4 ms·

Even if one technically has time, cooking is a considerable commitment and so it’s easy to end up having little to no downtime after working it into a schedule,

Even if one technically has time, cooking is a considerable commitment and so it’s easy to end up having little to no downtime after working it into a schedule, especially in a family situation. It’s hard to keep that kind of tight schedule up for long periods while maintaining sanity. Even if you start out cooking regularly and eating healthy it’s easy to burn out and wind up in a funk which then causes a spiraling effect that makes it ever-harder to get back to a healthy lifestyle. So I might suggest that many don’t just need time and energy to be able to cook healthy, but enough to cook healthy and still have time and energy left over. In other words, a sustainable schedule.

pfdietz 3y ago
One thing to note here: although industrial agriculture in the US is criticized for using too much energy, we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it (including all energy used to fuel farm equipment and make agrochemicals.) So don't think that cooking is somehow a trivial problem, especially for the world's poor.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  That happens only because most people use energetically inefficient methods of cooking, not because it is something intrinsic to cooking. Everything that I eat is cooked by myself from raw ingredients and for that I consume around 0.6 kWh of electric energy per day.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    As opposed to the global poor, who have highly energy efficient cooking equipment? That doesn't sound right.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      While the maximum energy efficiency for cooking is obtained with modern equipment, like microwave ovens, cooking equipment does not necessarily have to be modern and expensive. I am pretty certain that the kitchen stove used by my grandparents had a much better energy efficiency than the kitchen stoves that burn natural gas and which are still very widespread now. That old kitchen stove was a wood-burning kitchen stove, but only a small quantity of wood had to be burned, because it had a huge thermal inertia and after becoming hot enough food could be cooked for hours with minimal wood consumption. The heat transfer from the large hot iron stove (but with a temperature close to that needed for food, i.e. much lower than the temperature of a gas flame) was much better than from a gas burner, which resulted in much less lost heat. The efficiency of such a wood-burning kitchen stove is likely to have been similar with the efficiency of an induction electric stove.
- hollerith 3y ago
  >we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it Do you have a citation or a calculation for that?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Not directly, but various things I google show that in the US food system, only 10-20% of the energy used is on the farm. Much more is in handling (which includes cooking and refrigeration), transportation, and processing.
    - asdff 3y ago
      No surprise, farm is powered by the sun and water pressure.
      - tormeh 3y ago
        I hope you're trolling, because that's definitely not how that works.
        hollerith 3y ago
        He thinks farms don't use a lot of fossil fuels because he experiences positive feelings when he thinks about farms :)
        asdff 3y ago
        I have smelled a tractor before
        asdff 3y ago
        Sure other fuels go into it but it also takes in things like sunlight and water pressure as inputs for doing work (from the growing crops perspective at least). Whereas with transporting the goods, you don't have solar powered trucks or things powered from watermills or hydroelectricity moving these tomatoes. 100% of the energy makeup of the transportation side will be from fossil fuels, in contrast to the growing where fossil fuels make up some fraction but not the whole due to the work done by the sun and pressurized water. Likewise with handling and storage. I expect tyson foods has no bulk freeze drying apparatus that is powered independently with its own nuclear reactor, they are probably pulling from the dirty grid.
adrian_b 3y ago
Cooking with modern methods can take much less time than with traditional methods. Until three or four years ago, I was cooking traditionally. Because that required many hours, I could not do that daily, so I was cooking for the entire week during one day of the weekend, which was mostly lost to this activity. Then I have switched to cook everything in a microwave oven (which I had previously used for decades only for reheating food), including things like baking home-made bread. This allows very short and perfectly reproducible cooking times. Many kinds of food, typically those with high water content, like potatoes or meat, can be just roasted in closed glass vessels without adding anything to them and they are much tastier than when they are boiled, without needing to fry them in cooking oil. Other vegetables are better boiled in water with salt, but regardless of the method all vegetables require less than a quarter of hour in the oven. Since then, I am cooking every day what I eat just before I need it, which takes less than half of hour from start to finish for all operations, when cooking vegetables. Meat required less preparation time but more time in the oven (at reduced power levels), depending on what kind of meat it was, e.g. up to 30 minutes, so when I was eating meat I was cooking it separately, in amounts sufficient for several days, and I was cooking everything else just before the meal, when it was combined with the precooked meat. So with some experimentation, it is possible to find ways to cook your food without wasting too much time and energy with that.
- petre 3y ago
  Yes, that. Yay to ovens and electric appliances where you just set the power and the time and go do something else until the food cooks itself. I stopped boiling most vegetables, I steam process them over a pot with a strainer on top.
- neurostimulant 3y ago
  Get an air frier and you'll have more option to cook dishes previously not possibly using microwave alone.

pfdietz 3y ago

One thing to note here: although industrial agriculture in the US is criticized for using too much energy, we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it (including all energy used to fuel farm equipment and make agrochemicals.) So don't think that cooking is somehow a trivial problem, especially for the world's poor.

adrian_b 3y ago
That happens only because most people use energetically inefficient methods of cooking, not because it is something intrinsic to cooking. Everything that I eat is cooked by myself from raw ingredients and for that I consume around 0.6 kWh of electric energy per day.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  As opposed to the global poor, who have highly energy efficient cooking equipment? That doesn't sound right.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    While the maximum energy efficiency for cooking is obtained with modern equipment, like microwave ovens, cooking equipment does not necessarily have to be modern and expensive. I am pretty certain that the kitchen stove used by my grandparents had a much better energy efficiency than the kitchen stoves that burn natural gas and which are still very widespread now. That old kitchen stove was a wood-burning kitchen stove, but only a small quantity of wood had to be burned, because it had a huge thermal inertia and after becoming hot enough food could be cooked for hours with minimal wood consumption. The heat transfer from the large hot iron stove (but with a temperature close to that needed for food, i.e. much lower than the temperature of a gas flame) was much better than from a gas burner, which resulted in much less lost heat. The efficiency of such a wood-burning kitchen stove is likely to have been similar with the efficiency of an induction electric stove.
hollerith 3y ago
>we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it Do you have a citation or a calculation for that?
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Not directly, but various things I google show that in the US food system, only 10-20% of the energy used is on the farm. Much more is in handling (which includes cooking and refrigeration), transportation, and processing.
  - asdff 3y ago
    No surprise, farm is powered by the sun and water pressure.
    - tormeh 3y ago
      I hope you're trolling, because that's definitely not how that works.
      - hollerith 3y ago
        He thinks farms don't use a lot of fossil fuels because he experiences positive feelings when he thinks about farms :)
        asdff 3y ago
        I have smelled a tractor before
      - asdff 3y ago
        Sure other fuels go into it but it also takes in things like sunlight and water pressure as inputs for doing work (from the growing crops perspective at least). Whereas with transporting the goods, you don't have solar powered trucks or things powered from watermills or hydroelectricity moving these tomatoes. 100% of the energy makeup of the transportation side will be from fossil fuels, in contrast to the growing where fossil fuels make up some fraction but not the whole due to the work done by the sun and pressurized water. Likewise with handling and storage. I expect tyson foods has no bulk freeze drying apparatus that is powered independently with its own nuclear reactor, they are probably pulling from the dirty grid.

adrian_b 3y ago

Cooking with modern methods can take much less time than with traditional methods. Until three or four years ago, I was cooking traditionally. Because that required many hours, I could not do that daily, so I was cooking for the entire week during one day of the weekend, which was mostly lost to this activity. Then I have switched to cook everything in a microwave oven (which I had previously used for decades only for reheating food), including things like baking home-made bread. This allows very short and perfectly reproducible cooking times. Many kinds of food, typically those with high water content, like potatoes or meat, can be just roasted in closed glass vessels without adding anything to them and they are much tastier than when they are boiled, without needing to fry them in cooking oil. Other vegetables are better boiled in water with salt, but regardless of the method all vegetables require less than a quarter of hour in the oven. Since then, I am cooking every day what I eat just before I need it, which takes less than half of hour from start to finish for all operations, when cooking vegetables. Meat required less preparation time but more time in the oven (at reduced power levels), depending on what kind of meat it was, e.g. up to 30 minutes, so when I was eating meat I was cooking it separately, in amounts sufficient for several days, and I was cooking everything else just before the meal, when it was combined with the precooked meat. So with some experimentation, it is possible to find ways to cook your food without wasting too much time and energy with that.

petre 3y ago
Yes, that. Yay to ovens and electric appliances where you just set the power and the time and go do something else until the food cooks itself. I stopped boiling most vegetables, I steam process them over a pot with a strainer on top.
neurostimulant 3y ago
Get an air frier and you'll have more option to cook dishes previously not possibly using microwave alone.