What happens when food, dogma, a green chef, and a Ph.D. collide? Why a scientifically based feel good cookbook, that’s what.
How this cookbook review ended up on the website Energy Bulletin I have no idea. But the description is entertaining. I used to only worry about eating something that was too fattening, now I worry if that Snickers Bar will be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and cause us to pass a tipping point (and I’m not talking bathroom scales). So much to worry about, so little time.
Hmmm, here’s the premise:
“How do our food choices affect global warming? That’s what this website and project, named after the original title of the book, The Global Warming Diet, Cool Recipes for a Hot Planet, set out to discover.”
I wonder if Al Gore has tried this? Is there anything that is safe from being tied to global warming these days?
Cool Cuisine: Taking the Bite Out of Global Warming
Is global warming really the ‘best thing that has happened to the culinary world in a long time’ as chef Laura Stec suggests? The discovery that our food choices can reduce global warming as effectively as buying a new fuel-efficient vehicle inspires new strategies towards creating a more sustainable world. What we eat does have an impact on our planet and you can eat better tasting, higher-vibe food and find solutions for the global warming diet through Cool Cuisine: Taking the Bite Out of Global Warming by Laura Stec with Eugene Cordero, PhD (Gibbs Smith, Publisher).
Cool Cuisine is a smorgasbord of scientific fact and culinary art where the reader learns new ways to look at global warming. It presents the full cycle on how our agrochemical food system affects global warming and how global warming affects the food system. With in-depth research and interviews from over 30 scientists, farmers, ranchers and food professionals, it inspires personal life changes by offering easy recipes, ideas for your next “book and cook” club, and simple tips on how to prepare a global-cooling cuisine. The book is organized into three sections: the first gives background to global warming- food connections, the second highlights solutions, and the third is a “culinary how-to,” teaching simple techniques and tips for cooking a Cool Cuisine.
Laura Stec
Laura Stec is a San Francisco Bay Area chef and environmental advocate who enjoys teaching about the artistry, health and energetics of cooking. She trained at the Culinary Institute of America, the School of Natural Cookery and the Vega Macrobiotic Study Center before starting her own personal chef/catering business – Laura Stec – Innovative Cuisine, and joining Kaiser Permanente Medical Group as their Culinary Health Educator. Since founding one of the first U.S. food and environment organizations in 1989, Stec has been feeding us with the idea that one the most positive effects we can have on the environment begins on our dinner plate, a message she continues to promote while on staff 12 years at Acterra, an environmental organization based in Palo Alto, CA. With over 25 years experience in the food industry, Stec now partners with EcoSpeakers.com to lecture and consult with corporations and institutions on ways to bring regionally responsible cuisine into their food systems.
Read more about Laura at http://laurastec.com/aboutlaura.html
Eugene Cordero, Ph.D
Dr. Eugene Cordero is an Associate Professor in the Department of Meteorology at San José State University (SJSU) in California. His research interests are focused on understanding the processes responsible for long-term changes in climate through the use of observations and atmospheric models. At present, this work is supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA. Dr. Cordero is a coauthor on the WMO/UNEP 2006 Ozone Assessment report and is currently participating in projects related to evaluating the models used for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. In the Department of Meteorology, Dr. Cordero teaches various courses in climate change and is involved in projects working to improve methods of education that engage and ultimately stimulate social change.
Read more about Eugene at http://www.met.sjsu.edu/~cordero
(Hat tip and a carbon free lunch to David Walton)
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What about cooking times, a nice steak is almost ready to enjoy, compare that to beans!
“There are dog cookbook, cat cookbook”
http://www.ooze.com/ooze13/cats.html
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oPRNzuf7Ttc
Taking it literally
HA Reynolds
What about: The Inconvenient Minimum”?
Another bible for the fanatics!
I read an interesting article in New Scientist (10 Oct issue) today at lunchtime.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg20026774.400-our-psychology-helps-politicians-bend-the-truth.html
This was not related to climate change, but I read it with AGW in mind and couldn’t help thinking that the same mental processes mean that it is harder to turn the tide of entrenched public thinking.
Well this article certainly has inspired me. All this talk of food has made me very hungry. I think I’ll go out for a steak tonight.
Now it’s voluntary, packaged up real nicely in a cookbook. Fun stuff! How long will it be before they make it mandatory, and ban Earth-unfriendly foods from the grocery stores. You may think that is a jest, but from the AGW point of view, there is nothing to extreme to save us from the impending doom of our own making. Nothing.
What to eat
What to drive
What to believe
What to say
We all know watts up with that.
Well any species; intelligent or not, that converts food production resources and energy to something else that we are just going to burn up, doesn’t even deserve to survive.
so I think we should make food the way Mother Nature makes food; out out of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water; in that order.
Haven’t you heard an apple tree scream, when you rip one of her children from her grasp, and kill it with a single toxic bite.
The first recipe in the green cookbook should be how to hold your breath, for three score years and ten.
Second recipe for greenies should be a home recipe for Hara Kiri !
Soylent Green is people!!!!!
Soylent Green is people!!!!!
Re: “Hat tip and a carbon free lunch to …”
I prefer my endangered Patagonian toothfish blackened, so carbon free is out.
Birth is the leading cause of death.
Pickup trucks, barbecues, rodeos and rattlesnake roundups. A greenie ain’t got no hope at all here in Texas.
If you live here in Texas you just might wanna thank your lucky stars.
Fishing is an activity that is cooling. Especially in Wallowa County. This fall I got quite cool crossing the river so that I could fish the other side. In fact my hoohah got VERY cool cuz I’m short. But is was a squeal well worth the effort. I just made a killer fish stew with beer as the soup base. All it needs is crusty hot bread from the oven and more BEER!
It took 5 beers to make it. Three in the stew and 2 in the tummy. Which explains the slurred “isss” for “it”.
Or was that 2 beers in the stew and 3….
Umbongo (08:18:26) writes: “is there anything that is safe from being tied to global warming these days?”
“Science?”
Brilliant (albeit sad), Umbo!
Soylent Green is people!!!!!
Soylent Green is people!!!!!
I wish you wouldn’t do that. 😉
So, then you’re probably old enough to recall an episode of the Twilight Zone, so, for your perusal, I invite you to consider the following scenario…
Friendly alien visitors taking shiploads of earthlings off to their own world for “tours”, a copy of an alien book is discovered, its title soon decoded, is “To Serve Man”; as the spaceship doors close on our hero, now boarding for the last shipment, his friend and lover yells at him from beyond the railing: “Don’t get aboard. We translated the rest – it’s a cookbook!”
… O.k. forget the aliens with heads the size of shepherd’s loaves. The CONCEPT (Damon Knight’s classic SF story) was good.
With this sense of good taste firmly in mind, I would like to nominate the title of this thread for “BEST TITLE OF ANY THREAD”
It fully covers whatever is in store for the economy, climate and MANKINE. May we be so well served.
REPLY: Bill I remember that TZ episode well, one of the best. And thanks for recognizing the title. It was my third choice. – Anthony
I nominate the name “Chicken Little Warm” for the late unlamented positive PDO. The plot for the TZ episode was in a science fiction story I read well before TZ started. I hope they credited and paid the author. In his book; ‘Sex in History’, G. Rattray Taylor described Europe in the Middle Ages as a vast open-air madhouse, based on the religious fanaticism of the times. Everything old is new again.
I’m sorry that this is off-topic, but this is the most related recent posting and I couldn’t find a contact form or link-tip form or something. As this site has been interested in the unlikely effects of global warming on different animals, I thought this story would interest you. The headline reads “Climate change is driving increase in tiger attacks,” but reading the story it becomes obvious that poaching, habitat destruction and human stupidity (entering a tiger reserve) are more likely suspects. Increased salinity in the mangrove swamps due to sea water level rise are at best subsidiary (not sure how much the sea level has risen in this area, though)
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn15000-climate-change-is-driving-increase-in-tiger-attacks.html
feel free to remove this post after reading.
Cattle produce methane, eat more beef, and save the world.
It could be GW is good for culinary arts. Over at Overcomingbias there is a post up, Toilet Aren’t About Dying of Disease. Aparently childrens’ health is sufficient to get people to use toilets in poor countries, instead they must make them fashionable. Fashion continues to trump rationality.
The book is not vegetarian and it is ALL about pleasure and great tasting food. Check it out – You might actually like it.