Could learning to cook solve everything?

On the weekend I read a short book (or extra long article) by Mark Bittman called Cooking Solves Everything. It was a quick read, but it’s clear and simple message was very persuasive.

Bittman agrees with many of us that our current food system isn’t good for our health or our environment. We’ve all heard the statistics on obesity before, as well as genetically modified crops, over-medicated animals treated cruelly, and excessive use of chemicals for pest and weed control. There’s lots of groups working on trying to fix this situation via regulations, boycotts and trying to convince people to change their diets.

But Bittman thinks there’s another way to replace destructive agribusiness methods with something better for us and the planet. His suggestion is that we need to teach more people to cook. We’re not talking fancy gourmet stuff here, just sandwiches for lunch, and a pasta or stir-fry for dinner. Maybe a nice steak, or a roasted chicken, or some grilled marinated tofu to make a more substantial meal.

He comes up with 10 reasons that learning to cook leads to wide-ranging and lasting improvements. People who know how to cook choose less processed food. They can tell the difference between quality seasonal vegies and the limp stuff that’s been kept in long-term storage. Food tastes better when you cook it yourself, the same way the wonky beanie I knit myself is more valuable to me than the one I bought for five bucks at Woolies. Plus, cooking gives you control over what you’re eating, and independence from the giant corporations who want you to eat whatever gives them the most profit.

Which is all very nice for us as individuals, but the benefits go wider than that. More home cooks means more demand for real food over processed food. It’s a political statement (whether you mean it to be or not) that your time and your money are best spent on doing something healthy for you and your loved ones, and not on corporations with questionable ethics. It creates a more diverse and robust local economy, which helps everyone along.

So do you cook much? I do, at least to the level that Bittman is talking about. I can chuck together some herbs and mushrooms and parmesan and stir it through some pasta. I can roast a chicken and make either mashed veg or a salad to go with it. It’s not fancy, and I won’t win any prizes for presentation, but it tastes good. It feels satisfying to know I can provide for myself and my husband and friends this way. And I have noticed the personal benefits listed above.

If you’re not a confident cook, don’t let that stop you. Once every couple of weeks, look up something from taste.com.au or some other cooking site and give it a whirl. I guarantee that it’s pretty hard to make something completely inedible. And there’s always beans on toast if you do

If you are a regular cook, how do you think we can get more people to try it? So far I’ve thought of a couple of ideas:

• teaching a friend, Jamie Oliver style;
• inviting someone around who doesn’t normally cook for themselves, and making them a meal while they watch and maybe have a glass of wine. Showing is always more convincing than telling, and maybe after a few tries they’ll get involved.

What do you think?

Bittman’s booklet is available online via byliner.com for just under three bucks (US), and you can read an excerpt for free. If you’re interested in food issues, it’s well worth a look.

Review and giveaway: Smart Gardening

Thanks to Exisle Publishing I’ve been given a copy of Marcelle Nankervis’ book Smart Gardening, which is about how to grow your own fruit and vegetables while saving money and helping the environment. The publishers have been generous and given me a 2nd copy to give away to one of my readers – so why not read my review then enter my little competition to win it?

You might recognise Marcelle Nankervis from TV shows like Burke’s Backyard and Better Homes and Gardens. She’s a passionate gardener who believes that permaculture principles are a great way to help people grow produce in their backyard.

The book is in two main sections: the first covers the basics of soil preparation, watering, plant selection, pest control, backyard animals and so on; the second is a month-by-month description of what needs to be done for gardens in each climate. I liked that the monthly tasks included preparation for fire and wet season rains, as well as the standard vegetable information.

The permaculture principles aren’t presented in a lecturing way. They’re just integrated into the other information in a chatty style, with explanations of why these methods work so well for sustainability.

There’s a focus on Australian and New Zealand climates and plants which I really appreciated. Of course you can grow exotic species, but if you understand your growing situation well then you’ll be able to make good decisions about which ones will adapt well and which will struggle to survive.

The book covers the basics really well, without getting bogged down in finicky details. I’m a big believer in the “just do it” principle of gardening, so this suits me fine. I also enjoyed the focus on ornamental plants that will work well with fruits and vegetables – rather than keeping them separate, Nankervis suggests bringing them together to confuse pests and make your garden more attractive. If there were a second edition, I’d love to see an extra little section on how native birds and frogs can add to your garden, and ways to attract them.

Recommended?
Smart Gardening is a great book for gardeners who are ready to branch out from a few herbs in pots, or the standard roses and so on. It gives you good suggestions on how to get started, and follows up with a plan for the maintenance you’ll need. I think it’s also make a great gift for someone who’s wondered about growing their own vegetables but is a little uncertain of how to get going. Nankervis’ conversational style makes it an easy read, and it has large text and room for your own seasonal notes.

Competition
If you’d like to win a copy of Smart Gardening, please leave a comment on this post before Friday, 5pm Western Standard Time (so that’s 8pm Eastern Daylight Savings hours for you east-coasters!). I’ll pick a winner at random and email them to let them know. It doesn’t have to be an essay, just a short sentence or two expressing your enthusiasm for gardening or willingness to give it a go

Review: What’s Mine Is Yours

Thanks to HarperCollins, I was given a copy of “What’s Mine is Yours” by Rachel Botsman and Roo Roberts to review. It’s about collaborative consumption, the new way of sharing products and services that eco-conscious people are really enjoying and taking advantage of lately. You might remember that I linked to Botsman’s TEDxSydney talk on the subject a while ago.

Before there were giant shopping centres and a car in every driveway, people would share their stuff and their expertise with their neighbours and co-workers. Now the internet and our postal systems allow us to reclaim old virtues and share with people all over the whole world. This fascinating book covers the mid-20th century rise of hyper-consumption, and then looks into the ways in which new technology is disrupting this and bringing us back to older patterns of sharing, redistribution and collaboration.

There are interviews with the creators of modern businesses like AirBnB, Couchsurf, ZipCar and Bixi as product service systems, eBay and swap sites for redistributing excess consumer goods, and bartering and skill-share organisations for collaborative lifestyles. The authors look at what these successful businesses have in common: trust systems, a belief in the economic concept of ‘the commons’, a high idling capacity, and an early critical mass of supporters.

All of these services were created by a person or a community with a geniune need, not a marketing guru. All of them have built a group of excited, passionate users who aren’t just being green, they’re fulfilling their need for new-to-them things and a feeling of belonging. They’re valuing the experiences over mere stuff, and using the internet to get off the internet and meet people instead!

I enjoyed reading the creation-stories of businesses I already use, and to hear about new ones that support my ethics of consumption. I hadn’t really considered that it was technology making this return to ‘old-fashioned’ values possible, by helping us dodge the standard marketing practices, but the authors have convinced me that these businesses will thrive in the 21st century. We’ve got to reduce our eco-footprint, and collaborative consumption helps us do that in a fun and satisfying way.

Recommended?
Anyone trying to work out how to earn a living in a sustainable way should read this. It examines the success stories of people forging a new path, to see what worked for them, and the final section explores the ways in which these factors will expand in the future. And anyone who’s interested in how new technology is changing our society for the better will get a kick out of the stories of creative people using the internet to do the right thing by our communities and our planet. It’s an enjoyable read and I’ll be passing it on (via a bookswap site!) to make sure that more people are getting a look at it.

If you’re interested, check out the Collaborative Consumption site for more interviews and videos and resources.

Review: The World Without Us

I’ve been reading The World Without Us, a book by Alan Wiseman which asks the question: what happens to the earth if human beings were to disappear?

He starts small, looking at how long it would take for a house to decompose into it’s parts. It’s much shorter than you might realise! Although if you think about how much time we spend cleaning and maintaining our homes, maybe we get an idea of how much effort it takes to keep them clean and standing.

He then looks at lots of other aspects of the impact we’ve had on this planet. Cities, nature reserves, petrochemicals, the ancient wonders of the world, weapons and art and the Voyager space probes. I was most amazed by the ancient underground cities in Turkey – they’re still there today even though they were begun in 700BC.

This book is fascinating, and while I was reading it my mood switched between inspiration over the amazing resilience of nature, and depression over how determined it seems we are to mess it up permanently. Wiseman finishes the book with some musings on human nature and the challenges we face if we want to still have a home in the future.

You might like to check out the website for the book: it’s got a couple of animations showing photos of locations mentioned in the book and the decay rate of houses.

Recommended?
Fans of science, nature and history documentaries will get a kick out of this book. It ties in nicely with facts you’ll have picked up from tv and the news. It can get a little dry at times, but usually the next section picks up again when Wiseman interviews an expert who lives in the area being considered. Well worth a trip to the library for this one.

Review: Plan B 4.0 – how to save civilization

Plan B 4.0 by Lester Brown is just what I needed to read right now – everyone is talking about how our environment won’t survive if we continue with business as usual, but Brown is one of the few people talking about what we might do instead to create a sustainable future. He wants to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2020, and he’s got a plan…

Brown is a respected, long-term member of the environmental movement, and president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC, USA, which is a research institute. He’s got a plan for how the world can de-carbonise our energy system and transport system, reduce population, feed the world, reduce poverty and restore the Earth’s systems to a healthy state. It’s a tall order, but his plan relies only on existing technology and plans that have been tested on smaller scales around the world – no waiting for a magic pony here!

Plan B 4.0 (it started as just plain “Plan B”, but he updates it regularly to take new information into account) has nothing to do with what is politically possible. It’s about what we have the technology and the skills to do, and what the science says we must do if we want to survive.

• “The Challenges” is a summary of all the environmental problems the world is facing, along with all the social, economic and political impacts these have. Most writers put this kind of warning at the end of the book, and it was nice to get it over with at the beginning for a change, then move on to the solutions…
• “The Response” is a very long list of all the changes we can make to prevent CO2 emissions, fix our cities and our agriculture and our oceans and so many other things. It also features success stories where these technologies and techniques have already worked. I found these really emphasised that we actually have a chance at figuring out this mess, if we are clever enough and act quickly enough.
• “The Great Mobilization” is where Brown addresses how his plan could actually be put into place: what politicians will need to do. There’s also a lengthy notes section at the back, showing where you can find out more about the details he describes.

In case you were wondering, Brown doesn’t see an increase in nuclear power, and favours a carbon tax over cap and trade. I’m not sure I agree with all of his suggestions, but hey, he’s done the research and I haven’t! The middle section is very list-like, so it’s easier to read in short bursts.

Recommended?
Plan B 4.0 makes a great companion book to The Weather Makers (about the science of climate change) and Climate Code Red (about the impacts of climate change). It’s great for anyone looking for a realistic global plan for what could be done to avert this disaster, and fix a few other problems along the way for good measure.

If you’ve been keeping up with all the little plans for alternative technology and sustainable systems around the world, you might not see much new here. But most of us get stuck in our own little concerns, and if you’re in the mood for a broader perspective, Brown is what you need.

If you’re interested but on a tight budget, Brown has put up a free download of Plan B 4.0 on the Earth Policy Institute website. You can download the whole thing or just the bits you’re interested in, which is very generous indeed.