Building a cooking practice that prioritizes zero waste and sustainability is part of a meaningful shift in how we relate to food, resources, and the environment. From the ingredients we choose to how we store, prepare, and dispose of what’s left behind, every step in the kitchen offers an opportunity to reduce our impact.
Our lives on Earth begin and end with our soil. It’s the foundation for us all that lies beneath each of our feet and is the genesis of everything we grow to eat. We hear a lot now about carbon, but what does it really mean tangibly in your daily life? The journey of carbon emissions through food flows as follows, and some good news is that you can do something to impact each stage.
Sustainability Starts at the Source
Sourcing is where my cooking journey always begins. Fittingly, this is where we can have the single largest impact on the climate crisis—to recarbonize our soil. It’s where we are losing the most, and for that reason have the broadest opportunity to reinvigorate.
More than half of the carbon emissions of food products are derived from agriculture.
Therefore, sustainability quite literally starts at the source, with the farms that grow our food. It’s also the part of the food chain that we as consumers and cooks can have the most choice about.
What this means in practice
Shop locally and from mindful farmers as directly as possible and be discerning about the products and brands you purchase at your grocery stores. I’ll be sharing every bit of knowledge I have, from regenerative farms across the country to specific regenerative brands that you can accessibly swap into your pantry.
Regeneration for the Next Generation
Food accounts for almost one-quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions globally. The only system that can capture carbon in time to address the looming climate crisis is food and agriculture. And it’s also the only system that we, as everyday consumers and humans, can have a proactive effect on—a cosmic kismet.
We’ve long held to the myth of what the Industrial Revolution promised: that chemically driven monocrop farming is the only way to grow food at scale. That’s what the lobbyists representing “big food” want you to believe as indisputable fact. What is irrefutable now, however, is that these practices have been stripping our invaluable, limited resource of land of its healthy soil and yielding food devoid of nutrition.
By contrast, regenerative agriculture could draw down over half of that carbon into the soil in the coming decades—enough to compensate for all of the world’s transportation-related emissions. Think about that. Regeneration is about rebelling against convention that has not served us.
We now know why it matters, but what is regenerative agriculture? The term “regenerative” is still emerging, much like “organic” was a few decades ago. “Organic” is now in the zeitgeist, signaling a healthier option, regardless of whether the average person could recite the full and proper definition or if they understand the difference between organic and non-GMO. Organic practices are a component of regenerative agriculture, a stepping stone, though not the whole picture. There isn’t a full, succinct, widely agreed-upon definition of “regenerative,” yet.
But there are a few guiding principles that encapsulate regenerative agriculture and that this book seeks to infuse across what it means to me to live regeneratively.
Broadly speaking, regenerative agriculture is a dynamic food ecosystem that seeks to achieve six primary goals:
1. restore soil health
2. prevent erosion (for example, through cover crops)
3. promote biodiversity
4. minimize waste
5. protect water quality and improve soil’s water-holding capacity
6. reduce or eliminate use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides
An abridged version of what this looks like for a farm is as follows.
No-till or reduced tilling techniques are used to minimize land degradation, further assisted by managed grazing. The land should not remain fallow, which means year-round planting of cover crops, double planting, and relay planting, where the next season is seeded while the current one is in harvest.
All these techniques are designed to build climate resilience in the soil as the weather fluctuates. With an eye toward biodiversity, methods like crop rotation, alley cropping, and interseeding can naturally limit pests and nurture beneficial microbes, in turn reducing reliance on chemical pesticides.
The result is more vibrant, nutrient-dense, and chemical-free food that’s rehabilitating our land to support long-term sustainability and viability for farms and those who tend to them. It seems like the most obvious and fruitful winwin that exists. It does require time, capital, patience, and some optimism (“blue-sky thinking,” as I call it), which are all within our reach and grasp.
It’s important to note that the very purpose of regenerative agriculture— to redress the monocrop fallacy of farmland that’s been stripping our land of nutrients, viability, and carbon—means that these practices must be individualized. There are some critics who need certifications and guidelines to endorse the transition to regenerative farming. However, if nature must take the lead, then it follows that different regenerative practices will complement different regions, and the specific conditions of each individual farm will require a different approach. One size can’t and shouldn’t fit all.
Think of yourselves as a sphere of influence that collectively can shift the status quo by making different choices about how you buy, cook, and share food. My aim is to make regenerative living accessible. You can make regenerative food the next frontier, bringing the whole farm into your home on your table.
Wouldn’t that be radical?
Zero Waste for Every Kitchen
Now that we’ve talked about how we grow our food and choose what to source, consider that one-third of the world’s food production is lost or wasted annually, often without much reason. For context, think about the full life cycle of food, from field all the way to shelf and then finally to disposal after it’s purchased or eaten. About 10 percent of that journey’s emissions come from wasted food. That equals the emissions of transit, and it’s a piece of the system that we can affect every day in our kitchens.
Trash is all about perspective.
There are a few small tactical shifts you can make at home in your kitchen and pantry that can support the environment. The first is that I challenge you to part ways with paper towels. Invest in some inexpensive but effective kitchen towels, and I promise you will be surprised by how quickly you can’t imagine how you ever consumed so much paper before.
Next, collect all of the plastic elements in your home and consider swapping them for more sustainable materials. Research shows that we consume about a credit card’s worth of plastic a week. Yes, you read that correctly—weekly. Plastic is cheap because we, through our tax dollars, subsidize that industry to make it cheap. But it’s not inherently cheap, another myth of the Industrial Revolution. And we don’t actually need it.
There are beeswax alternatives to plastic wrap and plenty of options for functional and well-designed metal and glass storage containers. I keep a suite of jars of varying sizes for my preserves projects and to keep our pantry plastic free and well organized. All of my flours are in large glass jars with proper labels and dates for ease of visibility and tidiness.
Invest in some blue masking tape and a Sharpie. Stasher silicone bags are durable and reusable to replace your Ziploc bags, and I store stocks and frozen items (even leftover wine to cook with later on) in large silicone freezer molds to be pre-portioned when I’m ready to use them.
Finally, think about your cleaning products, another form of avoidable household toxins. There are so many effective and botanical brands out there, like Koala Eco, Grove Collaborative, and Blueland, that are safe for your family while getting the job done.
Let’s Get Wasted and Talk Trash
My culinary philosophy is to use every part of the plant. Question what you might otherwise consider trash and ask yourself why.
Understanding why something might be discarded is a first step in accepting ways to avoid throwing it away. Adopt a no-stalk-left-behind mentality and open yourself up to creative ways that scraps can serve some purpose. There are endless possibilities for innovation through upcycling.
Consider a few savvy substitutions, such as using shallots instead of red or yellow onion in most recipes. They’re smaller, which means little to no waste and, let’s be honest, when was the last time you used an entire raw onion in any dish? Plus, I actually think they taste better and sharper.
Or, if a recipe calls for fennel, you might reserve the fennel frond and use as a garnish or as an herb; it tastes delicious with both sweet and savory dishes and looks pretty too. You can add the stalk to a soup for extra flavor or blend it into a sauce. Other dishes might use a whole vegetable as the serving vessel or turn to a mandoline to shave stalks into a dish. Peeling skin off produce is usually an unnecessary and wasteful step. If there’s absolutely no way to incorporate a stem, leaf, or seed into a dish, it goes into stock or the compost.
Composting, the Basics
Compost is a natural fertilizer that improves soil’s physical, chemical, and biological properties, made up of nothing more than broken-down plants and food waste and organic materials.
Why compost? Landfills are the third largest driver of human-directed emissions. Throwing food into landfill releases 20 times the greenhouse gas emissions as composting. Yes, you read that right: 20 times. Plus, when compost is not only collected but actually used, the carbon emissions are negative, as it’s sequestering carbon as the compost feeds our soil.
No matter the size of your space or where you live, I promise you can compost. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin. I hear that composting seems daunting, or gross, or there seems to be no space. There might always be a reason not to do something, but what if you can conjure up even one reason to try it? In our house we have a saying with our kids: Instead of “Why not?” let’s ask “Why do?”
First things first. Get yourself a bin, with a lid—any bin will do.
Put it on your countertop, proudly in the center for you and all to see. You can go simple from your hardware store or bougie with a Bamboozle. This is the very first step in a fresh journey to start collecting your food scraps. Make sure it’s right where you cook so it’s easy to use and visible as you prepare food throughout the week.
What you see, you can start to impact. Beginning first with just measuring what you throw away and could potentially have used will get your wheels turning. This also plays into the inherently competitive human spirit. Once you see the food waste accumulate weekly, you may start to compete with yourself and rise to the task of finding ways to throw out less and less over time.
What gets composted?
Vegetable scraps should be collected separately and stored in your freezer forstock. Other food scraps, eggshells, and egg cartons as well as fibrous berry cartons from the market can be composted. Cardboard and even pizza boxes can be composted. Garden clippings such as grass and leaves as well as coffee grounds can be composted. Fibers, hair, and natural matter collected from the vacuum cleaners can also be composted.
Now finally, let’s talk collection, which varies by location.
A good place to begin is with community gardens and local farms, many of which offer drop-off opportunities. Many farmers’ markets also offer collection points. Some cities do citywide curbside pickup or are testing municipal pilot programs (you can find information on public websites). For a smaller, private option, there are at-home countertop solutions emerging such as Lomi or Mill. If you’re not familiar, Mill is a “white glove” composting option. The Mill odorless trash bin dries your organic waste and grinds it into nutrient-rich grounds that you can ship to be composted.
For those looking to invest and create a truly circular system for your home garden, you can install a larger-scale composting system to feed your own soil. The US Environmental Protection Agency has a robust step-by-step program and process outlined for the public for the full adventure.
This is the final step in the regenerative cycle that we can have a hand in, literally. So, what are you waiting for?
Prioritize sustainable cooking through zero waste methods: From the ingredients we choose to how we dispose of what’s left behind, every step in the kitchen offers an opportunity to reduce our impact.
Birds: they’re beautiful, they sing sweet songs, AND they can help our gardens thrive. Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of birds in gardens.
This salmon cake recipe makes for a simple and flavorful dinner. Delicious, golden-brown patties made with salmon are a tasty alternative to crab cakes.
Explore the vital role beavers play in our ecosystems and how they inspired Teddy Roosevelt’s conservation efforts after a disappointing hunting trip in beaverless badlands. Read the full story and you too will become a “Beaver Believer.”
