Feeding your family the Eco-Friendly way
When feeding your family, keeping them full and healthy isn’t the only thing that should be sustained.
Saving the planet and our environment are also important factors to consider when cooking for you and your family. Here are some easy switches that you can make to benefit both you, your family and the environment.
1. Buy Local Produce
Food miles are one of the main things to consider when trying to maintain an Eco-Friendly diet. Reducing food miles helps to alleviate our reliance on fossil fuels. The fewer miles from farm to table, the better. Organic food from across the globe may taste better in the middle of winter, but consider the pollution caused by flying them to wherever you are.
Instead, shop local!
Supporting local businesses has many benefits; shopping from small, local stores helps to keep them in business and buying from local farms preserves the farmland. Without small scale farms, the land might otherwise be developed for industrial or commercial use. Additionally, farmland attracts other types of biodiversity and gives animals, insects, and birds a place to live and thrive.
To keep food even more local, how about growing some yourself?
Growing your own food is an eco-friendly way of introducing new herbs and foods into your diet and the its even better since you grow it yourself. It’s easy to plant herbs and vegetables in your garden, or if you don’t have one, how about this brilliant indoor kitchen herb garden?
2. Increase your home cooked meals
When you prepare your own meals, you have more control over the ingredients. By cooking for yourself, you can ensure that you and your family eat fresh, wholesome meals. This can help you to look and feel healthier, boost your energy, stabilize your weight and mood, and improve your sleep and resilience to stress.
Also, Making food at home not only allows you to source sustainable ingredients, waste less food, and use less energy, but home cooking, especially a diet rich in plants, means less impact on the environment.
3. Energy Efficient Cooking
Cooking in batches is an extremely efficient use of both appliance energy and your time, so cook up a big batch of lasagne and anticipate saving (and eating) lots of leftovers. You can save these leftovers for later by freezing them or storing them in the fridge. Check out our blog on ways to reduce food waste for some great recommendations for eco-friendly food storage ideas!
Planning ahead is also a great way to be energy efficient when cooking; by meal planning, you prevent yourself from overspending in the shops, whilst also reducing the potential for excess food waste.
When cooking, make sure that you are using the right sized pots and pans for your stove, as well as utilising their lids in order to preserve more energy and reduce the amount needed to cook your food. If you’re using an oven, why not turn it off 10 minutes early to let the residual heat continue to cook your food?