Guest Writer: Lucy Wyndham

Home cooking with sustainable ingredients has many benefits. A desire to eat healthily motivates 22% of Americans to cook at home. Why is it important to live sustainably? Have you been thinking about sustainable home cooking and don’t know where to start? Knowing there are suppliers that you can trust and other people engaging in sustainable cooking is inspiring. Start your journey today.

Why live sustainably?

Sustainability is on the increase. American households have seen an increase of 17% in the past five years of households growing food at home or in a community garden. Some householders have gone the extra step of drying and aging meats at their own home. Once begun, the journey of self-sufficiency that is, it is hard to stop. One key motivator that cannot be overlooked is finance. Home cooking is the first step to increasing the money you save on food each week. Cooking in your own home not only saves you the price of eating out but if you manage to cook sustainably then you are also saving the amount of money you usually pay to transport the ingredients from wherever they have been grown- to the restaurant you are eating at. Sustainability teaches you to use all of your ingredients thoughtfully and thoroughly.

Where to start

Why not start at the beginning? Assuming you have a little patch of land, starting with seed production can be the best step and the most important. Researching and deciding what produce you need to be sustainable means looking at the way you eat the amount you eat and starting a small garden accordingly. Many short of space start with kits that help to grow selected seeds and build their collections from there.

Unexpected benefits

Your taste buds have microscopic hairs, that a very sensitive, called microvilli on them. It is those tiny hairs that send the messages to your brain that tell you how something tastes. Over time your taste buds can become desensitized to healthy food because of all of the processed fats and sugary additives in store-bought items. These extra additives stop the natural ability of the taste bud- to taste- and this blockage can be reversed over time.

Sustainable cooking is on the increase. Quality ingredients are becoming easier to find- starting at seeds- and combining ingredients has never been easier. The recent explosion and popularity of cooking shows on television have proved that we all have an interest in cooking. Take the step to sustainable cooking is not a big step. With planning and a bit of commitment the rewards far outweigh the effort.