Green Kitchen

A green kitchen does more than just produce healthy food. Your choices about cleaning, storing food, cooking equipment, recycling and composting food waste are important ingredients, too.

Green Cleaning
Keeping your work surfaces and cooking tools clean is vital to preparing healthy food. But you don't have to use lab-developed, factory-manufactured chemical formulas. Simple and inexpensive alternatives exist - and you can create your own green cleaning supplies kit and green kitchen cleaning recipes.
(For other parts of the house, try the recipes for general green cleaners, green laundry, and floor cleaners. or find it all in one handy, two-page Healthy Home Cleaners brochure.)

Food Storage
Plastics and food seem inseparable today - we buy ingredients in plastic clamshells or on shrink-wrapped trays; we bag our sandwiches and snacks in ziplock bags; and then we seal up the leftovers with clingwraps, Tupperware, or more plastic bags.

But the price of freshness is higher than we'd like to think. First, every time your food and its plastic protector touch each other, a little of the petrochemical compounds find their way into your food, and into your body.

Second, plastic products trash the environment, filling up landfills at best and winding up on our streets and in our waterways at worst. Made of materials that soil and water cannot break down into nutrients (bio-degrading, or composting), these materials merely break down into smaller parts, contaminating soil and water and killing wildlife.

You can change your habits and supplies one step at a time, following these tips:

Reduce, Re-use, Recycle
Less is more in a green kitchen. You can't buy your way to green-ness.
* Buy less packaging - do you really need a produce bag, a clamshell, another container? Can you find the item in bulk?
* Bring groceries home in a re-usable shopping bag
* Re-use durable containers instead of buying 'tupperware'
* Use alternatives to petro-plastics
- - a pyrex baking dish with a rubberized lid will heat and store with no extra containers to wash
-- wrap sandwiches in waxed paper (it's compostable!)
-- take lunch in an old-fashioned stainless steel lunchbox
-- instead of cling wrap, try waxed paper and a rubber band
* Where you really need plastics, try some of the new compostable plastic.

Composting Vegetable Scraps
Now that you are eating lots of fresh, local produce (choosing organics whenever you can), don't waste those scraps!
A counter-top compost container can look pretty, and need not smell. I keep mine within reach of the cutting board, tossing scraps in as I cook. To empty it, I just carry it to the garden, dump it into the compost bin, rinse it with the hose, and put it back on the counter.
It's easy and cuts down a suprising amount on my trash, which is also drier and lighter without food waste in it.

Green Kitchen Cooking Tools

Best Bets
* Iron skillets
* Pyrex pans and measuring cups
* Stainless steel
* Ceramics (with lead-free glazes)
* Solar Cookers

Caution
* Teflon - safe unless heated when dry (emits toxic fumes) or scratched up
* Microwave oven - how much radiation is safe? Opinions vary.
* Silicone - baking sheets, pans, muffin tins, and brushes. Little good information, currently.

Never Use
* Aluminum pots and pans (scientific consensus on link to Alzheimer's)