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Zero-Waste Chef

TorontoStar

Posted on July 27, 2021July 27, 2021by Paulina Cioce
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It's Day 24! Today's action: buy less stuff. Each It's Day 24! Today's action: buy less stuff. Each year, Earth Overshoot Day marks the date by which humanity has consumed all the resources that the planet can regenerate in one year. In 2021, Earth Overshoot Day fell on July 29. That left us nothing to live on from August to December, which means we borrowed against the future. This year, we’ll borrow again. We’re in the red. Our account is overdue. The bill collectors won’t stop calling. You get the picture. One radical idea: repair our stuff. We can do this ourselves, farm it out to a repair shop if were are lucky enough to have one in town or find a repair cafe. If your city doesn’t have a repair café and you’d like to start one, read Repair Revolution: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture, written by John Wackman, founder of the first repair cafe in New York, and Elizabeth Knight, a community sustainability activist and organizer. This well-researched, wise and inspiring book outlines the history of the repair movement and provides readers with the practical nuts and bolts for launching and operating successful repair cafés in their own communities. Link in profile @zerowastechef for today's newsletter.
It's Day 23 of 30 Days of Climate Action! Today i It's Day 23 of 30 Days of Climate Action! Today is all about clean cookstoves. Did you know that of Drawdown’s list of top 100 solutions to climate change, improving clean cookstoves is in the top 10? They also save lives. Nearly one in three people on the planet cooks over open fires or outdated stoves, fueled by polluting wood principally but also charcoal, animal dung and agricultural waste. Because these fires and stoves burn inside people’s homes, families breathe in black carbon, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and methane, which leads to an estimated 4 million deaths per year. These cooking practices exacerbate climate change in two ways—through deforestation driven by harvesting wood for fuel and by burning the harvested wood and generating emissions. Drawdown estimates these emissions account for from 2 to 5 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Link in bio @zerowastechef for the full story plus a cook-along fundraiser! This little solar cooker is one of many I checked out at a solar cooking festival hosted by @solarcookersinternational several years ago in Sacramento.
I've sprinkled some book recommendations into my J I've sprinkled some book recommendations into my January challenge, 30 Days of Climate Action. I loved @markbittman’s latest book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal. Food plays a major role in climate change—both as a problem and a solution. Our industrial agricultural system basically converts fossil fuels into calories: “With the machinery and chemical industries both highly dependent on fossil fuel, and with human labor increasingly displaced, the heartland became a producer of what might as well be called ‘petrofoods.’ As Wendell Berry wrote in 1977, ‘That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as on the soil—that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat—may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.’” And of course, the problems don't end there. The final section of the book offers solutions for fixing our broken system and examples of food policy and farming initiatives around the world that work. Bittman holds up 400-acre @full_belly_farm in Northern California as a model "for the farm of the future.” (I’ve been on a farm tour/farm dinner at Full Belly and can second that!) Regenerative Full Belly Farm respects the soil, the workers and the animals. What are you reading? Link in profile to sign up for the 30-day challenge (and read today’s action). Every day you’ll receive one in your inbox. There is still time to start!
Can we please have this everywhere? From @ecowatc Can we please have this everywhere? From @ecowatch: In Maui, restaurants "purchase stainless steel HuiZero containers, which are exchangeable at all other participating restaurants. When customers order food to go, they pay a $10 deposit to receive their food in a reusable container. The next time they order from a participating restaurant, they can bring that tin back to receive either $10 cash or $10 credit towards their food, depending on the restaurant." Customers can drop off their tins dirty. Restaurants wash them. Brilliant! Check out the list of participating businesses at @huizerohawaii.
Thank you for the story this week @ebtimes. "Reso Thank you for the story this week @ebtimes. "Resolved to reduce waste, save money and eat more deliciously? You need a local role model. Someone who makes it look easy, and won’t pile on the eco-guilt even if you forget to save your apple peels every now and then." The story includes a couple of recipe excerpts, Eat All Your Vegetable Pancakes and Sparkling Tepache, from my cookbook.
Happy 2022! So far, so good... Today is Day 1 of Happy 2022! So far, so good... Today is Day 1 of my new year's challenge, 30 Days of Climate Action. Today's action is …🥁 🥁 🥁... have a conversation with someone about the changing climate. Climate scientist @katharinehayhoe, author of the excellent new book, Saving Us, A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, says the number one thing anyone can do about the climate change is to talk about it. But how you talk about it is crucial. Hayhoe says to start with something you both have in common and care about and how climate change affects it. (e.g., I'm Canadian and a warming climate threatens maple syrup production). You can read the full action in my newsletter (link @zerowastechef). And please read this book! If you had some climate conversations over the holidays that didn't go over too well, this book will prepare you for the next ones. It is also filled with hope. Hayhoe lays out dozens upon dozens of examples of climate solutions that people around the world are already implementing.
Worrying about the changing climate can make you w Worrying about the changing climate can make you want to curl up into fetal position and give up all hope. But there are reasons for optimism. (Someone tell Bootsy here.) We already have the solutions to address the climate crisis and they are being implemented. Now we need to ramp things up. Tomorrow, January 1st, I’ll launch 30 Days of Climate Action, a subset of my regular newsletter that will run for the month. When you sign up for the challenge, you’ll receive a daily email outlining one way you can act on climate. Not every single person will take every single action in the challenge but I’ve included what I think are doable strategies that can make the biggest impact. So you won’t receive suggestions like “Day 12: Sell your car today” or “Day 18: Move to the woods” or “Day 22: Become a hermit.” (Although some of you may find those actions appealing.) I often hear questions like, “How do I go beyond zero waste?” or “I’m really worried about climate change but what can I do?” or “How can one person make a difference?” I’ve addressed these kinds of questions in the challenge. Some actions push for system change. Some actions focus on individual change. We need both. We need it all. I hope you’ll join in! Link in profile to register. I'd also like to thank you all for following me along on here. As we say goodbye to another difficult year, I want to wish you all a safe and joyful 2022.
Beginning January 1st—only a few days away 😯—I'm launching a subset of my newsletter: 30 Days of Climate Action. The format differs a bit from previous January challenges I've done that lay out the entire month's worth of actions on my site all at once. For this 30-day plan, every day, you'll receive a new task in your inbox to help keep you motivated (and hopefully in suspense!). I regularly get DMs asking, "What can we do on a bigger scale?" I've included lots of answers to this question in the 30 actions. Any guesses what the first action is? Registration link in bio @zerowastechef.
This isn't 100 percent zero waste but it's 100 per This isn't 100 percent zero waste but it's 100 percent cute! My daughter Charlotte lives in Montreal with her aunt, uncle and 4-year-old, dump truck-obsessed cousin so she made him this gingerbread dump truck this weekend. Charlotte followed a gingerbread recipe from @sallysbakeblog and based the design on a dump truck soft toy she sewed for her cousin last Christmas. The little presents on top do have some wrapping on them but you can skip those. Even with them, baking and assembling a homemade gingerbread house (or dump truck) cuts down on the packaging waste of store-bought, prefab gingerbread house kits plus you can design whatever type of structure you'd like. Make a simple cottage or a yurt or a mansion or a truck or, or, or... You can also eat the house! Yes, you can eat homemade gingerbread houses (and also store-bought if they contain edible ingredients and pieces, which most do). The houses taste better fresh, so eat yours within a week or so (depending on the recipe you followed). Pick off candies when no one is looking, stealthily break off pieces of the roof here and there, dip them into a cup of tea, or crush the gingerbread into crumbs and use them to later make a cookie crumb pie crust. What would be your ideal gingerbread house (or structure)?
Tomorrow we will hand out these simple 315 upcycle Tomorrow we will hand out these simple 315 upcycled cloth produce bags at the Sunnyvale farmers' market, beginning around 10am. Some are plain and some are patterned—each one is unique. Thank you to everyone who has donated their unwanted fabric and sheets. And thank you Sunnyvale Environmental Services Department for letting us squat in your booth! We give these away to reduce plastic at the market and to raise awareness about plastic pollution. During the holidays, they double as gift bags! They look cute and will keep wrapping paper out of landfill. But wait, there’s more! Sew some of these yourself over Zoom next week. I'm teaching an online produce bag-making class on Thursday, December 16th at 4pm PST. We will sew these VERY simple bags in the workshop. I still have some spots left. Bring your fabric, machine and a cup of hot chocolate or eggnog 🙂 The registration link is in my profile. I look forward to seeing some of you in person tomorrow!
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