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Zero-Waste Chef
No packaging. Nothing processed. No waste.

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Posted on March 23, 2014by The Zero-Waste Chef
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Instagram post 2198126696321198847_533634447 Could you and your phone use some time apart to improve your relationship? . At my day job, a small publisher, we receive lots of books. This little one, Off: Your Digital Detox for a Better Life, caught my attention early this year. It’s written by Tanya Goodin, founder of @timetologoff. After reading this, I started wearing my analog watch again rather than grabbing my phone to check the time, which inevitably leads me to check all sorts of things. . I also started using my daughter’s mechanical timer for baking and cooking. I’d love to find a secondhand wind-up alarm clock also. One day I’ll stumble upon it at the thrift shop (or the side of the road). . I avoid checking my phone first thing in the morning. Deleting a bunch of apps, including email and news, really helped with that. My day goes MUCH better if I do yoga first thing instead, even if only for a few minutes (Bootsy joins me on the mat every time). . Sometimes, I even leave my phone at home when I go out 😮 Just knowing I can’t check it gives me a sense of calm. When I’m home, I’ll often leave it in another room. . Could you use a digital detox?
Instagram post 2196714354039543766_533634447 Convenience has helped create our current garbage crisis. Beginning in the 1950s and 60s, consumer products companies marketed their wares—disposable dishes, disposable cutlery, disposable plastic wrap and eventually disposable everything—as time-saving lifesavers. As these companies and their products seduced and hooked us, we grew more dependent on so-called disposable materials, and less dependent on basic life skills (cooking, mending, making), creating a vicious cycle. . While adopting new (actually, old) habits can be difficult, some changes are not. Link in profile for 50 easy ways to refuse plastic. . 📸: @raquelapariccio
Instagram post 2195962877150762411_533634447 Feeling crafty this holiday? New blog post: “7 Simple Gifts to Sew for Your Favorite Zero Waster.” Swipe to see all 7: denim bags, makeup remover pads, utensil rolls, bento-style bags, unpaper towels, handkerchiefs and produce bags. Upcycle fabrics like old jeans for this bag or worn sheets or scraps from your fabric pile for the other items. If you don’t know how to sew, any of these make a great gateway sewing project.
Instagram post 2195248748995945888_533634447 When I give talks, one question I hear regularly is “What should we do about medication packaging?” . First of all, if medication packaging poses your biggest waste challenge, then you produce less trash than about 99.9% of the population. Americans throw out, on average, over 4.4 pounds of garbage per day, per person, nearly 1 pound of which consists of food waste. We need the majority of people in this country to merely begin to cut their waste, starting with the low-hanging fruit, like food packaging and food waste. . Second, I’d never tell anyone to stop taking their meds. . Third, I also point out that when I cut the trash in 2011, I started more unpackaged fruits and vegetables than I had been eating before the switch. I also started to ferment all the things. Then one day it dawned on me that I hadn’t had a cold for over two years. I was kind of amazed because I had always caught all the bugs. (*Results may vary!) . I’ll start a batch of fermented kimchi tonight with the Napa cabbage and daikon radish you see here. Fermented foods are filled with probiotics, which the World Health Organization defines as “live microorganisms which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host.” These health benefits include (among others) improved immunity and reduced anxiety. . My 8 or so cups of kimchi will cost about $7. Probiotic pills start at about $40/bottle and don’t taste nearly as good. And according to Stanford microbiologists Justin and Erica Sonnenburg, pioneers into gut research and authors of the book The Good Gut, “Presently, our understanding of the microbiota is not complete enough to predict what specific effects a particular probiotic could have on an individual’s microbiota. For this reason, we feel that fermented foods, which contain a diverse collection of microorganisms, offer the best chance of encountering a microbe that will have a positive effect.” . NOTE BENE! Fermented foods won’t cure cancer or AIDS or erase wrinkles or revert gray hair back to its original color or improve your sex life but the research shows that they do provide health benefits. . Link in profile for the simple kimchi recipe.
Instagram post 2194479717426815456_533634447 Trashy ornaments . After I posted my daughter’s egg carton roses in my stories on Friday, a bunch of you asked for the instructions. So here they are. . For each rose, you need four egg cups and one flat strip from the top of the carton. You’ll roll this strip up for the center of the rose. Cut four slits in each egg cup, then trim the corners to round them so they look like petals. With the first cup, pull in the petals a bit to overlap them, then glue the rolled strip to the bottom of the inside of the egg cup. Glue this to the inside bottom of the second egg cup. Repeat until you have glued and stacked all four cups, arranging the petals as you go. . You could paint these or glue tissue paper onto them before gluing the cups together. MK said she might make a wreath out of a bunch of them. To do that, you could cut a circle out of paperboard (like a cereal box from a recycling bin) cut out the center, then glue the roses on. . MK used homemade glue for these. Combine 1 part flour with 1 part water and whisk until no lumps remain. No more plastic bottles of white glue! . MK also made stars out of toilet paper rolls. Swipe to see one of those.
Instagram post 2192323600332569271_533634447 After sailing for three weeks across the Atlantic back to Europe, @gretathunberg said, "I’m not traveling like this because I want everyone to do so, I’m doing this to send a message that it is impossible to live sustainably today and that needs to change. It needs to become much easier." . Do not feel guilty if you cannot live as sustainably as you'd like to! Remember we are all swimming against the current. Just do your best. Link in profile for my post on Environmental Guilt Syndrome (EGS).
Instagram post 2191562771706217803_533634447 To tree or not to tree. That is the dilemma. . Will you put up a Christmas tree this year? If so, will you choose real, potted, rented, artificial, secondhand or upcycled? 🌲🎄🌳🌴🌵 . One of you sent me the following DM on the weekend: “I’m planning to get a Christmas tree and was wondering your thoughts on what is better for the planet. I’ve read conflicting stories. I’ve tried to buy replantable ones (they all died ☹️) and have tried the Norfolk pines (they don’t love dry New England). I was thinking many of your followers might be interested in knowing the same! Thank you 💛” . So I took to Instagram stories and asked you all what kind of tree, if any, you would choose. You had a lot to say. Swipe for handful of the responses.
Instagram post 2190124472412200934_533634447 Ditch the produce wash and use baking soda and water to remove some pesticide residues. . I buy organic produce at the farmers’ market from small local producers who: grow a variety of crops which they rotate, use beneficial plants and insects to keep pests at bay, build good soil and so on. My daughter MK, a broke student, cannot afford to eat food grown this way. She usually opts for less expensive, industrially farmed fruit and vegetables she buys at the discount grocery store—the non-organic produce grown in monocultures and sprayed with synthetic pesticides. . So she uses a simple trick that removes some of the pesticides from the surface of her produce: . In a bowl, mix together about one tablespoon of baking soda with six cups of water. Add the produce. Wait about 15 minutes. Drain. Rinse. . A 2017 study out of University of Massachusetts, Amherst, showed that a solution of baking soda and water removed two types of pesticides from the surface of apples more effectively than did plain water or a solution of bleach and water. (Study: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jafc.7b03118) . The researchers treated organic Gala apples with two common pesticides, the fungicide thiabendazole, and phosmet, which kills various pests, after which they soaked the apples in the three different solutions and finally, tested the apples for residues. They found that the baking soda solution “took 12 and 15 min to completely remove thiabendazole or phosmet surface residues, respectively, following a 24 [hour] exposure to these pesticides.” . Although the study looked at apples only, one of the researchers, Dr. He, said the baking soda solution is a “general method” that can be used on other kinds of fruit and vegetables because it helps to break up pesticide molecules, which can then be washed away. . More info on my blog. Link in profile.
Instagram post 2188708444092385571_533634447 Do you have leftover bread from your big meal? Don’t view it as wasted food but rather, as breadcrumbs waiting to be set free. . My daughter made these bread crumbs by slicing up some bread and allowing it to dry out for a few days before she needed it. (For faster breadcrumbs, toast the bread in the oven at 300°F for a few minutes). She then whirred the dried slices up in the food processor and added the breadcrumbs to the nutloaf she made for Thanksgiving. . Other ways to use breadcrumbs: bind vegetable pancakes, toast and sprinkle on salads (they absorb the dressing...yum yum), bread fried food, stir into soups and stews to thicken, sprinkle on macaroni and cheese and so on. . We saved several scraps from our Thanksgiving dinner: vegetable bits from prepping all the things, which became broth for other dishes in our feast; potato peels left over from the mashed potatoes to fry up today (maybe at breakfast) and apple peels and cores left over from the apple pie, which will become vinegar. If you consume the peels, scraps and cores of produce, you may want to stick to organic as skins contain more pesticide residues. . The amount of broth and vinegar alone produced by these scraps would cost about $12 to $15, plus I’d have to trudge to the store and then deal with disposing the packaging. Oh and these free homemade versions contain unadulterated ingredients and taste delicious. . Link in profile for 15 creative ways to use up food scraps.
Instagram post 2187976745972901148_533634447 It’s not a bargain if you don’t need it.

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