the eating process. Some methods are old, some new, some I tweaked, and all are devised with good green benefits in mind. Collectively, they’re a whole new approach to cooking the basics. These “New Green Basics” push the concept of “green cooking” far beyond the scope of just local, organic foods.
How you cook is as important as what you cook. Without abandoning your favorite recipes, you can bake, roast, broil, grill, and fry in vastly greener ways, saving fossil fuels, reducing greenhouse gases, and shrinking your cookprint.
“Cooking” has been a seriously underreported (yet substantial) greenhouse gas creator. In my book, it’s the biggest way for kitchen-conscious consumers to take greener action. Shopping and cleaning tips tackle the sister-cycles of feeding activities. And these tips don’t just help the planet. Many of my methods save time and money, too, yielding some unexpected side-benefits even for the cook.
To get the most bang out of your energy buck, why not start in the kitchen? After all, appliances account for 30 percent of our household energy use, and the biggest guzzlers are in the kitchen. After buying appliances with Energy Star labels, take the next big steps in the ways you use them. How you cook directly relates to more efficient fuel use, and the less fuel used, the fewer greenhouse gases.
Plus, a single-family home spews more than twice as many greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere as the standard sedan—mostly from heating and cooling. Cooking can make a noticeable impact on household temperatures and how we adjust our thermostats. Anyone who’s sweltered in a hot kitchen in summer knows the impact cooking has on local warming, not to mention global warming. A hot oven in winter can boost the room temperature, giving the household’s central heater a break, but there are more efficient ways to cook.
The message: without changing your politics, or completely disrupting your routine, you can reduce greenhouse gases simply by rethinking what you must do every day: consume food. And with this book’s green-method recipes and hundreds of idea-inspiring tips, you’ll soon be serving your favorite dishes in new and greener ways, without thinking about the changes you’ve made to your daily routine.
As you will discover, the kitchen is ripe with opportunities for going greener. It’s the place where you can make real choices and take direct control of your impact—without letting your family feel deprived, hungry, or stressed. In fact, everyone will feel better just knowing they’re helping the planet—and they can do it one bite at a time.
An Inspiring Story
Powerful ideas will migrate, if you share them.
George Marshall, an environmental campaigner in England, and his American-born wife, Annie, don’t know it, but they were the inspiration for this book. “We have two young children, Elsa and Ned,” writes George on their Web site. “We believe passionately that the world will be in a terrible mess for Elsa and Ned, and their children, unless there are dramatic changes in the way that everyone in rich countries lives. At the same time, we didn’t want to throw out all the benefits of living in the early twenty-first century—appliances, central heating, artificial lighting—all bring a lot of freedom to our lives. The challenge was to keep some of these good things whilst very significantly reducing our impacts.”
So George and Elsa set about redesigning an old yellow house, an ordinary English terrace house from the 1930s, with energy efficiency in mind. Their goal was to reduce the house’s consumption of electricity, gas, and water by two-thirds compared with its average over the previous four years. In the first year, they met that goal with water consumption and halved their energy use. They kept working at it with further success, and today you can read all the nitty-gritty details of their adventure at www.theyellowhouse.org.uk.
The Marshalls launched a six-stage process of eco-redesign, ranging from thermal zoning their rooms to increased self-sufficiency of fuels and water. But what inspired me most were the ways they changed personal cooking habits to slash their carbon footprint (their cookprint).
I had an “a-ha” moment the instant I read George’s account of “sit-boiling” and “haybox cooking.” At last, someone who thinks like I do! I call it passive cooking, though the principle is the same: cook the same foods you always do, but with energy-efficient strategies to reduce fuel and water consumption. Earlier civilizations have employed many of these same tactics, but until the present century, rich countries hadn’t felt the need to conserve. Now, with a scarcity of resources and a planet in peril, we most certainly do.
What the Marshalls and I share is motivation: we want to show people how to become more energy-efficient. The Marshalls tackle the issue from the ground up, literally, with building materials and home environment in mind. My focus is entirely on the building blocks of cooking: from farm and field, to fridge and fork, and cooking pan to kitchen fan.
Other like-minded cooks have, without knowing it, contributed to the strategies in this book. Admittedly, I am a cook first and scientist last, held together with a journalist’s glue. Harold McGee, Robert Wolke, Alton Brown, and Shirley Corriher brilliantly explain the physics of cooking. Anyone passionate about the hows and whys of cooking should dive head-first into their books. The cooking chapters in this book show how to put fuel-efficient principles into practice, but the more details you understand, the better you’ll be able to improvise with your own new green basics.
Powerful ideas migrate. Got your own ideas on how to shrink our cookprints? Share them at www.NewGreenBasics.com.
The “New Green Basics” Behind Cooking Green
It’s hard to believe that cooking with olive oil, ginger, and salsa was, at one time, novel and edgy. In the early 1980s, goat cheese was an Alice Waters- Berkeley type of thing, pizza came from a box or a chain, mayonnaise was mandatory in tuna salads, and wonton skins were exotic Chinatown ingredients. Pork was always cooked until overdone, and pasta sauces of raw tomatoes splashed across magazine pages as innovative entertaining. Organics came from health food stores, or if you lived in Austin, from a little neighborhood place known as Whole Foods Market.
Flip through cookbooks published prior to 1990 and you’ll see why The New Basics Cookbook rocked. It was as heavy as the iconic classic Joy of Cooking, but in The New Basics Cookbook, Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins codified a nationwide food revolution, and the country literally ate it up. Both cookbooks covered everything from meatloaf to mashed potatoes and abalone to veal. But with items like chèvre, Mexican ratatouille, and fig-and-pine-nut pizza, The New Basics Cookbook filled a widening gap between old-school Fannie Farmer traditional and what was settling into as freer, more expansive lifestyles, with cooks well versed in global ingredients. Today’s generations are more likely to be stumped by Oxtail Stew than they are by Wakame Salad.
The New Basics Cookbook changed the way I and an army of others cooked, ate, and entertained, and it’s still a model reference for cooks today.
Segue to “New Green Basics”: everyday living with the environment in mind . . .
Inspired by the Lukins-Rosso book, Cooking Green organizes and outlines the next new basics of cooking: where greener methods aren’t just options, they’re the natural way of cooking for today and the future. It’s the first practical guide for transforming old-school basics into eco-friendly cooking. It contains a manageable collection of recipes, designed to illustrate the concepts and put them into practice. Use them as they are, then apply the strategies to your personal repertoire. Each recipe comes with a handy Green Meter to highlight the way it saves fuel and water, and how it converts conventional methods to planet-friendly cooking.
Before You Get to the Recipes . . .
In this book, Chapter 1 begins at the beginning: how much do you already know about fuel, water, and energy consumption? It tackles the fundamentals of how cooking works, and why. Refrigerators, cooking appliances (big and small), barbecuing, and the kitchen itself go under the spotlight in Chapter 2. Hands-on tactics for cooking green, with detailed methods and tips, flow through the middle of the book, from blue-oven cooking to green flame strategies on top of the stove. Does cookware make a difference? You bet it does, and Chapter 6 delivers the lowdown on fuel-efficient cookware.
Shrinking your cookprint includes the whole journey of food from farm to fridge to fork, from local pick-up truck to eighteen-wheelers with freezer containers. Chapters 7 and 8 work together: they outline ways to shop smarter, eat greener, and consume less. They dive into which foods are better for the planet, deciphering food labels, choosing sustainable seafood, and greening your plate with meat or without, and they introduce an array of fuel-efficient ingredients that need little or no cooking, like Vietnamese rice-paper wrappers.
With food comes waste. You really can control how much excess food and packaging you create, and Chapter 9 shows you how to scale back. (Not all waste comes from your kitchen: the restaurants you pick make a difference, too.) Be sure to check out the simple tips in Chapter 9 for making fresh foods last longer by storing them at the right temperature and in the proper containers; you’ll waste less food and make fewer gas-guzzling trips to the store.
Good news: the recipes and tips don’t end on these pages. NewGreen Basics.com updates basic strategies for greener lifestyles, from food to pets to kids. It’s the brain trust behind this book. You won’t find recipes for veal at NewGreenBasics.com, but if you’re curious about Wakame Salad, dial up the site and grab a fork. (You’ll also find thousands of general, international, and vegetarian recipes at www.GlobalGourmet.com, which we launched in 1994 as the Internet’s first food and cooking site.)
Basically speaking, the concept of “new green basics” means choosing planet-friendly options in every aspect of our lives. Yes, it’s about how to live greener, but it’s also simply just another way to live, period.
ONE
A Cookprint, an Ecovore, and a Scientist Walk into a Kitchen ...
What do you call the impact you make on the planet when you cook?
It’s your cookprint—the entire chain of resources used to prepare meals, and the waste produced in the process.
Defining Your Cookprint
A cookprint starts with food, in your garden or at the farm; it travels to your kitchen and continues in your fridge, freezer, or pantry. The cookprint grows larger every time heat or fuel is added, from a cooktop, oven, or small appliance. Discarded waste, whether it’s organic produce trimmings, plastic packaging, or water down the drain, further colors the cookprint. So do the implements you cook with, the way you store leftovers, and how you clean up after the meal.
In short, the cookprint measures every meal’s entire environmental impact. It’s the total amount of energy and resources (from farm to fuel to fork) used in creating a meal. And it puts the cook squarely in charge of just how big, or how green, that cookprint will be—in ways that include but go far beyond buying organic or local, or eating meat or not.
Why “Cookprint”?
In writing this book, I couldn’t find the perfect term I wanted, so I created cookprint to define the serious but underreported impact of food and cooking on the environment, and how cooks, especially, can change it.
The cook in cookprint is a word of action. Just think of all the decisions, and all the physical steps, that go into answering the age-old question, “What’s for dinner?” Even if you don’t cook, someone cooks what you eat, and that contributes to your personal cookprint. Carbon footprint as a term measures carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, but it doesn’t reflect the impact of water usage or focus on the traceable path of food from earth to table.
Shrinking your cookprint forms the foundation of this book. It means questioning the things we take for granted, and making greener choices with every meal. Start by focusing on ingredients—where they come from, how they’re grown, and how they’re packaged. But don’t stop there: consider how you cook your food, the type of energy, the amount of fuel consumed, the amount of water you use—and the amount of fuel and water you waste. In places and times where fuel is scarce, people never take fuel consumption for granted. Neither should we. Does that mean giving up slow-roasted foods or big, boiling pots of pasta? Absolutely not! But there are plenty of ways to stretch the fuels we use, every time we turn on the oven or fire up the burner, just by tweaking the recipes or methods you’ve always relied upon. Rethinking recipes and cooking methods is pivotal to greener cookprints.
As this book shows, a cookprint covers even the smallest details. It’s about storing food in ways that use less energy, without sacrificing nutrition or flavor. Like making the refrigerator you already own more energy-efficient, and keeping fruits and vegetables fresh longer (for fewer shopping trips and less spoilage). Saving leftovers in glass containers rather than plastic ones or zipper bags, frying with energy-efficient skillets, and hundreds of other tips are included in the pages that follow.
Take the Cook’s Challenge: Can You Pass the Eco-Test?
If you really want to wire into a greener lifestyle, take this quiz and consider these issues. Do you know which are the greener options; that is, the ones that produce fewer greenhouse gases, use fewer natural resources, or come with a smaller cookprint?
1. Should the pilot light on a gas oven or water heater burn blue or yellow?
2. The refrigerator is the kitchen’s biggest energy hog. What’s the optimum temperature for your refrigerator?
3. Is it better to thaw frozen food in the microwave, in the fridge, or at room temperature?
4. If you’re an eco-friendly cook, should your next cutting board be made of Corian, glass, bamboo, acrylic, or maple?
5. Which of these dried grains requires the least energy to cook at home: basmati rice, medium-grind bulgur wheat, or quinoa?
6. When it comes to energy-efficient cooking, rank these Asian noodles from least to most cooking fuel used: soba, rice sticks, bean thread, and udon.
7. Which is greener: a charcoal grill, electric grill, or a gas grill?
8. Does a convection oven produce more or fewer greenhouse gases than a traditional oven?
9. Which of these dried legumes cooks the quickest: chickpeas, limas, lentils, or black-eyed peas?
10. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the term organic, with an official USDA Organic logo, means what percentage of the ingredients are actually organic: 100%, 95%, 70%, or 50%?
11. Do you save more energy if you run your dishwasher at midnight, noon, or 5:00 P.M.?
12. If your garbage disposal breaks, should you (a) call the repair service, (b) replace it with an Energy Star model, or (c) remove it and do without?
Answers on next page.
1. Should the pilot light on a gas oven or water heater burn blue or yellow? Think cool and blue. A yellow flame indicates a hotter temperature, consuming more fuel than necessary to ignite a burner. Better yet, opt for electric ignitions and ditch the pilot light completely.
2. The refrigerator is the kitchen’s biggest energy hog. What’s the optimum temperature for your refrigerator? In general, 37 to 40 degrees cools sufficiently without wasting electricity. Some foods last longer if kept in the colder sections of the fridge. Store them along the freezer wall (in a side-by-side) or in the back of the fridge; and never in the door. Or spot-chill them with freezer packs. For longer lasting freshness (and fewer grocery trips), keep dairy products at 33 to 38 degrees, meats between 31 and 36 degrees, and eggs at 33 to 37 degrees. Store fresh vegetables and ripe fresh fruits at 35 to 40 degrees.
3. Is it better to thaw frozen food in the microwave, in the fridge, or at room temperature? Thawing overnight in the fridge consumes the least amount of energy safely. Thawing at room temperature risks food contamination, and microwave ovens expend unnecessary power and thaw foods unevenly.
4. If you’re an eco-friendly cook, should your next cutting board be made of Corian, glass, bamboo, acrylic, or maple? Glass is more eco-friendly than the man-made materials of Corian and acrylic, but chopping on glass is hard on knives. Bamboo is the most sustainable material, even more so than maple. It’s strong, hard, and resists bacteria better than wood. Bamboo’s downside lies in its traveling cookprint: bamboo comes from China. Maple hails from North America, but some forests are facing environmental stress. The best answer is to dig deeper: check into new cutting boards made of recycled cardboard, plastic, and cork; they perform well and repurpose materials that would otherwise go to waste.
5. Which of these grains requires the least energy to cook at home: basmati rice, medium-grind bulgur wheat, or quinoa? Bulgur wheat is partially cooked during processing, so at home it cooks in minutes, just by pouring hot water over it and letting it soak. Both rice and quinoa need to cook in boiling water for several minutes, so they consume more energy at home.
6. When it comes to energy-efficient cooking, rank these Asian noodles from least to most cooking fuel used: soba, rice sticks, bean thread, and udon. Bean thread noodles (from soybeans) and rice sticks (from rice flour) soften completely just by soaking, so they take the least energy. Soba noodles (thin buckwheat noodles) and udon (thick wheat noodles) are boiled, though soba cooks faster. Better yet, the new green method for boiled noodles (including spaghetti) cooks them with half the fuel or less. (Chapter 8 explains how.)
7. Which is greener: a charcoal grill, electric grill, or a gas grill? Charcoal is the traditionalist’s favorite, but propane and electric grills burn cleaner and make the better choices. Propane gas and electric grills still consume natural resources and release toxins, but charcoal releases more carbon monoxide, soot, and particles. Coupled with lighter fluid, charcoal cookouts also contribute more to ground-level ozone, especially in hot weather. (See page 50 for greener grilling, charcoal chimneys, and low-impact techniques.)
8. Does a convection oven produce more or fewer greenhouse gases than a traditional oven? A convection oven cooks 25-30 percent quicker than a traditional oven, so it produces fewer greenhouse gases. The type of fuel is the same, as are the type of emissions; there are just fewer of them with convection.
9. Which of these dried legumes cooks the quickest: chickpeas, limas, lentils, or black-eyed peas? Depending on type and age, dried lentils cook in just 10-30 minutes of boiling (without presoaking), making them the most energy-efficient of these legumes. To cook lentils with even less fuel, follow the “green flame” passive boiling technique on page 68.
10. According to the USDA, the term organic, with an official USDA Organic logo, means what percentage of the ingredients are actually organic: 100%, 95%, 70%, or 50%? Give yourself a green star if you picked 95 percent. Here’s the breakdown: Products labeled as “100 percent organic” must contain only organically produced ingredients. To be labeled simply as “organic,” 95 percent of the ingredients must be organically grown; the remaining 5 percent must come from nonorganic ingredients that are approved on a national list. Products billed as “made with organic ingredients” must be made with at least 70 percent organic ingredients, three of which must be listed on the back of the package, and the remaining 30 percent of the nonorganic ingredients must be approved on the national list. All three of these categories may display a certifying agent’s logo, and only the last one may not wear the USDA Organic label. (Confused? Flip to page 113 for more on labels, logos, and claims to watch for.)
11. Do you save more energy if you run your dishwasher at midnight, noon, or 5:00 p.m.? Because electricity at power plants is generated more efficiently during off-peak hours, midnight saves fuel at the source.
12. If your garbage disposal breaks, should you (a) call the repair service, (b) replace it with an Energy Star model, or (c) remove it and do without? Lose it, don’t use it. Garbage disposals bring unnecessary energy and water consumption to the waste process. Composting, and even regular trash disposal, are better options. Garbage disposals don’t come with Energy Star ratings.
The Eco-Cooking Quiz: Score yourself Light Green if you got six answers correct, Solid Green if you answered nine questions correctly, and Bright Green if you know—and practice—them all.
Boiling Down Your Cooking Efficiency
If Jed Clampett’s oil wells were as efficient as our cooking stoves, he’d still be a poor hillbilly in the Ozarks, not a rich hillbilly in Beverly Hills.
Imagine that, like Jed, you strike oil on your property, and you set up four pipelines to capture it. But all your pipes have rusted holes in them. For every 100 gallons of oil entering a pipeline:
• the red pipe spills 93 gallons
• the blue pipe spills 60 gallons
• the yellow pipe spills 86 gallons (and maybe more)
• the purple pipe spills 26 gallons (and maybe more)
Genre:
-
Booklist, 4/15/09
“Fifty recipes…wrap up [Heyhoe’s] go-green dictate, all belying the myth that good for you isn’t great for the taste buds. This is a very careful, well-explained examination of the cookprint we decide to leave.”
- On Sale
- Mar 31, 2009
- Page Count
- 272 pages
- Publisher
- Da Capo Lifelong Books
- ISBN-13
- 9780786745364
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