Eating Green: The Basics
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study found that “about 14% of household garbage was perfectly good food that was in its original packaging and not out of date.”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]
[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.”
