Step into the Kitchen
It is amazing how many environmental issues are manifest in our simple daily kitchen rituals. Energy consumption and food miles, land fill and pesticides, cleaning up the environment you cook in will help clean up the earth. Start with your energy use: throw out your electric kettle, toaster and coffee maker. According to Greenpeace roughly 2/3rds electricity is lost before it even reaches your home, using gas directly saves energy, and co2 emmissions. Look at your food selection: imagine your green beans on an airplane? your fruit and vegetables shouldn’t travel more than you do. While shopping your first choice should be local produce, then slowly moving away in concentric circles, making food choices that are as close to home as possible, and nothing that obviously had to fly. What kind of wrappers? People are becoming more aware of using fewer carrier bags, but its time to thing about all of the other packaging that our food comes in. That small serving of hummous in a plastic container and a cardboard wrapper? Is that really necessary? One way to avoid this is to eat fewer prepared foods, making your own hummous will save packaging, money, and energy. It pays to become an pesticide expert: The Environmental Working Group publishes a shoppers guide that has a list of “The Dirty Dozen”and “The Clean 15″. Celery tops the list of the vegetables with the most pesticides and onions the list of the cleanest veg. So, if you need to save money, it helps to know which vegetables you can buy conventionally grown that have the fewest and least dangerous pesticides. Keep in mind that if you shop at a farmers'market, while some vegetables might not be certified organic, they may be grown with very little use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides, so it pays to ask. Let your kitchen be an inspiration to yourself and others by starting your environmental commitment there.
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