Climate Solutions //  ISSUE  # 101  //  HOTHOUSE 2.0
Dear Reader,
It’s officially winter! Happy holidays to all of you who are celebrating something this month, and I hope your Thanksgivings were as scrumptious as ours. If you think about it, Thanksgiving is a preamble to a much heavier season of eating. Christmas and Kwanzaa are staples of December. Depending on the year, Hanukkah and Diwali can fall on this month too. Buddhists celebrate Bodhi Day this month. In Mexico, you could be celebrating Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Say nothing of the secular holiday of New Year’s Eve.
If you’re anxious about food waste, as much as you love the festivities, you may be worried about the Tupperware stacking up in your fridge this month. But that’s okay, we’ve got a solution for you by way of journalist and chef Caroline Saunders. Caroline trained at Le Cordon Bleu before turning to writing full-time and is passionate about sustainable eating during the holidays. In this issue of Hot House, she’s going to impart some ideas on how you and I can make this next month of festive eating a whole lot more sustainable.
If you like Caroline’s ideas, the best way to support her is by subscribing to Pale Blue Tart. If you liked this issue, now is the time to share us with a friend too: It’s a great way of supporting Hot House — especially as we make calls for reader donations this month — and that way, you both get the climate-friendly holiday recipe Caroline has cooked up for us in the next week. That’s right! This month’s a double issue. — Tekendra
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How to Make Your Holiday Cooking More Sustainable
From leftovers to sustainable portioning, here’s how to make sustainable feasts this holiday season.
By Caroline Saunders
In the darkened house of an unsuspecting Who family on Christmas Eve, the Grinch needs three whole sacks to make off with their feast. Into the cavernous burlap bags, he tosses some three dozen cans of food, various unmarked covered dishes, grapes, a lone banana, bottles of what look to be Who spirits, carrots, potatoes, apples, Who hash, Who pudding, more canned goods, and — most devastatingly, the narrator’s tone suggests — the roast beast of indeterminate origin.
This bounty is as good a representation as any of the many holiday meals that will be cooked during the final month of the year, whether to celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, the winter solstice, or the close of another year: There’s way more on the menu than can reasonably be eaten, and meat is the undisputed star of the show.
So go feasts. Holiday menus include more splurge ingredients (which has historically meant meat in its various forms). They are also deeply bound up in tradition. Because of this, some have suggested that whatever conscious-eating strictures we might attempt to follow the rest of the year — like eating with the climate in mind — should be left at the mistletoe-draped door.
But as a climate writer and recipe developer who brings climate cuisine to life, I hungrily disagree. A climate-friendly feast is well within reach this year, even if you’ll be cooking for a crew that would revolt if you riffed on the rib roast. All it takes to make a climate-conscious holiday dinner is a little advance planning and, most importantly, calibrating to the sustainable cooking approach that will fly with your tribe.
Transform leftovers into delicious new dishes
Even if tradition rules your friends’ or family’s holiday dinner menu with an iron fist, you can give the big meal an incognito climate-friendly makeover by anointing yourself the chef de leftovers.
Food waste takes a staggering climate toll. As much as a tenth of all annual greenhouse gas emissions comes from uneaten food, which produces the super-warming gas methane when it rots in a landfill. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we toss more food in the trash around the holidays than during the rest of the year. On Thanksgiving alone, a preamble to the December holidays, food waste produces 798,568 metric tons of COâ‚‚ emissions. That’s the equivalent of burning through nearly 2 million barrels of crude oil.
Enter you, a glass of wine, and an evening spent thumbing through cookbooks to find uses for dishes you think could end up partly uneaten after the big meal has drawn to a close.
Leftover honey-baked ham can be thinly sliced and fried like bacon, or finely chopped, sautéed, and added to a quiche Lorraine to feed the guests that appear to be staying put another day. Spare challah slices can make a mean, make-ahead French toast. The stems of collard greens can be julienned and added to a New Year’s Day ribollita, the writer and cook Tamar Adler suggests. Extra cooked brisket can round out ramen. Sour cream leftover from latkes can make a sunny citrus cake as bright as the promise of lengthening days.
I advise seeking leftovers inspiration in advance because it kickstarts post-holiday meal planning and helps me see leftovers more lovingly. Without a vision for how to use them, I’ll gaze at stacks of Tupperwares stuffed between jugs of milk and feel my soul flatline. If I plan ahead, however, I can cast potential odds and ends not as sad leavings, but as the ingredients of future meals that they rightly are.
If recipe-planning for leftovers is too much work, you could also take a food-saving shortcut: do away with the typical super-portioning, preventing wasted leftovers before they happen.
Move away from red meat
But now, if your feast itself can be fiddled with, then the real fun begins.
It starts, as it must, with the other carbon-saving entrée beside wasting less food: easing up on meat — especially red meat. Animal agriculture causes between 10 to 20 percent of all annual warming; beef and lamb are outsized contributors. They’re up to 100 times and 40 times more carbon-intensive than peas, respectively. Of course, a vegan feast would have the lowest carbon footprint. But stay with me, omnivores: The incremental savings of putting lower-carbon proteins on the holiday menu are no small potatoes. Poultry meats like chicken and turkey have a fifth the carbon footprint of steak. Eggs and certain seafood, like sardines, anchovies, and farmed mollusks, are reasonable choices, too.
If a main dish switch-up would strike your crew not as heresy but as a welcome culinary adventure, consider a lower-carbon centerpiece. The change, after all, can be a chance to sample holiday dishes from around the world. In the northern provinces of Iran, a chicken dish studded with pomegranate seeds, called khoresh morgh nardooni, is prepared to celebrate the winter solstice. The red jewels of the pomegranate symbolize a red dawn and a new beginning. In Provence, oysters (one of those low-carbon mollusks) are served for Christmas. In Ethiopia, families prepare rooster doro wat, a berbere-spiced stew bobbing with halved hard-boiled eggs that celebrates the end of a 43-day fast on Ganna, the Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas. In Japan, toshikoshi soba — literally translated as “year-crossing” soba — rings in the New Year.
You could also save carbon just by buying a smaller brisket or pork loin, making meat a side and training the spotlight instead on vegetarian dishes. After all, who says that black-eyed peas and a tureen of peanut-sweet potato soup aren’t the real stars of New Year’s Eve? Or that the point of Christmas Eve dinner is anything other than this ombre gratin, its paper-thin layers of root vegetables, a warm-hued rainbow that lights up every plate?
Experiment with biodiversity on the dinner plate
While you’re playing with new recipes to lean into the low-carbon of it all, consider also leaning into biodiversity. It helps with climate resilience. Just 12 plants and five animals account for three-quarters of the calories eaten worldwide, despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of edible plants in the world. A system as concentrated as that is fragile, and the cracks are starting to show. Major crops like wheat and rice face increasing risks of global shortages because of climate change.
Increasing biodiversity in a meal can be as easy as using Einkorn wheat flour or a dash of rye in gingerbread cookies. It could also mean making applesauce with heritage varieties; a combination of types makes for a more multidimensional flavor anyway. You could also include an Indigenous recipe on your table, since native cooking is often a tapestry of regional ingredients. Manoomin, for example, a pilaf of wild rice topped with popped rice and dried ramp leaves, is a celebratory dish for many Indigenous communities around the Great Lakes.
It’s a great time to start rethinking our holiday feasts
Any of these approaches can make your feast climate-friendly and seed habits and values that you can bring back out for holidays to come. There’s no better time to build your waste-not cooking skills than when you have a day off from work and relatives in the next room to avoid. Nor is there a better time to consider what ingredients we place the most value on.
There’s ceremony in slicing a leggy roast beast, to be sure, but so there is in ladling out cupfuls of forest-restoring chest-nog, or passing around a plate of oysters, their shells stuccoed in greens and grays, their brine impossibly cold and crisp.
This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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