Food and Sustainability Expert
Food and Sustainability Expert It’s a matter of living sustainably, enjoyably in our world today.
Writer, keynote speaker and TV expert, Puneeta Chhitwal-Varma shows how cooking, climate action and community work are interconnected, and that our seemingly small steps can create powerful change.
Connect with Puneeta:
For speaking and media Inquiries - Email hello@puneeta.ca
On Instagram - @puneeta.author
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Puneeta's Ecosystem
Puneeta's debut cookbook, Good Food, Healthy Planet, was named a Globe and Mail and National Post Top Cookbook of 2024. It expands on the notion of 'good food' to include people and planet, and eases the burden of decision-making in our day-to-day lives. Buy your copy of Good Food, Healthy Planet.
About Puneeta
Food is Puneeta's love language. Through her writing, speaking, workshops and TV appearances, she helps people connect everyday food choices to the global food systems, and make climate-friendly choices at home. She believes meaningful steps, taken with energy and momentum, can create powerful change - and build a caring, climate-resilient world for all.
Puneeta's 'category-expanding' debut, Good Food, Healthy Planet, was a Globe and Mail and National Post Top Cookbook of 2024. As a trusted voice on sustainable cooking and climate-forward living, Puneeta has been featured in The Globe and Mail, National Post, CTV's The Social, Breakfast Television, CHCH Morning Live, CBC Radio, The Vancouver Sun, and Calgary Herald.
Contact Puneeta for workshops, media interviews, and commentary. Visit the Media & Press page for story ideas about Food, Climate, and Sustainability.
SUSTAINABLE EATING FRAMEWORK
Eating with Benefits™
“This book eases the burden of decision-making at home and shows us how we can prioritize our personal well-being and the prosperity of the planet, all at the same time.” – Good Food, Healthy Planet, 2024
In her book, Good Food, Healthy Planet, Puneeta brought together simple, practical cooking with climate science, food/mood research, and what generations of grandmas have known all along. That's how Eating with Benefits™ came to be - a customizable framework with 5 guiding principles to help people cook and eat, and integrate this new way of cooking and eating with ease into their own lives.
The 5 Strategies of Eating with Benefits™
- Support local. Think Global. More than simply reducing our carbon footprint, this section is about supporting local businesses, protecting local employment, ecosystems and the country's economy.
- Pulses are Perfect. Eat more beans and lentils. As a crop, they are easy to grow, comparatively drought-tolerant, and boost soil health. As a food, they are delicious and nutritionally fantastic for our health.
- Halve Your Meat. This is a highly resource-intensive food, and cutting it down can reduce our carbon footprint dramatically. Replace meat with vegetables, beans and lentils.
- Reduce what you throw away. Plastic and food waste are polluting our soil, air and waterways, too. Thankfully, this is a problem we can address quite quickly.
- Diversify your Plate. Eating a variety of foods is good for our gut health, brain health, and, as it turns out, this simple step can also help combat the global biodiversity crisis. Eat something different from the day before; you may be helping to save the world.
Puneeta talks extensively about this in her talks and in her cookbook, Good Food, Healthy Planet.
COOKBOOK
Good Food, Healthy Planet
A category-expanding cookbook that addresses the notion of “good food,” Good Food, Healthy Planet - or GFHP as it’s affectionately called - is a how-to guide to sustainable cooking that helps readers make low-waste, climate-forward choices in the kitchen.
A Globe and Mail and National Post Top Cookbook of the Year, Good Food, Healthy Planet, has been featured widely in broadcast and print media, including CTV’s The Social, Breakfast Television, CHCH Morning Live, Elle Gourmet, The Vancouver Sun, and Calgary Herald.
With 250+ pages, 81 recipes, and a framework that Puneeta cheekily named Eating with Benefits, GFHP offers a new way to understand the climate impact of our everyday choices and how we can make it all work in the kitchen, with ease.
🇨🇦 Buy in Canada at:
Amazon.ca | Indigo | Shop Local
🇺🇸 Buy in United States at:
Amazon.com | Bookshop.org | Barnes&Noble
