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Good Food, Healthy Planet is a Globe and Mail and National Post Top Cookbook of 2024
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"It's modern-day comfort when you want to nourish yourself and the planet." – Julie Van Rosendaal, The Globe and Mail
I’m a food and sustainability writer, speaker, and TV guest expert. I help people connect the dots between food and climate and how to choose practical, enjoyable, climate-friendly living. Or at least that’s what it says on my new website 🙂
What I really do is cook, ferment, plant, and garden, while teaching people how to do the same, sustainably and enjoyably! I also simplify complex topics to help people understand our place in the world and responsibilities in a situation. Big-picture thinking is what the experts call this, and there’s often delicious, INCREDIBLE food involved!
Let’s take climate, for example – this is not an abstract situation happening on the other side of the world. It is seasons shifting where we live. It is basements flooding down the street. It is algae in the lake so dense that swimming and fishing are out. It is food crops not able to grow. It is soil losing fertility, and water taps running dry. The effects of climate change are evident, but the point I’m trying to make is that this is not a theoretical discussion happening to people in another part of the world. It is all happening now, here.
Thankfully, food and the choices we make in the kitchen can help us at this time. What we eat needs soil, water, and energy to grow; plants, grain, meat and everything else in between. Some foods, like lamb and beef, use far more water, resources and land than, for example, beans and lentils. To put this in perspective:
“Beef production requires 20X more land and emits 20X more greenhouse gas emissions per unit of edible protein than common plant-based protein sources such as beans, peas and lentils.”—World Resources Institute, quoted from Good Food, Healthy Planet, April 2024
Cooking, Climate and Connection
Fertilizer use, pollution, and waste prevent the land from regenerating in time for the next crop cycle. Lentils (and beans) to the rescue because they need far less water and resources to grow, process and transport. They also generate far less waste, and once dried, they are shelf-stable and will last for years in your pantry. The bag of daal you bought during the 2020 COVID lockdown is likely still safe to eat and enjoy!
Lentils and beans are also nitrogen fixers; they convert atmospheric nitrogen and make it usable by plants. This improves soil and water quality, and growing them reduces the need for synthetic fertilisers. Good for us, our body and brains, and great for the environment too.
But unless we live in Karachi, New Delhi or Dhaka, we are eating far less of this crucial, nutritious, delicious food.
What we choose in the kitchen today influences how we will live in 10 years.
Two seemingly separate topics, like food and climate, are deeply intertwined. Wonderfully enough, the interconnection makes it easier for us – because when we change what (and how) we eat, we improve life for us today, and for those who come after.
My website puneeta.ca has gone through a refresh. I am thrilled to see it coming together the way it is. This website is the main place for my writing, and will also connect you to what’s going on behind-the-scenes.
Maple and Marigold, as I mentioned earlier, is still around; my blog will always be my love letter to India and Canada. Recently though, I have been feeling the urgency around the climate crisis, and hearing the call to act – so many of you are too. So here we are:
You may have heard this around the internet! The advice applies to planting trees and also to adopting new habits.
The best time to switch away from foods harmful to our future way of living was 30 years ago. And the next best time? That is today.
With my new website up and running, here are different ways to find me regularly:
- Grounded, my weekly-ish newsletter on all things sustainable
- Articles on how to simplify good food and sustainable living – COMING SOON
- All sorts of conversations on Maple and Marigold.
I’m looking forward to staying in touch. See you next week!