About this Blog

About this Blog #

At Climate-Friendly Cooking, I write about the climate impact of the food that we eat every day. I create recipes, analyze their carbon footprint and compare them with other recipes. This helps you to understand the effect of our food choices - and in the best case, we can try to slow down the climate crisis one plate at a time.

This blog includes my favourite recipes - the ones that I cook regularly in our own kitchen. For each of them, I calculate the carbon footprint based on emissions data for each ingredient and for the cooking process. We can then compare this with other recipes, finding out how climate-friendly a recipe is and how we could improve it by swapping out ingredients.

This blog offers you delicious recipes along with their estimated carbon footprint. For instance, you might be interested in these recipes with a comparitvely low climate impact:

1. Soba Noodles with Avocado, Lime, Cardamom and Pistachios, based on Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipe
2. Crispy Zucchini and Orzo Salad with Chimichurri
3. Vegetarian Baos in two variants (steamed asian dumplings)

I started this food blog because I realized that food is a big portion of our carbon footprint, but I could not find information on single recipes. It is relatively easy to find the carbon footprint of, for instance, tomatoes or beef - but nobody eats either a kilo of tomatoes or a kilo of beef. We obviously eat dishes like lasagna that include tomatoes and beef and other ingredients in a given ratio. So, how good or bad is lasagna really? This is what I try to figure out here, together with you. (Spoiler alert: Lasagna is very tasty, but not very good for the planet.)

Let’s cook some food that is good for you and for your planet! 🌍

About the Author #

My name is Max and I love to cook. I grew up in rural Germany in a family where food played an important role. During my childhood I ate meat almost every day. During my time at university, I discovered my passion for cooking and vegetarian cuisine - strongly influenced by Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbook “Plenty” and a woman I wanted to impress (and who I am lucky enough to call my partner today). Today I live in Switzerland and eat almost vegetarian.

Like many people, I want to live in such a way that our planet can sustain future generations. There is some scientific research on nutrition, but it doesn’t always translate directly into everyday life. Practical tips for sustainability, however, cover a wide range and are often a mixture of local foods, vegetable boxes, and avoiding packaging waste. Not all of this actually helps to really reduce our carbon footprint. That’s why I started looking into this topic and writing this blog.

Some Technical Details #

This site was created with Hugo and the fantastic Congo theme by James Panther (with a few small edits). It uses the font Inter and some icons created by Font Awesome. It is hosted by Netlify.