Cooking Green: A New Book to Help You Reduce Your Carbon Footprint--in the Kitchen!
Living green is the new normal. I spent two years researching Cooking Green and came up with green strategies that are effective, painless, and go beyond organics and recycling. And if a time-crunched omnivore like me can cook green every day, so can anyone. This book empowers you to shrink your “cookprint.” You’ll discover ways to prepare favorite meals using less fuel and water, and make greener choices along the entire food chain, from field to market to home (it’s like a personal eco-consultant whenever you cook, shop, or eat).
Here’s a chapter-by-chapter look at Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen--the New Green Basics Way.
Did You Know...12% of greenhouse gas emissions (or 14,160 pounds of CO2 per household) result from just growing, shipping, and preparing our food.
Intro: How we cook is as important as what we cook. Fortunately, the kitchen is the place where you can make real green choices, and take direct control of your impact--through passive and active cooking strategies, water conservation tips, and low-carbon choices for cookware, appliances, foods, water heaters, dining, and more. Save money and time, too, just by rethinking how you cook and eat.
Chapter 1: Take the eco-quiz. How much do you already know about fuel, water, and energy consumption? This chapter explains how cooking works, and the new green basics of cooking.
Fact: Ovens are the Humvees of the kitchen: They waste as much as 94% of the fuel they consume. Solutions: Opt for stovetop cooking over oven cooking, use toaster ovens, convection mode, or bake multiple items simultaneously to stretch fuel use.
Chapter 2: Green up your kitchen zones. Refrigerators, appliances (big and small), barbecues, and the kitchen itself take the spotlight.
Example: Garbage disposals are so last century. Chewed up gunk gets trucked from water treatment plant to landfill, wasting water, electricity, and gasoline. Solutions: Compost, or scrape the dishes into the trash.
Chapters 3 through 5: Hands-on tactics for cooking green, from blue-oven cooking to green flame strategies on top of the stove.
Example: Rapidly boiling water is the same temperature as gently boiling water. Solution: Turn down the heat once boiling occurs. (Also, passive boiling techniques, like blanching veggies and cooking pasta in sub-boiling water, can cut energy in half.)
Chapter 6: Does cookware make a difference? You bet it does, and this chapter delivers the lowdown on fuel-efficient cookware.
Example: Thin, flimsy and Teflon-style pans wear out in one to five years; they use fuel inefficiently, and trashing them grows your cookprint. Solution: Invest in cookware that lasts; this chapter recommends affordable, energy-efficient pieces, and new nonstick pans that are also nontoxic.
Chapters 7 and 8: Practical ways to shop smart, eat green, and consume less. These chapters dive into better foods for the planet, food labels, sustainable seafood, greening your plate with meat or without, and fuel-efficient ingredients that need little or no cooking, like Vietnamese rice-paper wrappers.
Example: To create a serving of steak requires 2,607 gallons of water; an almond serving requires 12 gallons, a chicken portion uses 408 gallons, and a serving of rice uses 36 gallons. Solutions: Eat less meat, and more plant-based foods. Nuts are especially nutritious, protein-packed, and highly sustainable.
Chapter 9: With food comes waste. Control the excess food and packaging you create. (Not all waste comes from your kitchen: the restaurants you pick make a difference, too.)
Fact: Liquid beverages weigh more, creating more greenhouse gases in their transport and packaging. Solutions: Use tap water instead of bottled water, and opt for powdered Gatorade or leaf tea over bottled versions.
Recipes: The New Green Basics: Here’s where green theory goes practical. A Green Meter for each recipe indicates what makes that recipe greener, and how to integrate the strategy into your own recipes.
I hope you’ll join me in this transition to everyday green living. Once I started practicing these methods, I started seeing new opportunities to go green everywhere, and I think you will, too. But don’t take my word for it: To test-drive Cooking Green, check out sample recipes at NewGreenBasics.com, click on Amazon’s Look Inside the Book to discover more tips for cooking, living and being green.
Looking for more ways to go green? Check out Amazon's Earth Day Savings Store.
Carrie on April 20, 2009 at 11:20 AM
Ok..going green. How's is making another cookbook about going green, going green? You have destroyed how many trees to do this? Trucks getting the books to the book store or even Amazon. Not going green. Come on people...this is getting out of hand!!!
mondo13 on April 20, 2009 at 12:38 PM
Carbon footprints and the whole global warming fad is a total scam by evil elites. It is they that are causing all the environmental problems by their CFR-NASA-Club of Rome chemtrail spraying bonanaza on the population over the past decade. Respitory illnesses and alzheimers are on an agressive upswing due to the high content of alumninum, barium, and other heavy metals that are highly toxic to our immune systems. Anyone in the western world just pay attention to the skies. That plane exhaust isn't water vapors. Its a toxic soup of chemical-biological polymer sludge being sprayed on us by the tonnage every day.
DonnaC on April 20, 2009 at 01:18 PM
This green stuff is all such a crock, and what amazes me is these folks think they invented it! Funny, my mom saved and reused everything, having lived through the depression; and we called it "Thrift!"
I, personally, am sick to death of every magazine, book, newspaper and ad, touting "Green," at the top of their lungs; and I'm actually in backlash mode. I'll live the way I've always lived, because I always try to be a good steward of the blessing given me but I'm not going to pay more to buy stuff made from recyled/renewable/environmentally friendly, whatever, stuff or anything just because it's promoted as "Green!" Anyone who does is a sucker and will look back in shame at having been taken in...
Kevin on April 20, 2009 at 03:09 PM
"Living green is the new normal."
Well, that's not true. Only around a third of America even believes that CO2 is a problem. Of that, only about 35% of them are acting upon their beliefs.
Don't get me wrong. We grow about a third of our vegetables ourselves. We like good eats. But we know that 'green' is the new 'snake oil', and that's it's best to avoid anyone touting 'green' stuff as the lazy envirohippies they are. Sheesh, they're worse than the Greenpeace hippies, imo.
Chin Hook on April 21, 2009 at 12:25 AM
Green Cooking concept is agree with Kyoto Protocol. We must support it. Do you find another books?
here : http://123childrensbookstore.co.cc/
Krista on May 14, 2009 at 09:31 AM
global warming and going green is not a load of crap and soooooooooooo many people just piss me off cuz they just say, "I'll do everything i've always done; i don't care." pompous assholes! just because life is still tolerable now does not mean it will always be in the future if we keep being so wasteful! the effects of global warming and overpopulation shows everywhere! so just swallow your damn pride and fear of change because, God forbid going green might have a positive outcome!