A Series Of Cooking Tips & Hacks For Sustainable Climate-Friendly Kitchens.
Hi! I've started this series in my Tuckertime blog for sustainable, fossil-fuel-free, climate-friendly kitchens. With the soon-to-be-enacted banning of new gas installations on the horizon, gas and wood-burning stoves are also being phased out. Here are some transitional technologies that will allow you to ditch the gas stove and start living in the 21st (and possibly even the 22nd) Century. The first two articles were my Lumina ice cream maker article and then the rice cooker article. Now dig in and enjoy this article.
Future Kitchens
I firmly believe that "kitchens" as they exist today are going away. It's sad (having beautiful memories of having spent many cold evenings in a warm kitchen as a child and young adult) but with climate change sweeping over us, it's inevitable. The kitchen has undergone many metamorphoses in our time this last civilisation cycle, from a fire hearth in the open to caves then to communal hearths and once again private in huts and homes, then we've had markets and prepared food stalls and dining houses, and even now we have examples of all those types of eating/cooking facilities around the world.
But with climate change we're going to have to change once again. This article is part of a series on this blog, on ways that I see kitchens changing and things you can do if you prefer some food autonomy.
Food Autonomy
I don't mean just that you grow your own food, although that's a cool goal. I don't mean just retaining your own kitchen, even though that's going to be an issue that I think has yet to be decided by the world at large. I mean being able to distinguish between bullshit foods and good foods, bullshit cooking utensils and and genuinely worthwhile ones. You'll find that some things are a valuable addition to your cooking equipment, others are just a good way to waste valuable resources by making a piece of crap that has no function other than extract some money from you and then some more when you have to pay (one way or another) for it to be recycled or it ends up as yet more plastic and heavy metal pollution.
So this series of articles is going to explore as many scenarios as my fevered fertile imagination can come up with, from Star Trek food replicators to community solar cookers, or even - if the situation becomes dire enough, and who knows if that won't come to pass? - survival cooking in the wilds. One just never knows, do one?
My articles are going to cover possible futures (This article) and then drill down to specific things as can be done right now. I'll maintain a list of them updated in this article, so when you come back in a week, the newest article will have become a link in the list below.
The List
- Using Lumina Ice Cream Maker. This is a very old article about getting a very simple ice cream maker and putting it to a few less usual uses.
- Rice Cooker Meals. This really started me exploring alternatives. There are so many ‘Instant Pots’ and “Rice Cookers’ and ‘Eco Pots’ out there and I cover a few of them and also add a few recipes I've made with just rice cookers as the cooking device.
- Food Autonomy. That's this article.
- Small Hotplates. There are several kinds of hotplates, resistive element and induction, and of course, the old favourite, the camping gas cooker, using bottled or cartridge gas.
- Ovens And Ovens. There are several varieties of tabletop ovens from the ridiculous to the sublime to air fryers and steam ovens. Any good?
- Mixers Blenders Juicers.
- Slicing and Dicing.
The Preferred Options
Food Authenticity
It's difficult for us to keep up a good diet when forces of capitalism and money are involved. It invariably comes down to the most inexpensive. If a manufacturer can shave a cent per kilogram off the cost of a food or add one cent's worth of extra value to the pric
e of it, they will make more money - and that makes them a more successful predator than their competitor. One of the ways this always plays out is with the health-promoting and nutritional values of foods. There's no way around this, cheaper is less nutritionally valuable, less beneficial to health - all the way down to Soylent...
So buying a ready-made meal is always a throw of the dice. Going to a fast food outlet is a gamble. Even going to a restaurant or cafe or diner can have poor outcomes. The more processed a food is, the more processors are operating on that food on its way to you. Each one shaves a cost, takes a shortcut, adds an adulterant. Cumulatively, the result is something that isn't 100% food any more, which can in fact be far less nutrition than you'd be led to believe.
For instance, when the entire world consistently produces only enough olives for the preserved olive market (which are hard to fake) and one hundred million litres of olive oil (which is easy to fake) and yet year after year sells two hundred and fifty million litres, you know that one hundred and fifty million litres aren't actually olive oil.
Your job is to guess which brand is genuine 100% olive oil, which ones have the least corn oil added, and which ones are just any crap oil which has been boiled with olive pits or in some other way made to smell and taste a bit like olive oil...
THAT is what I mean by food authenticity.
And it isn't just the bottle of oil for your pantry in this case. Those pickled vegetables in 'olive oil' you just bought - what oil are they floating in really? The pasta aglio e olio you just got served at your lunchtime restaurant - where did they get their oil from? And so on.
And this train of thought gets infinitely worse when you consider another particularly revolting trend that at this stage seems to be mainly concentrated in China - 'grease trap oil.' And it's every biut as revolting as it sounds. Restaurateurs (or someone they buy their cheap cooking oil from) who go around skimming the oil off rubbish skips and bins of restaurant food waste, from the grease traps in the kitchen sewage, and anywhere else that they can, sometimes filtering or boiling it and then re-selling and re-using it.
That's also what I mean by food authenticity... Don't forget that some of your olive oil may have even come from this inexpensive source. If you buy some lesser-known brands of Asian cooking oil, there's even a possibility that they're selling reprocessed grease trap oil directly and not just as an additive.
So our kitchens are a place where we can do our best to only have wholesome authentic food cooked in ways that preserves the nutritional value. To me that's one of the most important functions of a home kitchen and so I hope we keep having that room in the house.
Food Preparation
As the world currently stands, many (mostly, the developed) countries are living a lifestyle where a kitchen almost doesn't make sense any more. They wake, get dressed, and have breakfast at a diner or stall on the way to work, then have lunch at an eatery local to their workplace before picking up a cooked takeaway meal on the way home. The kitchen gets used to re-heat leftovers and make a snack now and then, and is almost a wasted room. This is saddening because it indicates a swing away from home-cooked meals and with that, a departure from the 'nuclear family' which in this case means a family forming a nucleus, not the Jetsons.
That's not to say that this is entirely unknown. In ancient Greece and Rome there's evidence that there were a lot of fast food places - almost certainly indicating that people below a certain income ate almost exclusively food prepared by street vendors or people who cooked meals in their homes and took in diners much as a restaurant does. There's evidence that families sent the children away to apprentice, or to work at farms or other businesses, or to get an education.
So we're used to families being a somewhat fragmented concept. Don't forget that early families often bred profusely precisely because limited local resources would either kill children or force them to move away (or be sold, indentured, or just chased away) and so the best course of action was to keep replenishing the youthful workforce by having more of them.
We've also had 'stone age nuclear' families - in the stone age - where we probably had a hearth and kitchen wherever we happened to be, but the child was valuable and so was kept along with the family to learn the skills and become a new successful hominid. Sorry to bring families into this essay about kitchens but the fact is that partially, the things we do around kitchens and food is to do with one other uniquely human thing, our extremely long upbringing of our children. That ties in with culture and education and is another reason that kitchens are one of the focii of our civilisation.
But also - and if managed properly and operated with a focus on quality over profit or cost - the idea of abandoning the home kitchen altogether makes some sense. We got to our current state of technological and cultural achievement through specialisation - one person farms, one person logs timber, another person makes furniture and utensils for the kitchen, a miner mines metals, a smith makes the pans and metal utensils, and so forth. Remember those ancient fast food places? They were operated by specialists too.
In a few days there'll be a post about corporate food BS, look for it after Sept 6th. For now, I'll close this with a hint to the next part: What Are You Cooking With? If you rent or are cost-conscious, the old-style electric range consumes far too much energy for what it does. Induction cooking ranges are more energy-efficient but costly to buy. And electric ovens still have to have resistive heating elements. But there are appliances that will allow you to try these things out and bypass gas or resistive electric cooking and big expensive-to-run whitegoods. See you on the next one!
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