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.”
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What does it truly take to cook green? It is more than buying locally grown foodstuffs, explains Heyhoe, though obviously “locavores” do have a head start on dining sustainably. Cooking green is far more comprehensive than monitoring appliance use; tracking energy output, for sure, is yet another element of eco-friendliness. Add cookware to the mix of determinants, along with type of technique, the table decorations, even the choice of energy-efficient ingredients (like no-cook pasta sauces). Ever-present sidebars are informative, with data that can potentially impact our ecological decisions: using freezer packs saves energy, vacuuming refrigerator coils often decreases electricity use, and trading white linens for bare tabletops in a four-restaurant chain amounted to a $100,000 annual savings. Fifty recipes, from meatless moussaka to true skillet cornbread, wrap up her 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; after all, 12 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions are directly tracked to the ways we grow, prepare, and ship foods. --Barbara Jacobs
'At Global Gourmet, we bring you the world on a plate.'
Kate Heyhoe is the founding editor of The Global Gourmet, launched as the web's first food and cooking site in 1994. Julia Child and Jacques Pepin each made their online debuts with Kate, and the award-winning Global Gourmet site has introduced millions of cooks to exotic foods, recipes, and techniques from all over the world. Kate is also the founding editor of newgreenbasics.com and cookingwithkids.com.
Kate's books have been praised by Mollie Katzen, Martin Yan, Mary Sue Milliken, Graham Kerr, James McNair, Michael Chiarello, Marcel Desaulniers, and even AOL's Steve Case, among others. Her books include:
Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen--the New Green Basics Way Great Bar Food at Home (James Beard Award finalist) The Stubb's Bar-B-Q Cookbook A World Atlas of Food (a culinary textbook) Macho Nachos Harvesting the Dream: The Rags-to-Riches Tale of the Sutter Home Winery A Chicken in Every Pot: Global Recipes for the World's Most Popular Bird Cooking with Kids for Dummies
Kate lives in the Hill Country near Austin, Texas, with her husband and business partner, and a menagerie of cats, dogs, and assorted wildlife, including Fluffy the toad. Hundreds of articles about Kate and Global Gourmet have appeared in media as diverse as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Time, Los Angeles Times, Parade, FoodArts, WOR, Bloomberg, and Sony World Wide radio networks. She has written for Better Homes & Gardens, Saveur, Cooking Pleasures, Chile Pepper, Great Chefs, and other magazines.
If I had my way, every American cook would read Cooking Green--it's that important.
Our individual food choices--how we select and prepare our food, how we store it and dispose of the wastes--are part of what has become an enormous, life-changing global problem: global warming and climate destabilization, caused by human production of greenhouse gasses. Kate Heyhoe estimates that twelve percent of all these emissions result from growing (think fossil-fueled agriculture), packaging, transporting, and preparing our food. Over 7,000 tons of carbon dioxide per household per year is attributable to what and how we eat. Chew on that for a moment.
If we care (and we should) what can we do? Cooking Green is full of good ideas for reducing what Heyhoe calls our "cookprint," the environmental impact of every meal we eat. She starts by suggesting that we should think of ourselves as "ecovores," choosing and eating "foods that are raised and grown in harmony with the environment." This is more flexible and realistic than strict "locavore" practices, such as the 100-mile diet. It is more ambiguous as well, as she describes in a section called "The Ecovore's Dilemma." It means thinking, reading, evaluating, deliberating, for these are not easy matters, in an era when there are too many of us and we use too many limited natural resources.
Some of Heyhoe's ideas will challenge your idea of a home-cooked meal. Turn off that inefficient oven, she says ("ovens are the Humvees of the kitchen"), and plug in a toaster oven. Reconsider the cooktop, and opt for a greener flame, using more energy-efficient appliances and "passive" cooking practices. Adopt low-impact waste-disposal methods.
Shopping?... Be mindful of the seasons, eat more plants and less (much, much less) industrially-farmed meat. Understand "organic," think field-to-fork, consider fair trade, check for sustainable sourcing, weigh the packaging. Eating out? Ditto all this, and look for restaurants that have gone "green."
Nobody said this was easy.
But Heyhoe is right: "The reversal of climate change requires a complete paradigm shift and global actions, in more than just food and cooking. But one thing leads to another. Little steps in behavior can make a big difference in how we think."
There are a few things to quibble with. To my mind, gardening is one of the most important ways we can contribute to our personal food supply, but Heyhoe dismisses this with "grow a few greens." Dishwashers consume more than just hot water (Heyhoe's only measure of efficiency), especially when you consider the resources and energy that goes into manufacturing, shipping, and marketing the appliance. My dishpan requires no electricity, and doesn't cost as much to make or market as a dishwasher.
But these are minor issues. I was challenged by this book to make important changes in what I thought were already careful food choices and cooking practices. You will be, too. But you have to start by reading it.
P.S. When you've read the book, check out the website: [...] Lots more good stuff there.
by Susan Wittig Albert for Story Circle Book Reviews reviewing books by, for, and about womenRead more ›
As a fan of newgreenbasics.com, I've been looking forward to this book. Kate Keyhoe is highly knowledgeable, and every time I dip into Cooking Green I learn something new. Example: Americans throw out 27 percent of all food available for consumption. So we can be more green, and save money, by lowering this percentage. It's highly readable and well organized too.
Of course I am committed to reducing my carbon footprint. Aren't we all? I have worked to reduce the miles I drive each week, and to reduce the amount of electricity I use, and to recycle, etc. All of this is to the good, even though I know it is at best a drop in the bucket of what is required. We can work around the edges to reduce our carbon footprint, but until our government undertakes serious efforts to reduce emissions through regulation of industry and business we won't see a serious turnaround in greenhouse gases.
I did not think much about reducing the carbon footprint in the kitchen, however, but this book has many little things that anyone can do to reduce it. "Cooking Green" is a self-help book, emphasizing tips, recipes, and processes to be just a little more eco-friendly. These might be passive or active efforts, but all should help if followed as outlined here. The author is especially good at helping to reconsider how we cook and eat, in the process we might be able to save some time and to be just a little healthier that previously. A major benefit from my perspective was the more than fifty recipes in this book.
My teenage daughter's green club turned me on to this book. It's one of those rare books that's intelligent but reads easy and is soooo interesting. It teaches old dogs like parents new tricks, and it shows my daughter's generation how to start off on a green foot for life. Plus, it's sparked a lot of family discussions about why water never gets hotter than its boiling point, whether we could live on a 100-mile diet, and why we like the terms "cookprint" and "ecovore."
Sorry, but unless you are already living in a cave and reading this review by torchlight I think you will find this book a massive turnoff. I waited a long time for this book to come out but it is mainly full of "green nags" like how to cook your beans in luke-warm water. Further I believe she gets her science wrong in too too many places -- a blue flame IS NOT cooler than a yellow flame, most energy is already embedded in the food choices you choose to buy, not whether you cook that bean in luke-warm water vs. hot water, etc. The recipes are all ho hum stuff I THINK you can cook yourself with a book! I suggest you read "Food, Energy, and Society" by Pimentel instead -- what you learn will make your head spin!
"Cooking Green" is one of the books I wish I had started immediately upon checking it out from the library.
The first few chapters bored me and I was afraid I wasn't going to take anything from the book. There was a lot of discussion on green appliances, building your kitchen for maximum efficiency, etc. As an apartment renter, these are things I cannot change or decide.
Then the book moved into chapters more applicable to me - how to cook more efficiently. How to choose foods that have less of a "cookprint." Some suggestions will increase spending (organic groceries) and others will decrease expenditures (saving electricity, resources, time).
Overall, I enjoyed most of the book and hope to borrow this book again. When I do, I'll move through the book much more slowly and begin to implement some of the suggested changes. I've already discovered that pouring hot water over my noodles (saving electricity) works just as well as boiling them!
