Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen—the New Green Basics Way

By Kate Heyhoe
Da Capo Lifelong Books, $17.95, 272 pages

You have a “cookprint.” Whether cooking ramen on a hotplate, or whipping up entrées in a catering ensemble, your kitchen generates a cooking carbon footprint. A quiz in the first chapter of this book bestows the reader with useful kitchen energy knowledge as well as dispelling the more common myths. After a brief lesson on heat properties, Heyhoe launches into a series of practical tips on which appliances transfer the most heat into the food and spelling out money-saving principles like ‘passive’ cooking.

Sixty-percent of the book is implement-able by the average household towards reducing energy consumption and saving money. A poignant example is using an electric kettle to boil water and pouring them over cut vegetables to gently blanch them, in lieu of boiling over a stove for prolonged periods. However, rest of the Heyhoe’s advice is either too drastic a change for most families, like going completely ‘meatless’, or it is too expensive… as in replacing the kitchen appliances. There are a few facts cited that may warrant checking, such as the insinuation that cows pollute the earth more than all motorized vehicles worldwide; her recipe for roast beef (to name but one) seems to ignore this dire claim. On the whole, this is a useful book, if taken with a grain of salt.

Reviewed by Meredith Greene