My sustainable habits in the kitchen.

1 out of 3

Changing one's habits is exceptionally hard. It’s so hard it took me several years to even write this series of articles. On one hand, it took years of research. On the other hand, I needed to establish strategies to make the changes I’ve implemented feel easy.

Generally, I’d say I’m someone who’s always cared about sustainability. In theory, anyway. In practice, “buying organic products” and “recycling” made me believe I was someone who cared about sustainability. Yet, looking at it from today’s perspective, this was just the very beginning of becoming a person who cares about sustainability.

For this series I’ve taken a closer look at the habits I’ve established in the kitchen, in my bathroom, and while living a busy life as a freelance consultant.

There are many things I consider a “work in progress” regarding how I live my life. It’s thanks to the people around me who inspired me to change my habits.

I want to use this space to maybe inspire you to make a change in how you live your life, too.

The process of changing my habits started when I decided to no longer work with one of my biggest clients. Life at that time was extremely fast-paced, wasteful, and often felt superficial. I spent more time at airports than with my friends. I needed a radical change to feel grounded and like I had my life under control. I knew I had to ditch some habits that might have been convenient but didn't reflect my values too.

The changes I will describe in these three articles are not changes I’ve established overnight. It's closer to two and a half years, really.

While I’m still working on living up to my values, I do want to share what’s already working and how I managed to overcome my lazy, inner monkey and make them work for me.

Let’s start by looking at my kitchen habits first.

Shopping for groceries at the farmers market

Thank you, Matthew Strother, for being a great inspiration in this regard.

I always assumed that shopping at farmers markets was costly.

You know, you're either a person that goes to a farmers market….

Or you're a person that doesn't.

And I was someone who didn't. I'd go to the supermarket and think to myself how expensive all the fruit and vegetables were. I'd buy packaged goods and mostly consume convenience foods.

As someone who works in marketing, I'm well aware that people only change their shopping habits around life-changing events, such as graduation, moving away from home for the first time, moving to a new city, changing jobs, marrying someone, when a baby arrives, or during unfortunate events, likes the diagnosis of an illness. These are the times when people tend to reconsider their consumption.

For me, it was the desire to slow down. And so, every Saturday, I started going to my local market in Vienna. As I now do in Berlin.

I bring tote bags. I choose the vegetables I want to eat the following week. I talk to everyone for a little bit. Orion, my dog, usually drags me to the flower stand where they have dog treats and then to the cheese stand because she knows something always falls down for her to pick up.

Shopping for my groceries at the market every week is incredibly grounding. It's making me happy. Most of all, I didn’t even realize how this habit has become my new normal until I started going out with my boyfriend.

He'd sometimes bring groceries over. It was a well-meant gesture. However, it also made me realize that, by cutting my visits to the supermarket, I also cut the amount of trash I brought home.

I believe it’s not until you internalize some of the hard facts that you’ll consider cutting down your visits to supermarkets, which is why I’d like to share some facts and statistics. Most of them are from Tristram Stuart’s book Waste: Uncovering the global food scandal.

Generally speaking, the fully stocked shelves at the supermarkets mean a lot gets thrown away. There’s a reason waste statistics are locked away from the public eye. Often, the retail price is two to three times the cost price, which means that, for a supermarket, it's more economical to waste two of each product than to lose even one sale by selling out of it.

The most wasteful supermarket departments are ready-made foods such as sandwiches and salads and fresh vegetables and fruits. Additionally, a lot of fruit and vegetables supplied to supermarkets are out-graded even before they get to the shelves. At a rate of 30 to 50%, the number is indeed drastic. It’s due to the European Union standards and the idea that produce should look the same in every member’s country.

By buying produce directly from the farmer, you not only support the farmer directly, but you also save food from getting dumped. It’s a fact that food waste is one of the most critical industries polluting our planet. It’s got a lot to do with methane, which I’ll talk about in the next section.

Usually, I go home from the market with two full bags of produce, which is enough for the two of us for the whole week. It costs us about € 30. And I cook once or even twice a day and make breakfast at home, too.

If you don’t have a farmers market near you, look for a delivery service that brings you a box full of produce to your door. That option might be more pricey than a visit to the market, but, in the long term, it will be one of the most sustainable decisions you can make.

Separating food waste

I find it unfortunate that not every municipality makes it as easy as it should be for people to separate food waste from household waste. In our apartment block in Berlin, we’re lucky to have an organic bin right downstairs.

The reason why the food industry has an even higher impact on our environment than the entire transportation sector is that methane is about 25% more effective at trapping heat than CO2.

In Berlin, everyone seems to be talking about cutting the emissions caused by driving and flying. All I can think of are the emissions we produce inadvertently by how we consume and/or discard food.

Generally speaking, and due to our high standards in the west, we've forgotten how to use up tired-looking produce. We’ve gotten accustomed to full supermarket shelves at 6 p.m. at night, too. It seems like most of us don't understand the impact of private but also industrial food waste. And most of us don’t understand the impact of not separating food waste from landfill waste. It’s adverse.

By throwing away food, we’re not only wasting the food we throw away: We’re also wasting water, oil, and land, and are harming biodiversity. Food waste leads to methane, which, of course, is a greenhouse gas. Or, in other words, the gas that is warming up our planet.

Obviously, food waste cannot be avoided entirely; thus, I can only recommend getting a compost bin. This is the one I have.

I can also recommend Sophia Hoffman's book Zero Waste Küche in case you speak German.

I bring the compost waste down about once a week. It’s neither gross nor stressful to have a compost bin in the kitchen, and the one I have can be washed in the dishwasher, too. What I’m most proud of is that I now only need to bring down landfill waste about once every three to four weeks. As you can imagine, that has cut down the waste we produce significantly.

Being committed to veganism

Thank you, Jan Bredack, for having been a great inspiration in this regard.

In 2012, at the HKU, I participated in an incredible seminar called propaganda by Bart-Jan Kazemier and Rogier Klomp. It was a hands-on lecture teaching us different persuasion techniques. We could choose between different subjects we wanted to explore and produce propaganda material for. Given "being vegetarian" fit my self-image, that's what I chose as a subject. I wanted to compose a project that would turn me into a vegetarian.

After weeks of research, I realized that vegetarianism doesn't make sense to me. To keep this story short: As long as we drink milk, there will always be veal that someone needs to eat too. Hence, I happily continued eating meat.

From today’s perspective, I'm astonished that my conclusion was to keep eating meat, dairy, and eggs instead of going vegan to start with. I guess my conclusion at the time had to do with the questions I asked myself back then.

However, in 2018, I happened to take on Veganz, Germany's biggest vegan grocery brand, as a client. While working with them, I continued eating the way I have always done.

As I’ve already mentioned, I'd already been buying organic groceries, yet I ate cheese, eggs, and meat with a real passion.

The project at Veganz was stressful, and there wasn't much time left to question my habits, despite being surrounded by people who had all the right arguments and – from today’s perspective – did things right.

Once the project finished, I picked up a few books. One of them was Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. Reading that book changed everything for me.

People go vegan for various reasons: animal welfare, environmental impacts, and health reasons being the three most common.

Because I grew up on a small city farm, I can only say my view on what agriculture looks like was pretty skewed. Modern-day farming has nothing to do with what I experienced in my childhood.

What we see in pictures has nothing in common with how things really are. The way farming is done is pure animal cruelty. As long as we live in a capitalist society in which maximizing profits is the highest of all arguments, it’s ignorant to continue using animals to satisfy our mindless habits and traditions established in precapitalist times.

Additionally, it's animal farming that causes the most damage to our environment. Again, it's not the mobility sector we should be talking about – it's the food sector.

A very simplified example that I hope illustrates everything that's wrong with the food industry as we know it is this one:

Do you remember BSE, mad cow disease? According to Tristram Stuart's research, its cause goes back to feeding the brains of sheep suffering from scrapy to cattle, which – as you might recall from elementary school – are herbivores and thus cannot process meat in the first place. (Again, profits over reason.)

Following the outbreak of BSE and putting safety first, government officials immediately prohibited feeding food waste to livestock, regardless of what the animals can or cannot eat. Now, pigs, for example, when kept at smaller farms, had always been used as an extension of the farm's own food waste management; all scraps and swill were fed to the pigs to reduce the farm’s landfill. Simply because a pig can have a very similar diet to humans.

Now, and given feeding food waste to all animals has been prohibited, the feed we supply to livestock are the crops (mostly grains and soy) for which we destroyed the rainforests in Brazil. Obviously, this is a highly simplified explanation.

What’s also considerably wasteful is the amount of feed and water a pig "needs" before it lands on people's plates. It’s an extremely energy-insufficient meal, which is scientifically called the feed conversion ratios (FCR). “According to Dr. Robert Lawrence of Johns Hopkins University, the ratios are approximately 7:1 for beef, 5:1 for pork, and 2.5:1 for poultry. The larger the animal, the larger the percentage of that animal's body mass is inedible material like bone, skin, and tissue. It's why beef conversion ratios are the highest. It takes exponentially less water and energy inputs to produce grains, beans, and vegetables compared to meat."

Last but not least: It’s pooping that’s the big issue. Cow poop causes – just like food waste – an incredible amount of methane. I don’t think I need to go into much detail on this one...

There are a million arguments about why a vegan diet makes more sense. What we've been eating has become obsolete. But then, of course, what we eat reflects our identity and culture, and it's hard to walk over to the U.S. and be like: "You can no longer eat turkey for Thanksgiving." Or go to Germany and take away people's sausages. Or Schnitzel in Austria. Our entire food culture in the Western world is meat-based.

Our habits are, too.

Breaking such habits takes a lot of energy, research, and time. It may well be that you're eating muesli with yogurt for breakfast, a cheese sandwich for lunch, and a salami pizza in the evening. And you do it because you like the taste, you know what to expect, and you've always done it that way.

That's normal and understandable. And I was the same for a very long time.

Now, let's say you decide you want to be vegan.

As I did.

Let's say you want to become vegan for environmental reasons.

As I did.

(Which, honestly, is becoming a necessity.)

The question suddenly isn’t about “why” but instead about “how.”

How does one become a vegan?

How did I become vegan, as someone who gets excited about bloody steaks and sausages and can eat up a package of salami in a sitting just like others might eat a bar of chocolate?

How does someone who always had stacks of cheese in the fridge suddenly go vegan?!

How on earth have I been a vegan for almost two years?!

I learned a lot from my time at Veganz and can also highly recommend Jan’s biography.

I now know choosing a plant-based diet starts with having suitable replacements.

At Veganz, the product philosophy is that they copy the foods people eat and are used to and make vegan versions of them.

Let's say you're into butter cookies. They'll have the same ones – but vegan.

Or let's say you love cheddar cheese or gouda? They'll have that too...just made from coconuts.

Do you crave a pepper steak? No problem – they have that, too.

The reason Veganz has so many products is that they want to make it easy for people to go vegan. So yes, at the start, you might eat a lot of replacement products. Just because changing habits and finding suitable alternatives takes time and effort, and going vegan is easier if you don't fail your self-confidence by failing your own plan. However, eventually, you’ll start exploring different recipes and experimenting with new veggies as I did. Just because being a vegan is something that becomes part of one’s identity fairly quickly.

Yes, at the start of one’s vegan lifestyle, it's about picking up the stuff you would have always bought – just buying the vegan version of it. You might go for soy or oat milk instead of cow milk. You might get a vegan salami instead of a real salami. You might buy vegan sausages instead of pork sausages. Eventually, you'll start questioning what else you could eat. And that's when life becomes fascinating because there are just so many possibilities to eat incredible food.

Vegan food tends to be much more playful and flavourful, and the internet is full of inspiring bloggers who can teach you some simple recipes. It's suddenly going to be easy to get to those five a day that are supposedly keeping the doctor away.

At least that’s what I am regarding my diet and it feels really good.

(*** This is part one of my sustainable food series. Find Parts 2 and 3 here.)