Shrinking your Kitchen’s ‘Cookprint’

Written by Corrine Garcia Wednesday, November 24 2010

There’s a lot of talk about carbon footprints and how to shrink them. But have you ever thought about shrinking your “cookprint?”

Kate Heyhoe sure has, and her cookbook, Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen the New Green Basics Way, offers tips plus energy- and time-saving recipes to shrink your cookprint. She also spreads the word as the author and editor of GlobalGourmet.com and NewGreenBasics.com about healthy green eating and all around green living.

What is your Cookprint?
“Your cookprint measures the entire environmental impact you make on the planet when you cook or eat,” Heyhoe says, “whether you cook the meal or someone else prepares it for you.” She describes the factors that contribute to a person’s cookprint as a kind of cycle that keeps growing until the food finally hits the fork.

The cookprint starts from the time the food is raised or produced, including all of the resources used to grow and transport food from the farm or factory to your kitchen, the food’s packaging, and even the refrigeration required to keep it fresh before it lands in your own fridge or freezer. From there, your cookprint is compounded by the amount of waste produced in your kitchen and the amount of fuel and water used in the cooking process. And there are ways to shrink it.

A More Efficient Cookprint
Shrinking your kitchen’s cookprint, according to Heyhoe, involves some obvious energy-saving choices along with some thinking-outside-the-green-box ideas. “How you cook is as important as what you cook,” she says, explaining that you can still cook your favorite recipes, but there are ways to do this and save energy, including:

Limit oven usage. Ovens waste up to 94 percent of the fuel they output, Heyhoe says. She recommends using the cooktop or a toaster oven for more fuel-efficient cooking.

Multitask the oven. If you are going to use the oven, Heyhoe suggests baking several items at once to maximize the fuel being used.

Use the oven’s convection setting. Convection ovens, she says, produce 30 percent fewer greenhouse gases than conventional ovens.

Use small appliances. Rice steamers, slow cookers, toaster ovens, pressure cookers, and electric teakettles all are more energy efficient than conventional cooking methods, Heyhoe says..

Winnie Abramson has a degree in naturopathic medicine. Based in New York, she writes regularly about green cooking on her blog Healthy Green Kitchen. She focuses on green eating techniques and delicious, healthy recipes documented with high quality photography. She offers additional suggestions for shrinking your kitchen’s cookprint, including:

• Composting when possible to cut down on kitchen waste.
• Running the dishwasher only when it’s completely full.
• Being conscious of running water unnecessarily.
• Using eco-friendly cookware, such as cast iron, that doesn’t leach any harmful chemicals.
• Using healthier leftover storage containers, such as tempered glass containers with lids, in place of plastic.

Your Edible Cookprint
A large part of your kitchen’s cookprint relates to the foods you bring into it. Heyhoe recommends eating lower on the food chain by consuming less meat. In her book, she offers vegetarian options along with “greener meaty options, like stretching out portions of grass-fed beef for die-hard committed carnivores.”

As far as food goes, Abramson suggests buying organic, seasonal, and local foods as much as possible. “Of course, it depends where you live,” she explains. “I eat as much in season as I can during that growing season, but once late fall and winter hits, that gets harder.” If you live in warmer climates, there’s a good chance that you have a local farmers’ market running year round.

Aside from local and organic food choices, Abramson suggests:

• Buying bulk foods whenever possible to cut down on packaging.
• Buying foods with the least amount of transportation involved, like something grown in the country where you live.
• If you buy meat, trying to get the grass-fed meats from a local farmer.
• Reading the labels and being an informed consumer.

“Understanding your cookprint helps put the cook squarely in charge of just how big, or how green, that cookprint will be,” Heyhoe says.

Corinne Garcia is a freelance writer and editor living with her husband and two young boys in Bozeman, Mont. She has also written for Women’s Adventure, Christian Science Monitor, Northwest Travel, Pregnancy, Fit Pregnancy, and Fit Parent.