basilbias.com

It’s generally a bit embarrassing to admit that I try not to buy food in plastic packaging. It’s as if being vegan wasn’t restrictive[1] enough, as if cutting out all animal products didn’t have enough potential to make other people think I feel superior. Well I don’t. I don’t know why I’m compelled to do these things. “My actions are abstract and absurd, and they are neither saving the rain forests nor feeding the world’s hungry,” writes J.B. MacKinnon in Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet. I’m not naïve enough to think that refusing to eat meat exonerates me from the horrors committed daily on factory farms, or that I’m doing my part to stop global warming by biking to work. I’m all too aware that no matter how conspicuously I wield my glass jars in the bulk section at the Berkeley Bowl, that huge roll of plastic bags will be used up by other shoppers in a matter of hours.[2] The guilt of not doing enough weighs heavily on me no matter how much I give up.

[T]he essential pointlessness of such a gesture [as eating only local foods for a year] is not lost on me[.] I am acutely aware that efforts like the 100-mile diet are readily dismissed as “the new earnestness,” which is currently enjoying a very temporary cool, and I am not deluded enough to feel that I’m making a difference or being the change I want to see in the world. Both of these contemporary platitudes contain kernels of truth, but both are also overwhelmed by stark realities. I have traveled these ethical pathways in one way or another for twenty years now, choosing to ride a bicycle in homicidal traffic, to reuse my tinfoil and plastic bags as though I lived in the Depression, to shop little and buy less. It doesn’t make me feel “good.” It makes me feel like an alien. As I pedal through another midwinter rainfall, virtually every indicator of global ecological health continues to worsen, from biodiversity to energy consumption, and my being has done little to change the world (p. 17).

And yet. The Plastic Trash Challenge long over, coming up on a year of strict veganism, I’m not slowing down. I can’t seem to bring myself to go back to buying tofu in a tub, or yogurt in a carton.[3] After reading Plenty, I’ve even started thinking harder about where my produce comes from. It used to be, if it said ‘California’ (or even ‘Oregon’) and ‘organic’ on it, I was good to go. But California is a big state, and I have no idea where Watsonville is.[4] It sounds nice and local, but it could be 400 miles to the south for all I know. And after reading about Earthbound Farms[5] in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’m wary of even organic produce that seems too corporate.

Which is why I found myself biking the 3.3 miles to the Berkeley Farmers’ market yesterday. It was a beautiful day, the second spring-like day we’ve had in the past week. I hadn’t been to a farmers’ market all winter. I had wiped all the winter grime off my bike, wired my saddlebags to the rack,[6] and set off in sunglasses and a sweatshirt. Plenty had inspired me to shop without a list, to buy whatever the farmers were offering that day, whatever was in season that moment. I tend to think that cooking needs to be complicated and meticulously planned to be good, often forgetting that some of the best meals I’ve made have been thrown together with whatever was on hand.[7] And so I got a bunch of dandelion greens, two chanterelles,[8] two baby butternut squashes, some beets, purple carrots, and rapini. Today for lunch, on my day off when I’m usually loathe to cook,[9] I thought I’d sauté my precious chanterelles with the dandelion greens. But the vegetables demanded more of me. ‘Crêpes,’ they seemed to be saying, ‘we need crêpes to nestle in.’

Et voilà.[10]

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[1] Or irritating for people trying to include me in their dinner plans, either.

[2] In the six months that I’ve been lugging my own jars back and forth to the grocery store, a couple people have remarked at what a good idea it was. But not once have I seen someone else with their own jars.

[3] Though last week, out of desperation on lunch at work one day I did buy a plastic tub of hummus and a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. I was very hungry, Smart Alec’s was closed for repairs, my 30 minutes was running short and I had no cash for a sandwich at (what used to be called ) Intermezzo…

[4] Lots of produce at the Bowl seems to come from Watsonville. Naturally, I Googled it just now, and Watsonville seems to be anywhere from 88 to 104 miles away by car from where I live.

[5]30,000 acres of certified organic industrial farming.

[6] To deter thieves (or the ones without wire cutters or the patience to unwrap a bit of wire, anyway) from taking them while I shopped. My saddlebags are cute and very functional when hooked to a rack, but too unwieldy and awkward to carry around a farmers’ market.

[7] Of course, so have some of the least edible…But even using a recipe isn’t disaster-proof.

[8] All I could afford. But Michael Pollan’s prose on the subject of chanterelles convinced me that $5 per quarter pound is a steal for these amazing fungi.

[9] I love cooking for other people, but when I’m alone and hungry, it usually seems like too much trouble to spread some peanut butter on a slice of bread.

[10] Vegan crêpes are not only possible, by the way, thanks to the miracle of chickpea flour (which has a protein similar to that of eggs,) but they are also just as delicious as the more traditional dairy-laden kind. See Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan Brunch or Veganomicon for a recipe.

When my mother informed me on the phone that she had stopped using her dryer,[1] I pictured my parents’ tiny first floor laundry room that doubles as a guest bath thick with clotheslines and garments in varying states of dampness.  In the dead of a Midwest winter, they couldn’t have installed a clothesline outside, right?

It seems I underestimated my parents. When I arrived in Madison a couple days ago, I discovered that they had indeed put a clothesline on their screen porch. What’s more, the towels and clothes they had hung on it in frigid temperatures miraculously hadn’t frozen. ‘They feel a little clammy, but they’re dry’ my mom said as she pulled some jeans off the line. ‘It just takes a little longer in the winter.’ [2]

Having thus defied the laws of physics, my parents moved on to a few other improvements. Food scraps, which for years went down the disposal or in the trash,[3] are separated into soup stock makings and compost, and are collected in a couple coffee cans in the freezer. The compost gets brought outside to the compost bin periodically. My dad has had more luck than me making soup stock that doesn’t taste funny, even though he flouts all the rules about what should and should not go in it.[4]

They also got the back stairs refinished by Mr. Sandless,^TM a company that uses certified low VOC finishes. ‘It smelled like orange juice instead of polyurethane,’ my dad says.

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[1] When asked why, she said the thing about EnergyStar not even certifying clothes dryers bothered her, especially in light of the fact that dryers are unnecessary. ‘When you really think about it,’ she commented, ‘it’s like using a hair dryer to make your clothes dry a little faster.’

[2] My mom says that when dryers first started appearing in houses in the fifties, women of her mother’s generation used them as a last resort, preferring the fresh scent and crisp texture of clothes dried en plein air. She remembers my grandma’s sheets freezing in the winter occasionally when she took a chance and put them out to dry in spite of the weather. It’s funny how we still think of the aesthetics of ‘real’ living as ideal in our chemical age- even dryer sheets, which couldn’t be more fake,  sell themselves with allusions to fresh breezes and cool mountain air, and more often than not portray clothes on a line on their packages.

[3] We had a compost bin when I was growing up, but over the years my parents lost interest in keeping it up. What it was about decaying vegetables that couldn’t hold their interest for longer I’m not entirely sure…

[4] When I told him that the cauliflower I was chopping up had to go in the compost, not the soup stock bin, because cauliflower is cruciferous, he looked at me like I was nuts. ‘It’ll get bitter!’ I insisted. I think he threw it in the compost just to humor me. This is the man who taught my mom how to cook, but who can count on one hand the number of times he’s followed a recipe in his life.

A lovely piece on food in America, by Maira Kalman.

The latest BPA findings are still not conclusive, but they’re scary nonetheless. In the face of all the scientific uncertainty surrounding this ubiquitous chemical, this New York Times op-ed piece quotes Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network:

When you have 92 percent of the American population exposed to a chemical, this is not one where you want to be wrong. Are we going to quibble over individual rodent studies, or are we going to act?

Which makes me wonder, why are chemicals considered safe until proven harmful (beyond any shadow of a doubt) anyway?

I started writing this months ago but after getting my cavities[1] filled, my interest in finishing it diminished considerably. Even with a hyper-attentive and -concerned dentist wielding the drill, I was still kinda traumatized. But I’m over it by now, so here it is: my take on going to the green dentist.

I didn’t have particularly crooked teeth as an adolescent, but I had a particularly authoritarian orthodontist.[2] And yet, for all the time he spent barking out instructions to his many assistants[3] (who did all of the actual orthodontic work) he never took even a second to explain anything to me, the person whose mouth was most affected.[4] And so I became accustomed to dissociating from whatever unidentified discomfort was deemed necessary during each visit, and instead eavesdropped intently on the technical exchange going on above my head, trying to parse it for clues.

BARTing my way to the green dentist this morning, I was reading this:

“What Gately can get from what she says to Dr. Pressburger is that there’d been concern that Gately might have got a fragment of whatever projectile he got invaded with in, through, or near his lower-something Trachea, since there’d been trauma to his Something-with-six-syllables-that-started-with-Sterno, she said the radiology results were indefinite but suspicious, and somebody called Pendleton had wanted a 16 mm. siphuncular nebulizer dispensing 4 ml. of 20% Mucomyst q. 2 h. on the off-chance of hemorrage or mucoidal flux, like just in case. The parts of this Gately can follow he doesn’t care for one bit. He doesn’t want to know his body even fucking has something with six syllables in it.” (Infinite Jest p.921)[5]

Gately has been lying in the hospital with a terribly painful, infected gunshot wound for a long but unknown (to him and the reader) period of time by now, and only pieced together a few pages ago that the reason he couldn’t talk was that there was a tube down his throat. This fact was so obvious to his doctors, nurses, and even his visitors, that no one thought to mention it to him.

Despite the fact that my own experience with medical and dental professionals has been (thankfully) incredibly limited in comparison to Don Gately’s, I could totally relate. Whether or not you have an actual, physical tube down your throat[6] preventing you from talking, it always seems to feel like it in a medical setting. It’s not even that questions are discouraged- it’s simply taken for granted that you don’t need or want to know. Anything. It’s like your understanding is superfluous.

This inaccessibility that characterizes most doctor and dentist offices was why I was caught so off-guard when I walked in to the green dentist’s office this morning and was greeted by the dentist herself. She heard me come in and ran out from somewhere in the back especially to introduce herself and lead me to a tiny conference room to ‘get to know me.’ The tiny room’s diagonal feng shui chair arrangement and obligatory ’soothing’ fountain[7] and the direct, searching gaze the (gorgeous) dentist leveled at me as I tried to explain ‘who I was’ made it all a little awkward, but I appreciated the gesture anyway. Because even if she wasn’t as concerned and open as she purported to be, even if it was just a ploy to get more clients, I appreciated the effort. As David Foster Wallace might have said, even pretending that it was important to pretend to care made the experience less soul crushing than it might otherwise have been.

Next, the dentist introduced me to one of her coordinating, modishly-clad assistants[8] who embarked on a tour of the office’s green features. I was not getting special treatment for having mentioned I was interested in the environment. Nope, it was standard procedure to show each new patient around. Pretty much everything she showed me I had already read about on the website (water filtration system, recycled denim insulation, paperless office, high-efficiency autoclave, etc.) except the couch in the waiting room, which was actually from the dentist’s old living room, but, again, it was a nice gesture.

The second half of the visit felt more like a normal dentist, save for the constant[9] checking to see if I was comfortable, and the dreaded warm shoulder wrap, which only made me hot. I got to see the digital X-rays they took on the computer screen, but maybe all with-it dentists do that now (I hadn’t been to see one in three years.)[10] Oh, and they did offer me some sort of high tech goggles to watch a movie while they cleaned, or at least headphones to listen to what the dentist temptingly called “meditation music.” I think I disappointed them by refusing both.[11] Clearly, I am not quite their demographic.

So why am I not focusing on the green innovations I encountered at the only eco-friendly dentist in San Francisco?[12] Because, for the most part, they seemed so obvious. Cloth bibs, reusable tools, eco-friendly toothpaste, typing directly into the computer rather than filling out paper forms. Who wouldn’t think those were good ideas? Filter the ecosystem-destroying mercury from old fillings out of the water before it leaves the building? That’s crazy talk!

No, as great as all that was, what really struck me about the green dentist was that it wasn’t merely a dentist office with eco-friendly features. It was a re-envisioning of dentistry as we know it.

Just as feminism began as a quest for a single equal right for (white) women and came to embody a critique of entire societies and came up with whole new ways of doing everything, the green movement shouldn’t limit itself to carbon footprint size. Nor can it. To be truly effective, I think, we can’t just substitute green products for the toxic and wasteful ones we were using before and be done with it. There has to be a fundamental shift in the way we understand the world.

In Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, he discusses large-scale industrial organic farming. It turns out that, when you merely substitute organic inputs for chemical, it’s in some respects actually worse for the soil, because more disruptive tilling is needed for weed-control. Trying to farm with the existing industrial model to organic specifications is possible,[13] but not nearly as effective as adopting a true, all-encompassing organic outlook would be.

In the same way, a dentist’s office that regards its patients as human beings rather than so many sets of teeth and takes a holistic view of health is so much greener than an office that simply employs all the latest in green technology. Becoming green should and must entail a reevaluation of the way we do everything, not just a by-the numbers reduction of emissions and pollution, as vital as that may be. Because to keep the old industrial, reductionist view of how the world works entirely misses the point.

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[1] Which, I just discovered in Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World, were virtually unheard of until the 16^th century when sugar plantations were developed. Seriously, medieval peasants, the ancient Greeks, even hunter-gatherers (who it seems actually had a pretty cushy life) didn’t get cavities. No toothbrushes, no flossing, no dental professionals, no fluoridated water necessary.  It’s enough to make you want to cut out sugar altogether.

[2] But maybe that is the nature of people attracted to teeth-straightening as a profession.

[3] All of whom were female, incidentally, and all of whom wore such hideously patterned smocks that they just had to have been designed to go with the office’s blandly offensive decor.

[4] The one time I saw the inside of his conference room, he likened the spacers he was about to insert between my molars to having a piece of meat stuck in your teeth. This metaphor was, of course, entirely lost on me, and my mother and I glanced at each other and burst out laughing. Which, you could tell, totally flustered my sad, straight-laced ortho. Maybe that’s why he never took us into his conference room again…

[5] In retrospect, probably not the best choice of reading material to take my mind off of my appointment. But it sure beat the hell out of my statistics textbook.

[6] or plastic thing holding your mouth open, as my orthodontist was particularly fond of.

[7]At least I’m pretty sure there was a fountain. My imagination could be supplying extraneous details, but you get the idea…

[8] Did those chic black-and-white numbers of which each assistant wore a variation come from the same dental hygienist apparel universe from which my orthodontist’s poor assistants ordered their smocks?

[9] And by constant, I mean every couple of minutes. It bordered on annoying, but better to err on the side of overly-attentive than negligent.

[10] Hence the cavities. I do brush and floss, I swear!

[11] I was a little curious to check out their movie selection though. I could only imagine: Escape to Nature Vol. II: Underwater Peace? The World’s Most Beautiful Places? Power of Flowers: Dreaming Orchids?

[12] There is another one in Berkeley, but it seemed even more new age-y than this one. The website’s description of a complimentary foot massage during your cleaning combined with the vague threat that I was going to be forced to meditate at some point, made the extra effort of getting on BART seem well worth it.

[13] At least with the current, less-than-exacting USDA certification standards.

Clothes dryers are so inefficient that Energy Star doesn’t even certify them. What’s more, they are totally unnecessary. Why are Americans still using them?

The trailer for Drying for Freedom, a film about laundry in America:

Read more from Project Laundry List about how much energy dryers use here.

Canvas (and that weird material supposedly made out of recycled plastic bottles) is slowly taking over the check-out line. I haven’t seen anyone carrying an Evian bottle in ages. Handkerchiefs sticking out of hipster pockets aren’t (usually) just a fashion statement. But what hasn’t caught on yet is making do. Green accessories are great when they save resources. But, being more durable and thus generally more energy-intensive to produce than disposables, they only really save resources if you use them over and over. Like, for years.

Because if the landfills fill up with reusables, we’ve really screwed ourselves over.

Take for instance tote bags. As an article in the Utne Reader[1] pointed out, you can’t attend a conference, donate to a nonprofit or shop at Trader Joe’s without free ones being forced on you.[2] Of course, the ones you’d actually want to be seen with in public you have to pay for, with their ironic slogans and clever graphics, so you acquire those too. And then stuff all but the newest one in the back of the coat closet or the bag to take to Goodwill.[3]

I couldn’t find exact figures, but according to the tote bag article, if cost is any indicator, a canvas tote bag takes about 400 times more resources to produce than a plastic bag (100 billion of which are given away ‘for free’ every year in America.) That means you’d need to use your tote in place of a plastic bag more than 400 times to make up for the environmental cost of producing it.[4]

The same goes for metal water bottles. Even taking into account the energy used for shipping disposable plastic water bottles, a reusable metal bottle must be used for years before its resource-intense production has been effectively paid off.[5]

Making do, in our world of cheap, plentiful goods, seems pretty silly. It’s not as if we’re homesteaders and have no choice. If H&M is twenty minutes away, and new jeans are only $40, it seems dumb to spend the better part of a day revamping an old pair instead.

But price tags don’t reflect the true cost of the product they’re affixed to. [6] In his book A Green History of the World, Clive Ponting discusses the fundamental oversight of classical economics, the theory upon which much of our economy is based.

“The crucial defect [of the theory of a self-regulating market] is that the earth’s resources are treated as capital- a set of assets to be turned into a source of profit. Trees, wildlife, minerals, water and soil are treated as commodities to be sold or developed. More important, their price is simply the cost of extracting them and turning them into marketable commodities [...]Yet this view overlooks the basic truth that the resources of the earth are not just scarce, they are finite.” (155-6)

So while we’re all clamoring to buy more and more green products, let’s not lose sight of the reason they exist in the first place. Although it may be tempting to buy a new KleenKanteen when the first one gets dented, or to buy a sleeker-looking tote, resist the urge. Because I’m willing to bet the ones you have’ll do just fine.

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[1] Which I just now found published in its full version (with pictures of trendy totes) here.

[2] A giveaway is never free, for anyone involved. Not for the giver, certainly, or the environment, of course (though you don’t generally stop to think about it,) but not for the recipient either. Whether or not there are strings attached, the fact remains that you now possess this object that you didn’t really need. And now you have to use it, store it (perhaps in some of the 2.3 billion square feet of self storage facilities now available in the U.S.) or find a way to get rid of it with a clear conscience.

[3] For proof that corporate tote bag branding is an environmental issue, check out the bag bin at Goodwill. It is almost always overwhelmingly logo-bearing (former) freebies.

[4] Of course, the disposal of plastic bags is arguably even more of an environmental issue than their production…

[5] I saw a great little diagram showing the resource use of metal vs. plastic water bottles somewhere, and now I can’t find it for the life of me. I’ve wanted to cite it about ten times since I read it, and each time I try to search for it again, but with no luck…

[6] See The Story of Stuff for more on this.

It was silly of me to think that I could reread Infinite Jest this summer, continue to avoid plastic and animal products and post regularly about it. It wasn’t just an issue of time: I knew that my attempts at writing about anything would seem too insignificant to bother once I was immersed in the brilliance of David Foster Wallace’s prose. I hung on though, for a while, at the very least posting my plastic trash results (albeit a little later every week, so that by the end I was almost a month behind) in bare-bones list form.

And although I stopped posting, I continued collecting all my plastic until about two weeks ago.

And then came Baby (as we unimaginatively called her, having run out of good names on about the eleventh stray kitten to show up in our yard.)[1] She appeared out of nowhere, with no discernable litter mates, disheveled and sluggish and obviously sick. And so I cleared everything out of my room that could harbor the fleas Baby most certainly had (including my dresser drawers full of clothes and my futon) and it became Baby’s room.

The first pieces of plastic I threw out without recording were the latex gloves I used to give Baby her medicine (we didn’t want what the vet thought at first was feline leukemia to spread to our cats.) It seemed counterproductive to leave them lying around, and besides, why should I include them in my tally when they were a product of my attempt to do a selfless thing?

When I was cooking the next day, it occurred to me I no longer had anywhere to pile my plastic trash.[2] So I left a piece of produce tape on the counter, till I could figure out where to put it, and it got thrown out by one of my roommates.

And then I kinda gave up. I still wasn’t buying any unnecessary plastic, but I was no longer collecting it.

Socializing a kitten takes work, and I was spending more time than I would care to admit cajoling Baby into eating and worrying about finding a home for her. “We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe,” Hal reflects during his breakdown on page 900 of Infinite Jest. Which was the only reason I wasn’t concerned about all the time (and money) I was spending on what was just one of thousands of stray kittens in Oakland. All human pursuits are basically irrational, is one of the themes that comes up again and again in Infinite Jest, but try living without devoting yourself to anything.

This line of thinking is the reason I still don’t have my room back. Baby got better, became a glutton for human affection, and was adopted. So we promptly rescued two more kittens.

And then I had two serious lapses. The first occurred when we ordered take-out Chinese food because I was too busy with[3] the kittens one night to make dinner, and not only did my mu shu turn out to have egg in it, [4] but it came in a styrofoam container. I didn’t know anyone even used styrofoam take-out boxes anymore. Since it was Chinese, I had assumed the food would come in compostable paper containers. The second lapse happened the very next day, when I was driving with my friends to a wedding. We stopped in a tiny town and got food from the only restaurant we could find that would be able to make anything vegan: a taqueria. So the leftovers of a huge burrito wouldn’t be sitting in a hot car for the rest of the day, I just got a taco. I thought it would come in aluminum foil; it came in styrofoam, and when I bit into it, it tasted like… animal.[5] I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that my taco might come with refried beans.

But two styrofoam containers, a serving of eggy vegetarian mu shu, and some probable lard in my beans will not succeed in doing what I have (barely) managed to keep eleven kittens and a 1,000 page masterpiece of American literature[6] from doing this summer. No matter how time-consuming, insignificant, and irrational it is, I am resolved to stay off plastic and animal products. And maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I’ve stopped keeping track: as Joelle points out near the end of Infinite Jest, it’s harder to stay in the air, clearing cars, if you’re counting them.

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[1] Against our better judgment, we had started feeding the mother and three kittens we discovered in our backyard at the beginning of the summer.

[2] My roommates put up with enough already without me stashing tempeh wrappers and empty rice milk cartons in a corner of our kitchen.

[3] Or stressed out about, rather. One of them was crying incessantly, and heartbreakingly, at the window, because he could see his friends outside and missed them desperately. (Even though I know this kind of personification of animal behavior is a stretch, I just can’t stop myself from thinking this way…)

[4] Like, the kind of eggy stir-fried egg that would have grossed me out even when I ate eggs.

[5] Or what animal tastes like to vegetarians anyway: wrong.

[6] Or, my FBOAT (Favorite Book of All Time.)

I’ve heard that it’s possible to keep bread fresh in a cloth bag if you sprinkle it with water periodically. But that seemed mold-inviting to my American sensibilities.[1] Hence my solution to keeping artisan bread[2] fresh without disposable plastic bags: a reusable bread bag. I took a plastic produce bag which, used on its own, would develop holes, and encased it in two layers of cotton fabric. So far, it’s kept my rolls fresh for three days. Washing it might be a little tricky, but it shouldn’t need to be washed too often and I think with a little creative inside-out flipping, handwashing won’t be a problem.

1. Limit (or better yet, eliminate altogether) intake of animal products.

This is the single most effective way to reduce your carbon emissions.[1] The New York times reports:

[W]ith worldwide production of milk and beef expected to double in the next 30 years, the United Nations has called livestock one of the most serious near-term threats to the global climate. In a 2006 report that looked at the environmental impact of cows worldwide, including forest-clearing activity to create pasture land, it estimated that cows might be more dangerous to Earth’s atmosphere than trucks and cars combined.

It’s hard to reduce your consumption of meat and dairy without keeping track of it. So if you don’t want to give them up altogether, try eating one or two vegan meals a day, or eating vegan a certain number of days a week, or only eating animal products when you go out to eat. Even forgoing meat one day a week will make a big dent in your carbon footprint, as this handy chart shows.

2. Waste less.

Peter Singer and Jim Mason write “According to [...] a U.S. government-funded study, more than 40% of food grown in the U.S. is lost or thrown away- that’s about $100 billion of wasted food a year. At least half of that food could have been safely consumed.”

Much of this food waste come from food industry practices like buying more than will be sold so that the shelf looks full, or because of a quantity discount. But household waste is by no means a negligible factor: the same study found that “about 14% of household garbage was perfectly good food that was in its original packaging and not out of date.” Buy only as much as you need (I find it helps when buying food for a recipe to write the quantity called-for down on my list so I can buy the exact amount,[2] or at least eyeball it, at the store.) Eat your leftovers. Compost scraps that can’t be used for soup stock.[3] And when you have a weird combination of straggler vegetables that didn’t get used during the week, be creative.[4] That said, unless you know what you’re doing or you’re one of those lucky people who can eat anything, it’s generally a good idea to at least consult a recipe to ensure that the results come out edible.

3. Bring leftovers for lunch.

For any given dish, the energy needed to cook two meals-worth rather than just one will be less than twice as much (unless each serving needs to be cooked individually for some reason.) So by cooking enough for lunch (or dinner) the next day, you will have reduced the amount of energy expended per serving.

4. Store and transport food in reusable containers.

Bring your own jars (or at least reused plastic bags) for buying bulk foods (ask at your local grocery store if the store needs to weigh them before you fill them.) Go a step further than bringing your own grocery bags: bring cloth produce bags too![5] And always try to bring a container when you go out to eat.[6]

5. Buy only high-quality cookware that you really need (and then use it for the rest of your life.)

Rather than getting the cheapest utensils, pots, and pans that you can, and then throwing them out after a year of use, always buy high-quality, durable cookware that has many uses. Cheap stuff ages badly and doesn’t work very well in the first place. If you need a pan, get a cast iron one instead of a brightly colored non-stick one that will look pretty for all of two months. Get heavy bottomed, stainless steel pots. Get the best knife you can afford.[7] Avoid super-specific cooking gadgets (anything that does only one thing- like a quesadilla maker or an avocado slicer.) Check thrift stores before you purchase anything new (they don’t often have high quality stuff, because who would give away a nice cast-iron pan, but if you dig through the plastic colanders and novelty ice-cube trays and dented aluminum pots, you might find what you’re looking for.)

6. Use reusable tea strainers and coffee filters.

If you drink coffee, there is no reason not to own a reusable filter.[8] Buy one, and you’ll never have to remember to buy the paper ones again. If you drink tea, get a tea ball or teapot with a built-in strainer, and switch to loose leaf tea.

7. Cook more efficiently.

-Don’t preheat the oven before you’ve made your cake batter or chopped your root vegetables. I know recipes always say the first thing to do is turn on your oven, but ovens only take about ten minutes to warm up, max. If you are making pastries, bread, cake or cookies, wait until you have only about ten minutes left before whatever you’re making will be oven-ready. Most other foods can be started in a cold oven, especially if they need to bake for an hour or more. Also, use glass or ceramic pans in the oven whenever possible, as they retain heat better (it’s rumored that glass and ceramic are so effective that you can even turn the oven down 25 degrees.)

-Use an appropriately-sized pan on an appropriately-sized burner. The smaller the pan, the less energy it takes to heat it up. Don’t choose a huge pan if you’re only cooking for two. The pan should completely cover the burner, On an electric stove, the pan should not extend more than an inch past it. Consumerenergycenter.org says “A 6 inch pan on an 8 inch [electric] burner will waste over 40 percent of the heat produced by the burner.” On gas stoves, they recommend using a lower flame setting to save energy.

-Put a lid on it. When boiling water, making soup, cooking rice, steaming vegetables, etc. use a lid.[9] Things cook faster with lids- they trap the heat. Of course, remove the lid when you add anything likely to boil over, like pasta, or if you want whatever you’re cooking to fry or reduce.

-Don’t boil more water than necessary. Some purists (and all pasta boxes) say you need 4-6 quarts of water to make a pound of pasta, but I’ve never had a problem using much less.[10] According to a recent article in the New York Times, you really only need 1 ½ to 2 quarts per pound.

- Turn the heat down after things have started boiling. High heat is only needed to reach the boiling point. If you have an electric kettle (water-boiler,) use that first, and then pour the boiling water into a pan on the stove to save energy and time.

-Put reflector dishes under your burners and keep them clean and shiny.

-Use a toaster oven or microwave to heat small portions. From my own calculations, I suspect that toaster ovens are more efficient than microwaves.[11] Either way, though, both use a lot less energy than heating up a full-size oven.

-Defrost frozen food in the refrigerator rather than running it under copious amounts of hot water. Putting it in the fridge will actually improve its efficiency.

-Don’t open the oven door while food is cooking. Doing so lowers the temperature by about 25 degrees. Just turn on the light and look in. Rearrange oven racks before you preheat the oven. And don’t put foil on the racks- this blocks the flow of air in the oven.

-Get a pressure cooker.[12] They can reduce energy consumption (and cooking time) by 70 percent.

8. Wash dishes with less water.

If you have an energy-efficient dishwasher, scrape any food off your dishes (but don’t rinse them!) fill up your dishwasher all the way and turn it on. It will use way less water than you could ever hope to doing the dishes by hand. My roommate likes to turn the dishwasher off before it starts the drying cycle, and let the dishes air dry with the door open, or dry them with a towel. I couldn’t find anything that said this saves energy, but common sense suggests it would.

If you don’t have a dishwasher, use as little water as possible when washing your dishes. I use cold water to save energy unless I’m washing something really greasy. Turn the water off while you are scrubbing each dish. When you rinse a dish, let the water run into the next dish to be cleaned, or into a pot that needs to be soaked. Scrub a bunch of silverware and then rinse it all at the same time.

9. Buy organic, local, in-season food whenever possible.

Buying local isn’t enough. If something was grown locally in a greenhouse (because it’s out of season) it most likely took more energy to produce it than it would have taken to ship it from somewhere warmer. In most cases, if something requires conditions which are not present naturally (like heat or a lot of water,) you’re probably better off buying an imported one, provided it traveled by boat, train, or possibly truck (depending on how far it went.) For instance, growing rice in California is so energy- and water-intensive, that even if you live there, it’s more environmentally responsible to buy rice grown in Bangladesh.

However, you can’t generally tell how food was shipped. So it’s best to stick mostly with organic, local, in-season, climate-appropriate food. Although it’s been pointed out that smaller growers’ trucks use more energy per pound of food per mile than a semi would, assuming they don’t travel nearly as far and taking all the other benefits of buying locally into account, I still think farmer’s markets and locally-supplied grocery stores are the way to go. In a supermarket, it’s impossible to do all the carbon emission calculations when deciding between two tomatoes, because the necessary information is almost never supplied. At a farmer’s market, at least, you can ask the growers directly how they produce and transport their food.

10. Avoid packaging.

Buy more fresh fruits and vegetables, bulk goods and other foods that come with little or no packaging, or with packaging you can reuse or which can truly be recycled (that means no plastic!) If you take into account the environmental cost of producing and disposing of the packaging and the extra shipping weight of pre-prepared foods, it often makes more sense to make things from scratch.[13]

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[1] As well as improve your health and reduce the amount of animal suffering your lifestyle is responsible for. If you eat meat and you haven’t read graphic descriptions of  factory farm practices recently, you are unknowingly condoning cruelty. And if you still believe that milk “does a body good,” realize that it’s common knowledge among medical researchers that dairy is bad for humans. For myriad reasons, the physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine recommends cutting dairy (as well as meat) out of your diet. Here’s why.

[2] Those hanging produce scales aren’t just for cheapskates!

[3] See footnote 2 here for soup-stock-making guidelines.

[4] I am notoriously bad at remembering to use up my food before it goes bad. I just can’t eat things fast enough. However, recently I’ve started making scrambled tofu in the mornings, and throwing in whatever leftover vegetables I have (like the rest of a bunch of scallions, the last mushrooms, the rest of some fresh cilantro I bought for a recipe, or some shredded carrot or kale.) And, if I can’t think of a way to use something up right then, I often throw it in the freezer to use for soup stock later.

[5] Because, really, what’s the point of putting individually plastic-bagged veggies and fruits into a canvas tote? You can easily make your own produce bags out of sheer fabric or netting, or you can buy organic cotton ones here.

[6] One that, I admit, I haven’t gotten in the habit of doing yet.

[7] This is my biggest peeve: cheap knives. The purpose of knives is to cut. Cheap knives (especially those serrated ones that supposedly never need sharpening [not to be confused with bread knives]) don’t cut. Why buy them? The same goes for cheap tools in general. Buy one really good tool, rather than a bunch of differently-sized, but useless, cheap ones.

[8] Unless you own a French press or stovetop espresso maker or some such device that doesn’t need a filter.

[9] Seems obvious, but I’ve seen people try to steam things without a lid!

[10] And I make a lot of pasta…

[11] My toaster oven uses 118 watts for maybe 5 minutes to heat the same thing my microwave takes about 1130 watts for 2 minutes. Of course, this will vary depending on your appliances and  what you’re heating, as some things are more suited to microwave-heating than toaster-oven-heating.

[12] I haven’t gotten one of these yet. My parents always used them when I was growing up, but they remain mysterious to me. The time my mother made split pea soup in a pressure cooker and it (the soup) ended up on the ceiling may have something to do with this.

[13] Though not always: Slate did a comparison and concluded that buying canned beans is probably slightly more energy efficient than cooking dry beans yourself. Either way though, they concluded, “you can rest assured that getting some of your protein from beans instead of meat is a kind move to make for the planet’s sake.”