To build a sustainability plan for your kitchen, the chef must have a sustainable mindset, meaning specific goals are sought. What does each sustainable plate look like? Well, that’s up to the chef. Remember, the menu can always change when new information or other details shift or are included on the plate.
Becoming sustainable is a journey. If you’re an experienced cook, you remember when you began—it didn’t all start with making those macarons, which take a special touch to make come out right.
Start with an easy recipe first such as choosing one product to focus on. Maybe you like to bake a lot and use chocolate quite often. There are many things to think about with sustainable chocolate, including fair trade practices and climate change. For this part of your future dish, you would be adding two sustainable ingredients: climate change mitigation and improving fair wages. These are two good ingredients (sustainability indicators) to add to the pot.
What are the benefits of becoming sustainable in the kitchen?
- The answer to this question, you would need to consider your own choices when you’re standing at the pot. The next few subpoints were developed as starting points:
- For cocoa (chocolate), chefs can seek chocolate from farms that have shade-grown cocoa. This shade-grown cocoa uses a cover crop (cover trees that help to sequester carbon, climate change mitigation). Coffee beans that are shade grown also assist in climate change mitigation in a similar fashion as cocoa.
- Choosing your meats wisely can also help reduce carbon and methane emissions.
What is the best way to get started being sustainable in the kitchen?
The first thing to do is to look around at topics that really brought you to ask this question in the first place. This will inspire you as a future sustainable chef to solve a problem that you were passionate about.
The second stage is to look at your topic and consider the sustainability indicators you’re looking to improve. If we take shade-grown cocoa (chocolate), then we can consider climate change mitigation and increasing fair wages (just to start).
Third, you could use these indicators to look further into your pantry and fridge. Then ask yourself, or research, if there are ways to reduce these indicators for those items. Chefs may find alternative items as well that function better in the manner under question.
Fourth, put things into practice.
Then last, make sure to continuously study the latest trends in sustainability. Things continuously change over time.