Tips for More Energy Efficient Cooking

We hear more and more about how much energy is required to produce meat, particularly beef. Shifting to more poultry and vegetables is one effective way to reduce one's carbon footprint. But there are also various ways to reduce energy use in the kitchen:

Dr. Seuss might appreciate this green approach to hard boiling eggs.

1. Put raw eggs in just enough water to cover them. Cover the pot.
2. Heat to a boil.
3. Turn off the heat. Leave cover on pot.
4. Allow to sit, with no additional heat, for fifteen minutes.

How to boil "green" water (This is particularly handy in the summer, when the last thing you want to do is heat up the kitchen unnecessarily):

1. Heat only as much water as you need. If it's for tea, then use the teacup to measure the water as you put it in the teapot. Add a little extra in case some boils away as steam.
   
2. If heating water in a pot, for instance for soup, keep a lid on the pot while heating the water. This reduces heating time by preventing heat from escaping as steam while the water is being heated.
3. Set a loud timer in case you wander too far from the kitchen while the water is heating.

Use the microwave instead of the stove for cooking:

1. Sweet potatoes in the skin--easier, and no doubt much less loss of nutrients, than peeling, chopping and boiling in water.
   
2. Sweet corn (one and a half minutes per cob). I learned about this when I ran into a friend in the vegetable section at the grocery. Websites describe elaborate preparation of the corn prior to putting it in the microwave, but I find it comes out great when simply put in with husks left on. The silk comes off very easily after cooking.
   
3. Though it be a violation of tradition, for a quick cup of "green" tea, put a teabag in a cup of unheated water and heat to something approximating boiling in the microwave. Staples, which are becoming rarer on teabags, don't seem to create a problem.
   

Imagination and Water Use

One thing that will help you green your domestic habits is imagination. For instance, many people are in the habit of letting a lot of water flow from faucet to drain unused--while shaving, washing hands, dishwashing, or before taking a shower. This sort of habit might become less common if people held in their minds an image of all the rigamarole involved in 1) getting clean water into that faucet, and 2) dealing with the water after it heads down the drain.

Follow the water. Most of Princeton's drinking water is drawn from the Raritan River, just downstream of Somerville, NJ. It's run through a water purification plant, then pumped 20 miles over to Princeton. Water is pretty heavy (8 lbs/gallon), so one has to assume that it takes a lot of energy to push it hither and yon. If it slips unused from your faucet down into the drain, it quickly loses any pristine qualities as it mixes with all the rest of Princeton's sewage headed for the wastewater treatment plant on River Road on the east side of town. There, large amounts of fossil fuel energy are used to clean the sewage sufficiently so that it can be discharged into the Millstone River. Diluted in the river, it heads northward to the Raritan River, where a portion of the river water is pulled out, purified and sent once again towards our faucets.

After all that travel, cleansing and purification, how incongruous it is that our drinking water emerges from the faucet, flashes for only a split second in the light, then is immediately transformed into a civic burden as it heads once again to the sewage treatment plant, unused.

If we had to carry our water 20 miles to our homes in buckets, we'd make use of every drop. But the way the system is set up, our water flows in an endless stream from our faucets, with nothing but our imaginations to help us understand the elaborate investment of work and fossil fuel energy that goes into getting it to our homes and dealing with whatever heads down the drain.