Building a Sustainable Kitchen: A Journey to a Climate-conscious Dinner Table - Brossura

Hansen, Naomi

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1771514736 ISBN 13: 9781771514736

Casa editrice: Touchwood Ed, 2026

Riassunto

Building a Sustainable Kitchen is the thoroughly researched and realistic step-by-step guide every climate-conscious cook needs to make the heart of their home more planet-friendly.

When Canadian food writer Naomi Hansen first started a “sustainability” blog, she was overwhelmed by conflicting advice, shiny advertisements, unrealistic recommendations, and a culture of shame. Building a Sustainable Kitchen is her antidote: a solutions-focused, no-nonsense guide designed to help you cut through disinformation and greenwashing to make your kitchen truly sustainable, one step at a time.

In each chapter, Naomi invites you on her journey to build a planet-friendly kitchen, with help from her husband Paul and their dog Rue. Drawing on wisdom from hundreds of expert interviews, academic studies, books, and more, as well as on the author's own experience as a regular Canadian in her humble kitchen, Building a Sustainable Kitchen demystifies the science behind how what we do in the kitchen every day affects our Earth, and most importantly, shows you what you can do about it.

Each chapter contains a wealth of flexible recommendations for achievable, evidence-based changes that make a real impact for the planet. Chapters on reducing food waste, understanding plant-based, local, seasonal, and organic eating, and gardening teach us about the food on our plates. Chapters on the potential and pitfalls of composting and recycling, learning what it really means to send waste to a landfill, and navigating the nitty gritty of disposable and reusable items help us reduce garbage and grow toward a circular economy. From water use, to cleaning, to choosing appliances, to our beloved coffees and teas, Building a Sustainable Kitchen leaves no stone unturned. This heartfelt, practical guide proves that building a sustainable kitchen is not just possible, but that it can also be joyful and transformative.

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Informazioni sull'autore

Naomi Hansen is the award-winning author of Only in Saskatchewan: Recipes & Stories from the Province's Best-Loved Eateries, her debut cookbook published in 2022. She is a contributor to many publications, including CBC, Chatelaine, and Canadian Living. Building a Sustainable Kitchen is her second book. She lives on Treaty 6 Territory in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with her partner, Paul, and their dog, Rue. Find her online at naomihansen.ca.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

INTRODUCTION

If you’re reading these words, I would venture a guess that you are concerned about what the future holds for both us and this beautiful planet. I am concerned about that too. I’m also going to make a second guess here: At various points in the past, you’ve probably wondered if there was any action you could personally take that would make a dent in climate change. If that’s true, then we also have that in common. I often feel helpless whenever I hear about extreme weather events or read up on climate news. No matter what angle you approach it from, climate change seems like a problem almost too enormous to tackle. Although I want to be informed, I’ve often questioned whether it’s even possible for anyone to inspire meaningful and lasting change in this realm. If it’s not doable, then why bother trying?

But then I go outside. I look up at the towering elms that line the streets in our neighbourhood. Their grand trunks and outstretched arms tell a story of trees that have stood tall for decades. I see wildflowers poking up from our front flower bed, with more shades of pink and purple than you’d think possible for such tiny blooms. The big blue sky extends endlessly above, while the sun shines bright, sharing its warmth. Even in my small corner of the world—on a random day in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan—it’s easy to see that the Earth is astonishing. There’s no denying that nature is exquisite. The tiniest bug or a blade of grass is a wonder in its own right. So despite my feelings of despair, I can’t help but think there must be some way to protect and save it all—the trees, the flowers, the bugs, and beyond. I simply cannot accept that nothing we do in this realm matters, or that our only option is to lament climate change’s inevitability. I won’t take these notions as reasonable excuses. There has to be more to the story.

MY JOURNEY TO BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE KITCHEN

For years now, I have felt a gnawing need to do something—anything—to chip away at the problem that is climate change. Back in 2018, I felt this gnawing more keenly than ever before. That summer, smoke from wildfires near and far seemed unrelenting. I can remember a time when wildfire smoke was essentially non-existent in Saskatoon’s summertime forecast. That now feels like a distant memory. But in the summer of 2018 in par­ticular, when going outside meant being greeted by a persistent smoky haze, I realized I could no longer ignore the reality that climate change was happening. And if climate change was happening, there was only one thing to do. I had to become more engaged.

At the time, living low-waste seemed like the most obvious way to become more engaged in an individual, everyday sense. This solution was plastered everywhere, once you started looking for it—books, blogs, and social media alike. Ready to do my part, I willingly hopped on board. I began to spend my spare time reading about low-waste and minimalist lifestyles. I started a backyard compost. I bought cloth produce bags and used them at the grocery store. At a local sustainability shop, I stocked up on reusable kitchen items: beeswax wrap, stainless steel straws, cloth nap­kins, and more. I switched to a shampoo bar and a bamboo toothbrush and started buying natural deodorant in a refill format. Paul, my then-partner, now-husband, joined me in these changes. We even picked out matching reusable and collapsible silicone coffee cups, vowing to never use a dispos­able coffee cup again.

I began documenting the whole effort on my personal Instagram account for a small audience of family and friends. I called it “the sustainability project.” At first, I thought the videos would just be a fun way to track our progress. Then my family and friends surprised me by showing great interest in the project. People started asking questions, so I started investigating the answers. Was there anywhere in Saskatoon where you could recycle plastic grocery bags? Where could someone drop off a light bulb that had burned out? Could you purchase non-plastic garbage bags anywhere in the city? Did such a thing even exist? These questions and more began to occupy my time, and I became increasingly intense about recycling, composting, and analyzing—okay, overanalyzing—anything we threw away.

Then came the covid-19 pandemic. Almost immediately, everything I had been doing was put on pause. Bringing your own reusable mug or cloth produce bags into a café or grocery store was understandably no longer an option. Although I was initially pained about the overnight halt on most of my sustainability efforts, I have to be honest with you here. As time went on, I stopped caring. I was both defeated and preoccupied by the reality of the pandemic. Paul and I had to cancel our wedding, and he spent long days finishing up his university degree from our kitchen table. We were both at home around the clock, and I was anxious about everything. I constantly refreshed the news, searching for some sort of explanation or resolution that simply did not exist. Sustainability took a serious back seat during this period of my life, and it stayed there for much longer than I care to admit.

I don’t need to explain to you that the pandemic was terrible though. So let’s fast-forward to a couple of years later. With the publication of my first book under my belt, and the pandemic gradually fading into a foggy bad dream, I had time and space to think. I knew that summer wildfires weren’t getting any better. If anything, they seemed to be getting worse. One day, while I was brushing my teeth with my bamboo toothbrush—I never quit buying the bamboo toothbrushes—it dawned on me to examine the link between climate change and reusable, low-waste items. The fact that I was a bit older now (read: wiser) certainly aided in this cross-examination. How did my bamboo toothbrush relate to larger problems like wildfires, if at all? The link between these two things did not appear overly direct, and I craved more information. Was there a tangible connection between low-waste living and climate change? Were some individual actions more hard-hitting than others?

I began reading more broadly on sustainability and climate change. Then, I began writing about it too. I pitched article ideas to various news sources and magazines, because I wanted to research the topics anyway. I was assigned articles on lifestyle topics like reducing food waste, explain­ing compostable plastics, and exploring whether or not beef could be sustainable. As I dived into these topics and more, I discovered that my previous sustainability project had fallen a bit short. While I had been on the right track, I had missed or maybe even ignored important details. In hindsight, I had not properly done my homework before hopping on board. Now that I was reading, researching, and writing more, I discovered a number of facts that surprised me. For starters, being more sustainable wasn’t really about stocking up on reusable stuff, like cloth produce bags or stainless steel straws. Being more sustainable wasn’t about creating a more intense home recycling set-up either. These actions aren’t bad—don’t get me wrong. We will dive into all of this and more in the chapters to come. But these actions merely scratch the surface of both the depth and reach that individual action can have. While these actions are on the right track, the track in question is long and complex.

Meanwhile, I had a second realization: Other people were interested in these topics too. When push comes to shove, many people genuinely care about the trees, the flowers, and even the bugs. Many also view nature as exquisite, something to be saved and protected. And many people understand that we are not separate from nature; instead, our very well-being is directly tied up with that of the environment.

But people are busy with everyday life. They simply do not have time to research the climate impact of individual actions. Without this information, or even a sense of where to find it, they may not know how to start or what to do. As my own knowledge expanded, it occurred to me that sharing what I had learned with others was an important piece of the puzzle. When faced with a problem as big as climate change, there is simply no sense in not sharing solutions. We are truly all in this together, whether we like it or not.

These realizations eventually turned into the idea for Building a Sustainable Kitchen. There’s a large intersection between food, climate change, and what we do in the kitchen. I decided that I wanted to explore that intersection in a way that made it easy for other people to understand. I knew kitchens, and I knew food—and I knew I could figure out the rest.

We’re going to zoom out from food and kitchens for a moment here, just so I can explain a few key concepts. Understanding sustainability and climate change will help form the foundation for the rest of this book. Then we’ll get back to the kitchen, I promise.

UNDERSTANDING SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability is a word that gets thrown around a lot. I sometimes hesitate to use this word in the first place, because it can admittedly seem like a bit of a buzzword. Sustainability can be applied to food, health, fashion, finance, agriculture—you name it, there’s probably a sustainable version. But I think part of the reason sustainability is used so frequently is because it’s an incredibly fitting way to describe whether something is working long-term or not.

There are many different definitions of sustainability out there. For example, in 1987 the United Nations defined the term as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” I like this definition because, while straightforward, it encompasses a lot. Other, more lengthy definitions often focus on the three pillars of sustainability, which are economic, social, and environmental factors, along with how these elements overlap. Environmental sustain­ability is the one factor I’m primarily concerned with in this book, but the environment does not exist in a vacuum. So economic and social factors inevitably appear here and there throughout this book as well.

Environmental sustainability is rooted in the belief that we are both intricately linked to and dependent on nature and other living things. This notion acknowledges that if we want future generations to be able to fulfill their needs, we have to ensure that we don’t exploit the environment or natural resources in the interim. Overall, I think the simplest way to think about environmental sustainability in its ideal form is like this: We can continue to do whatever it is we’re doing now, into the future. In doing so, we won’t cause harm to the environment. That continuity doesn’t mean that environmental sustainability is rigid or static—quite the opposite. Sustainability is inherently adaptable on an ongoing basis to ensure that it consistently delivers on its future promises. At its core, sustainability is proactive and forward thinking. If something is sustainable, then it makes sense both in the here and now, and further down the road.

The problem is that many things about the way our world operates are unsustainable. In other words, we are causing harm to the environment. If we keep this up and don’t change anything, it will serve only to exacerbate climate change.

. . .

WHY FOOD AND KITCHENS?

All right, back to the kitchen. What, exactly, is the intersection between climate change, food, and kitchens? Although burning fossil fuels is the main source of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, it’s not the only one. Many elements of food and kitchens have a part to play, particularly when they’re considered on a collective and cumulative scale. For example, greenhouse gases are generated when food waste rots in landfills, through the production of food itself, or any time something new is manufactured—from a glass bottle to a small appliance.

Many food- and kitchen-related actions also appear on acclaimed lists of climate solutions. Project Drawdown, for example, is a highly regarded non-profit organization that works to map out climate solutions that are effective, efficient, and rooted in science. It has a list of nearly one hundred climate solutions, which revolve around how the world can reduce green­house gas emissions to achieve “drawdown.” Drawdown refers to the point at which intentional human efforts will begin to trigger a decrease in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And guess what? Many of Project Drawdown’s proposed solutions have to do with food and kitchens. Some of these solutions require broader system changes, involving agricul­ture and fisheries, for example. But other solutions have a clear and direct link to individual, everyday action, like composting, curbing food waste, and changing the type of food we’re eating. Therefore, many of Project Drawdown’s solutions overlap with the topics covered in this book. This means that many of the solutions in this book have an impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions—which ultimately reduces your individual or household carbon footprint too.

Another way to frame the intersection between all of these things is to think of the kitchen as a portal. Aside from my home office, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen during the day, whether I’m cooking, eating, putting away groceries, doing the dishes, or dealing with our household waste. This makes the kitchen a sort of window to a number of wider problems and solutions. For example: Household kitchen garbage is linked to landfills. Daily use of plastics is related to plastic pollution. The type of food we buy and eat is connected to the wider impacts associated with how food is produced. When we use appliances that draw on non-renewable sources of energy, this involves fossil fuels. Gardening is related to building climate resilience. The pervasiveness of single-use, disposable food and kitchen items tells us a lot about our throwaway economy. I’ll stop here because I’m sure you get it, but the list could go on and on.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that other areas of your home are any less important than the kitchen. As we move through the chapters, you’ll come across many instances where I’ve noted that a given solution can be applied to the rest of the house. Some solutions can also be applied outside of the home—like in the workplace, for example. There’s plenty of crossover, because it’s not like the kitchen is the only place where food, plastics, and waste appear. But starting with a specific area and then scaling up helps make it less daunting to implement sustainable changes. And given its prominence in our daily lives, I think the kitchen is a good place to start.

—excerpted from Building a Sustainable Kitchen

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Touchwood Ed
• Data di pubblicazione: 2026
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1771514736
• ISBN 13: 9781771514736
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 320
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile