Sustainable Gastronomy: The Environmental Impacts of How We Cook Now and How Might the Sustainable-Diets Agenda Shape How We Cook in the Future?

legumes, and nuts), and decrease the consumption of unhealthy foods such as red meat, sugar, and refined grains. However, there has been much online backlash of the EAT-Lancet diet, with critics stating that it lacks consideration of local and traditional diets, food ways or systems of production, and the report has limited suggestions for how the suggested global healthy sustainable diet could actually be implemented (Edman et al., 2019; Garcia et al., 2019; Jonas, 2019; Torjesen, 2019). In my previous paper, Sustainable Gastronomy; power and energy use in food – is it possible to fight climate change though cookery? , presented at the 2019 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (Reynolds, 2019), I established that the production and consumption of food is linked to the generation of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), and that energy (electricity) is used in the production of food and also in cookery. When this energy is generated from environmentally damaging sources, such as coal and gas, it also is linked to greenhouse gas emissions. I then examined how the choice of cooking method and the time spent cooking is related to the exact amount of energy used, and the resulting climatic impact. (1) In the Oxford Symposium paper, I then reviewed the history and content of sustainable cookbooks, highlighting 23 key texts. These range from Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (Lappe, 1992), through to contemporary texts such as Diana Henry’s Plenty: good, uncomplicated food for the sustainable kitchen (Henry, 2010), or the five books of the American Academy in Rome’s Sustainable Food Project (Talbott, 2012, Boswell, 2013, Boswell, 2014, Talbott and Misenti, 2010, Behr, 2016). Since the Oxford Symposium, I have been alerted to additional sustainable cookbooks such as Rose Princes’ The New English Table: Over 200 Recipes That Will Not Cost The Earth (Prince, 2010), and Frank Holleman’s self-published Fork Ranger – Solving Climate Change with Food (Holleman, 2019). I have found sustainable cookbooks to be a broad genre. There is a variety of vegan, vegetarian, and omnivorous books published, each with different concepts of sustainability or low-carbon diets (some containing beef or lamb). The main commonality is that each ask the reader to change their behaviour and embrace differing concepts such as using leftovers, shopping organic, buying local, mindful eating, and/or eating seasonally. However, within the cookbooks surveyed, the environmental benefit these actions will have at an individual level is not quantified. Indeed it is only within the last decade that this quantification has been done within the scientific literature. Likewise, few consider the impact of cooking Abstract: The 2019 Eat-Lancet report has proposed a global healthy sustainable diet, which would provide not only for human health but also sustain a healthy planet. The main recommendations are to increase consumption of healthy foods (such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts), and a decrease in consumption of unhealthy foods (such as red meat, sugar, and refined grains). A critique of the EAT-Lancet diet is that it lacks consideration of local and traditional diets, food ways or systems of production, and the report has limited suggestions for how a global healthy sustainable diet could be implemented (Edman et al., 2019; Jonas, 2019; Torjesen, 2019). This paper firstly explores the sustainability impacts of cooking food, and how different foods have different environmental impacts from production, consumption, and cooking. It reports on a 2019 survey of cooking methods and habits in the UK, Australia and USA, examining how these different nations’ unique culinary and cooking habits lead to different environmental impacts. This paper then examines what dietary shifts are being recommended by current academic literature, and how these dietary shifts may change the methods of cooking in the future.