Can Learning to Cook Save the Planet?

I must start out with a disclaimer. I am biased on this topic. I desperately want the answer to be yes, cooking can save the planet.

That’s because in August, I committed to 365 days of scratch cooking after being inspired by a Michael Pollan article on the decline of cooking and the subsequent rise in the packaged food industry.

Among the things I have made from scratch are ricotta cheese, sour cream, brioche (photo, above) and tortillas — easy; as well as potato chips, croissants, tamales and candied ginger — not so easy, but mostly worth the effort.

A friend used to tell me that saying natural child birth is like saying natural surgery; if the drugs exist, just use them. And there are days when I think the same about convenience foods; there is a reason that candied ginger comes in nice little plastic packages from who knows where because really, who has the time to boil and rinse and boil and rinse and boil and rinse and then cook for an hour to make what is ostensibly a garnish.

So, when I called Helene York, the director of strategic initiatives at Bon Appétit Management Company and the architect behind the company’s Low Carbon Diet program to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from food service operations, I was really hoping she would tell me that packaged foods account for a large enough portion of the carbon emissions in the food system to make all that kneading and stirring and chopping worthwhile. After all, this is the company that set a goal of reducing meat on the menus in their 400 corporate and university cafes by 25 percent over two years and actually reached 33 percent.

The first thing York explained is that roughly 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States come from what we eat, and about 1/3 of emissions globally are connected to the food system.

“People shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying food, especially if they choose the amount of food they actually eat and really enjoy it,” says York, explaining that waste within the food system, at the farm level, processing level and at the table is a major problem.

But, she says “we might want to consider a little less of certain foods and make them a treat … there are choices we can make that minimize what we’re responsible for in terms of emissions. Just like we might choose to drive less or turn off the appliances, we shouldn’t ignore the role that food plays.”

I can verify through personal experience that when you start making your own French fries or potato chips, they definitely become a treat rather than a daily, or even weekly, indulgence. Like Pollan explained in his article, though, once somebody else starts doing all the work, that changes. But what about the role of processing and packaging in the emissions profile of our diet?

York warned me that deriving a percentage of emissions from food made in industrial kitchens is complex due to a number of factors.

“On an overall U.S. basis, very little, maybe 5 to 10 percent of food emissions, come from processing and packaging,” she explained.

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