New York Times, Julie Besonen and Andrea Kannapell
Published August 30, 2005
THE shift toward local, seasonal and sustainable agriculture makes sense for the taste buds, the body and the planet. But there's a next step: making home kitchens just as environmentally sound as those pastoral organic farms.
Keeping a green kitchen circa 2005 doesn't mean renouncing cocktails for organic wine and Cheetos for soy crackers, or stashing worms under your sink. The green kitchen lies at the intersection of good cooking and common sense, and coexists with - nurtures, even - individualistic quirks that make your kitchen yours alone.
"Once you make the leap into understanding it's better to shop organically and locally, it's a natural step to think about how you store and prepare the food," said Mindy Pennybacker, the editor of The Green Guide, an online newsletter devoted to environmentally friendly options for the home (thegreenguide.com).
We two East Villagers, possessed of wee kitchens and budget-conscious minds, have been gradually turning green over the last 10 years, focusing on everything from better produce shopping to safer household cleaning. Our guiding principles, including the ones here that focus on food, play no favorites. They work just as well in old-world Tuscan kitchens and stainless steel models of ultra-modernity as in our cramped kitchenettes.
"It's a matter of pleasure," said Annie Berthold-Bond, known as the Green Heloise for books like "The Green Kitchen Handbook" and "Better Basics for the Home." "Your enjoyment of life is exponentially improved when the food you eat is wonderful and you don't have a headache from cleaning with chemicals. In the end, it's a much richer, better living experience."
Clutter Counseling
A cluttered fridge is like a cluttered closet - so much crammed in there that it's hard to find anything, and by the time you do it's out of date. So before buying anything new, check the inventory. On a meal-by-meal basis, do a quick scan of leftovers, spices and shelf-stable staples. Recipe Web sites can thread disparate bits together. The other day, our own forage through fridge and pantry turned up leftover pork roast, escarole, Great Northern beans, garlic, onions, chicken stock and Parmigiano-Reggiano. A quick search at epicurious.com magically yielded a recipe for a stew that turned out to be just delicious.
Wise Buys
According to the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit environmental research and advocacy organization financed by foundations including the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Joyce Foundation, washing fruit and vegetables reduces pesticide residue but does not eliminate it. Peeling works better, but then valuable nutrients in the skin are lost. Lab tests conducted by the organization's team of scientists and engineers have determined some unsettling results, such as nine different pesticides on a single sample. The top 12 fruits and vegetables most heavily sprayed with pesticides are peaches, strawberries, apples, nectarines, pears, cherries, red raspberries, imported grapes, bell peppers, celery, potatoes and spinach. Our feeling is that these are the most important to buy organic. Ranking lower in contaminants, and thus less crucial to buy organic, are asparagus, avocados, bananas, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet corn, kiwis, mangos, onions, papaya, pineapples and sweet peas.
Cut down on packaging waste by buying in bulk at health food stores. Costco doesn't work for us because we don't have cars, nor room for a box of cereal as big as a human torso. Bring your favorite display bottles and mason jars into your local health food store, have the cashier weigh and mark them, then turn on the spigots for high-quality olive and canola oil priced by the ounce. The cashier will deduct the weight of the container before totaling the bill.
Starve the Garbage
We horrified a health food cashier once by asking her to twist off and discard carrot tops. "Don't you know how good these are in soup?" she said, accusatory and aghast.
In an August 2002 New Yorker profile we've never forgotten, the chef-writer Bill Buford, working in a Mario Batali kitchen as an apprentice, tossed out celery leaves. Molto Mario melted down.
"Remember our rule: we make money by buying food, fixing it up, and getting other people to pay for it," he said, retrieving handfuls of greens from the garbage. "We do not make money by buying food and then throwing it away."
Find your inner Mario. After you trim the greens off celery, carrots and beets (you want them off anyway because they drain the moisture from the root), freeze them. Over time, add the trimmings of other stock vegetables - including onion and garlic skins and tomato. Parmesan rinds add a wonderful flavor.
The last time we made roast chicken for a dinner party, we quickly cleaned the bird after the main course and tossed it in a stockpot, added water and the contents of a couple of freezer bags of trimmings, some salt and a bay leaf. During dessert, a fresh batch of broth made itself. It was ready for the freezer by the time the dishes were done.
Pouring out perfectly good, undrunk wine after a party used to kill us. We learned from a Nigella Lawson show that it can be frozen in Ziploc bags and thawed for stews, ragus and deglazing.
A household of one or two can also freeze sliced bread, which preserves the quality better than refrigerating it. Pull out a few slices at a time for toast; no thawing necessary. A leftover baguette can be split and cut into 4-inch to 6-inch lengths and frozen, to be reheated quickly in the oven for a French breakfast with butter and jam. Stale bread, whirred in the food processor, makes perfect, freezable breadcrumbs.
Now for the Worms
According to the New York City Compost Project, the average New York City household discards - daily - roughly two pounds of naturally recyclable waste, the raw material for black gold otherwise known as compost, which could be spread around gardens and parks or near street trees.
San Francisco and Toronto have successfully underwritten curbside collections of kitchen scraps, but so far New Yorkers must act on their own initiative. Their numbers are increasing. Christine Datz-Romero, director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center, said that 10 years ago her organization took in just 300 to 400 pounds per week; today it's more than a ton.
Look around for a convenient compost drop-off. New Yorkers drop off approximately 1,500 pounds of compost materials at the Union Square Greenmarket every week. Some health food stores and community gardens also collect.
Be scrupulous - you can't compost everything. Ms. Datz-Romero said workers find the occasional unacceptable steak or chicken bone. "What we find a lot of is spoons, forks and knives," she noted, attributing it to overzealous plate scraping.
Besides flatware, do not try to compost meat and fish scraps, any dairy products, fats, oils, grease, pet feces or cat litter, diseased plants or pesticide-treated lawn materials, sand, plastics, metal or glass.
Double-check with your own drop-off spot, but in general, you may compost fruits and vegetables, flowers and dead plants, coffee grounds, egg shells and nut shells as well as stale bread, flour, cereal, spices and beans, spoiled juice, food-soiled paper towels, napkins and cardboard, coffee filters and tea bags (staple removed), shredded paper and cornstarch packing peanuts.
Apartment dwellers need not fear the stigma of stinky scraps. Amass them in a bag or container - airtight, of course - in the fridge or freezer. Using the freezer is particularly energy-efficient because a full one helps keep itself cold.
Got a Cup of Sugar?
It started with the proverbial cream pitcher. One morning in the last millennium, Andrea gazed dourly from her mug of steaming coffee to her milkless refrigerator, and decided that this time she was going to look within her building instead of going out or going without. Empty pitcher in hand, she ventured into the hallway. The German guy across the hall said, "Sorry, I don't do milk." But Julie down the hall provided. A few weeks later, she borrowed the time-honored cup of sugar.
Now, when one of us goes out of town, the other inherits her perishables and takes on the (light) burden of watering plants and herbs. Buttermilk, sold in containers far larger than any one recipe ever seems to call for, enlivens two kitchens. Need one egg and don't want to buy 12? Check. Two leaves of sage? Check. Got anything for my compost run? Sure. We've even gone so far as to partially blend dinner parties, with one of us making the main course and the other the supporting dishes, merging our guests for convivial cocktails in one of our tiny apartments and then splitting back into two for more comfortable dinner seating.
Both longtime New Yorkers and both from small towns in the South, we've gone back to our roots in a way, achieving clean country living in the big city.
This story also appeared in the Florida Sun-Sentinel
