Cooking Your Food but not Our Planet

Burnt fossil fuels are heating our planet, by means of a well-understood phenomenon of atmospheric physics known as the “greenhouse effect.” That’s why fossil fuels’ combustion products—including carbon dioxide and methane—are called “greenhouse gases.” Now the heating has gone on long enough that the effect is accelerating due to positive feedback.

But you can do your own small part to slow the acceleration by stopping burning fossil fuels. It really is that simple.

Unfortunately, stopping in general is neither simple nor cheap. To stop burning gasoline, you have to take public transportation, hop on a bicycle, or buy an electric car. To stop burning natural gas to heat your home, you have to invest in an electric heat pump or so-called “split-duct” system. (Such a system can heat in winter and cool in summer, all on electricity alone.) If you live in an area where your power company burns fossil fuels, you have to install a solar array or personal windmill to power your car or heat pump. And if you rent your home, you have to get your landlord to do all this, preferably without raising your rent.

But there’s one thing every person or family does that is entirely within their personal control: cooking. If you use natural gas to cook, you can switch to electricity. In many communities, electric-power companies have already switched to renewable energy sources, or are in the process of doing so, because renewable energy is not just cleaner, but cheaper, too.

So as you switch from gas to electric cooking, you can help save your planet. Not only that, you can do so for a capital investment of a couple of hundred dollars or less. In the process, you can make your food healthier and save a lot of time in both cooking and cleaning up. Read on.

When I was a kid, back in the fifties, stoves were electric. That was before natural-gas producers went on their promotional binges. I still remember a series of gas ads on the local classical-music station then in LA (now, I believe, defunct). A male announcer with a sonorous, upscale voice and a French accent described the benefits of “cooking with gas.” He concluded, “J’ toujours cuisine au gas.” I had and have no idea whether that’s good French. But it sure sounded neat! By the time I was in college, all the apartments I rented had gas stoves.

But today you don’t need to swap out your gas stove to cook with electricity. Most homes in America, including rentals, already have microwave ovens. And you can put a convection oven and an electric rice cooker on your kitchen counter for a total investment of less than $200. The trick is learning to use these three devices instead of your gas stove.

The primary purpose of cooking is to kill germs and stop spoilage. If not for that, we could eat all of our food raw, just as we do lettuce, carrots and sashimi.

Some people like the taste of partially burnt food, with its carbonized edges. But medical science tells us that the benzopyrenes that produce that taste are bad for you. They are toxic and in time can cause cancer.

To make food safe from germs, all you need to do its heat it to a temperature of 165 ℉ for a minute or more. The temperature of boiling water, or 212 ℉, is plenty high enough. You don’t have to carbonize your meat or turn your vegetables into mush to make them safe.

For microwaved food, there’s a simple routine. If you open the lid of the microwave dish and lots of hot steam comes out, you can close the lid and let the food sit for a couple of minutes. Then it should be safe. (Also, feel around the bottom of the dish when it comes out to make sure that no part of it is still cool.)

Countertop convection ovens and rice cookers are even simpler. The oven lets you set the temperature for cooking and tells you when it’s reached; and the rice cooker invariably heats the food over the boiling point for the specified time. Even the rice-cooker’s warm-down cycle can kill most germs given enough time. (This is the “default” cycle that comes on if you forget about the food being cooked and leave the cooker unattended after the cooking cycle.)

The advantages of these three kinds of electric cooking are many. First and foremost is convenience. There’s far less mess to clean up. There’s no baked-on gunk, let alone carbonized food that has to be scoured tediously from pots, pans, grills and utensils.

You can leave the microwave dish to cool on a trivet or heat-proof countertop, then stick the leftovers and dish right in the fridge. If you cover your small “grill” in the convection oven with aluminum foil before cooking, you can just crumple up the foil, with all the juices and any carbonized gunk inside, and throw it away. (Aluminum and organic waste won’t pollute the dump with PFAS or other dangerous plastic microparticles.)

The rice cooker is perhaps the easiest. Just spoon the food out as needed, leave the inner pot to cool on a trivet or heat-proof counter, then put a suitable small plate on top to seal it. Throw the leftovers with the pot in the fridge, to be spooned out for later heating in the microwave, or heated in whole in the rice cooker again.

The second major advantage of electric cooking is health. Carbonized combustion products are bad for you, no matter how good they may taste. So are many of the fats and oils—especially saturated fats like butter, lard and coconut or palm oil—commonly used in stovetop cooking. You don’t need to use any oil or fat in a microwave, convection-oven or countertop rice-cooker. (Well, maybe a small amount brushed on the aluminum foil in convection baking or broiling, to keep the food from sticking.) Your waistline will thank you, and so will your arteries as you get older.

Then there’s saving time. As compared to stovetop frying or stir-frying, a microwave, convection oven, or rice cooker is nearly entirely unattended. You put the food in, press the button or start the timer. Then you come back when the bell tells you the food is done (or, for the convection oven, when it’s time to turn the food over). You can spend the interim time reading, working online, talking with family or friends, or fomenting a revolution on social media, instead of standing over a hot stove breathing combustion products and risking burning your fingers or arms.

Once you get the hang of it, electric cooking can become a flight of fancy and an exercise of imagination. Can you cook eggs in the microwave? Of course. It just takes a little experimentation. With time you can produce tasty omelets and a good simulacrum of “eggs over easy” with far less time and mess.

Then there are the “one-bucket” meals. I recently discovered quinoa (pronounced “keen-WAH”), an ancient grain that is healthy, nutritious and much more fun to chew than rice. Chop up some fresh carrots and string beans, put them into the rice cooker with the usual ratio of quinoa to water, and you have a complete, healthy starch-and-veggie meal, with only the protein lacking. My next step will be trying different types of protein (such as salmon, other fish, chicken and/or tofu), maybe pre-cooking it in the microwave first.

The final advantage of all-electric cooking is saving yourself from gas combustion products. Breathing residues of natural gas combustion, including deadly carbon monoxide, won’t kill you if you have proper ventilation. But even breathing what doesn’t get swept up by the blower is not healthy, especially in the winter, when the windows are generally closed. I was astonished at how much better I felt in our laundry room after we switched from a gas to an electric dryer.

So as you experiment with making delicious meals with electric appliances, rather than gas, think of yourself as part of a long line of human biological and social evolution. In the beginning, our hominid-ape ancestors killed, picked or scrounged what they could, often getting sick from partially spoiled food. Then came the bonfire, the campfire, the wood stove, the coal stove, the electric range, and the gas stove.

Today’s electric heating makes combustion completely unnecessary. The apex is the microwave, which heats food from the inside out by agitating its molecules with oscillating electromagnetic waves. But the results are all electric: food heated without fire to kill germs. Today’s electric methods are so much cleaner, simpler, healthier, energy-conserving and less polluting than ever before.

Try them; you’ll like them. And you’ll help save our planet and cook healthier food while you save yourself time, money, and your own energy and trouble.

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