BECOME A ZERO hero
Sustainability chef shares how to cook, shop and eat better in 2022
Resolved to reduce waste, save money and eat more deliciously?
You need a role model. Someone who makes it look easy, and won’t pile on the eco-guilt even if you forget to save your apple peels every now and then.
Enter California’s AnneMarie Bonneau, aka The ZeroWaste Chef. Bonneau is the cloth shopping bag-sewing, sourdough starter-naming home cook with nearly 200,000 Instagram followers and a new, timely guide to actualizing your resolutions.
“The Zero-Waste Chef: PlantForward Recipes and Tips for a Sustainable Kitchen and Planet” (Avery, $25), based on Bonneau’s popular blog of the same name, is much more than a cookbook. It’s a lifestyle guide. Yes, it features 75 tasty vegan and vegetarian recipes for cooking with scraps and creating fermented staples, like ricotta and tepache, a sparkling pineapple drink. But Bonneau ends each recipe with tips on how to use your ingredients again and again.
“You can make a second batch of tepache using the same pineapple peels,” explains Bonneau, who spent 15 years living in an intentional community in the San Francisco Bay Area. “And scrap vinegar for a third infusion.”
Even non-fermenters will appreciate the simple suggestions — save kale stems for soup; invert a plate over leftovers instead of using plastic wrap — and the sensible, use-what-you-alreadyhave
approach to cooking, which is more like the freestyle way our grannies used to do it.
“A lot of people think they have to start from scratch and make something new every night,” Bonneau says, partly blaming TV shows for this. “They’ve raised it (cooking) to some kind of extreme sport. It shouldn’t be that way.”
Neither should America’s food waste, which is a sobering place to start. Every day, the average American generates 4½ pounds of trash, and, nearly 1 pound of that is food. (The rest is made of materials we used briefly, like food packaging; more on that soon). We waste more food at home than grocery stores or restaurants. And globally, food waste accounts for 8% of greenhouse gas emissions. To put that in perspective, the aviation industry generates 2.5%.
But don’t get freaked out by the zero, Bonneau says. Not everyone can fit their annual trash into a Mason jar.
“It’s just a name, a goal,” she says, like striving for an A in every class.
In this case, embrace the mantra of “Cs gets degrees.” Bonneau has crunched the numbers and confirms: “Everyone doing a little bit makes the biggest impact.”
That’s your New Year’s resolution. To reduce your food waste and plastic use by 10%. And this cookbook tells you how to do it, with sustainable kitchen-building chapters like “You Can Make That? Staples and Scraps.” Turn that half-zucchini, lone carrot and handful of herbs into savory Eat-All-Your-Vegetables Pancakes. Save those apple peels to make Apple Scrap Vinegar. And for the love of citrus, do not simply squeeze and discard a lime or lemon. Zest it first.
“During the (winter) season I get zest guilt,” Bonneau says. “Luckily, it freezes beautifully and
you can use it later in so many things, like quick breads, salad dressings and soups.”
Freezing is her mantra. Bonneau’s freezer is a rainbow of stacked Mason jars filled with everything from end-of-season fruit and cooked beans to whisked eggs and crackers made with sourdough discard. In “Make Mains, Not Waste,” learn how to make use of the entire vegetable, with dishes like Frugal Fennel Fronds Pasta and Pesto (some farmers market vendors give away fennel stalks and fronds) and Kernel-toCob Corn Chowder using even the silks and husks to make the broth.
Bonneau’s eco-journey began in 2011 after she read about the devastating effects of plastic pollution on our oceans and their inhabitants. (At the rate we’re going, the oceans will contain 1 ton of plastic for every 3 tons of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastic than fish). She wanted to cut plastic immediately, but weaning
actually took several months. She started making her own snacks instead of buying packaged ones, and took glass containers to restaurants for leftovers.
She even brings them along when picking up takeout.
“Many places are happy to do it,” Bonneau says, but admits that she’s “been doing this for 10 years and still feels a little embarrassed walking in with my own containers.”
To normalize it, Bonneau recently started a grassroots project, Silicon Valley Reduces, to help connect businesses with customers who choose to reuse. A sticker in the storefront window declares them a safe space for reusers. There are nine business on the list, including Ada’s Cafe in Palo Alto and China Wok in Sunnyvale. But it’s growing. Bonneau’s followers in Fremont, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and Ithaca, N.Y., are starting programs this year.
Just think, you could too.