Consider the Cookprint

by Shawndra Miller, Irvington Green Initiative co-founder / Radical Homemaker

Driving back from Northern Indiana Sunday, we happened upon the public radio show The Splendid Table, which is always a sweet listen. Host Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s absolute thrill in all things food comes through in her voice. I was salivating over her description of all the ways she used green beans and potatoes fresh from the garden.

One of her guests this weekend was a writer of a new book, Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen, which concerns ways to “shrink your cookprint.”

It's a familiar refrain: the average meal travels thousands of miles before it hits an American's plate. The local food movement has brilliantly highlighted the eco-importance of buying from small farmers within a small geographic area: less fossil fuel in transportation, less environmental harm as most are able to farm with few chemicals.

But what we don't always think about is the impact of what we do with the food after we get it home. Anyone who gardens or belongs to a CSA knows that procuring the food sustainably is only the first step. Once you have all that produce staring at you, you've got to do something with it. Except for salads, cold soups and the like, this task generally involves using some form of energy - turning on the burner, heating up the oven, setting up the crockpot.

The author offered some tips for lowering cookprints, one of which had Kasper a bit chagrined: boiling water for pasta and then turning the burner off once the pasta is in the closed pot. Apparently this is sacrilege in Italian circles, but it does work. (I tested it out last night and can attest that even with whole wheat penne, you don't have to keep the water actively boiling to reach that perfect al dente texture.)

My cherished solar cooker is another way I keep my "cookprint" under control, at least in summer. I'm also a fiend about using the entire oven if it's hot, and will actively create work for myself in order to use both racks. (Roasting a chicken? How about baking squash and making a cobbler at the same time! Never mind the dirty dishes mounting in the sink.)

I intend to buy a pressure cooker in time for fall, so that when my solar cooker is retired for the season, I can replace its efficiency with an appliance that supposedly cuts cooking time by 70 percent.

I haven't researched how much energy a crockpot uses in comparison to a gas burner, but with IPL's green energy option, my crockpot is powered by clean, renewable energy sources. Guilt-free crockpot chili!

What’s your cookprint, and what are some ways you are making it smaller?

Learn more about solar cooking and other environmentally friendly food skills at the Nov. 7 Irvington SkillShare "Feast"ival, 1-5pm at Irvington United Methodist Church.