Tell me how you cook, and I'll tell you which is your Carbon Footprint / #KISS Week 41

Every human activity generates a carbon footprint, from industrial to individual activities.

If we want to take individual actions to take care of our environment, is necessary to be aware of how we can contribute with our grain of sand.

Today I want to share some data about the carbon footprint we leave every time we cook in our homes and offer some alternatives to minimize it.

Sometimes it seems difficult to achieve it, especially today when we are surrounded by so much technology that contributes to high electricity consumption and its consequences to the environment.

Every human activity that requires combustion contributes CO2 to the environment. Surely you are thinking about the simple act of breathing, and yes, you are right! But when we breathe, the CO2 we emit into the environment is absorbed and processed by plants. The vegetation is fundamental to this balance by preventing some gases (not just CO2) from being trapped in the atmosphere and having harmful effects on the climate.

Perhaps for the primitive man, it was easy to avoid the effects of burning wood for heating and cooking, but for today's man, it is vital to be aware of this. Paradoxically, the more technologically advanced we become, the faster the environment deteriorates.

At home, there are endless recommendations to minimize electricity consumption, but what about when we cook?

Cooking is a daily activity. At our homes, we have a stove that allows us to prepare our food. We also have freezers, refrigerators, coffee makers, microwaves, blenders, and any other appliance to whisk, mix or chop. However, in this post, I will only focus on the use of the stove.

Man has at his disposal a variety of foods for his consumption. It should be noted that foods that are consumed raw, such as vegetables and fruits, do not require much processing. It is very different from the case of meats and legumes. These foods require long cooking times, which in turn require a lot of domestic gas or electricity.

So I think it is easy to see that our carbon footprint will be smaller when using shorter cooking methods rather than longer ones.

The carbon footprint will be smaller when beef is prepared as meatballs than in a stew.

The same will be for cooking chicken. It is more "ecological" to prepare a grilled chicken breast (15 minutes) than to roast a chicken (1 hour or more).

Stoves in the house can be of two types. Some run on domestic gas, and others on electricity. There are even hybrid models, i.e. one part runs on gas and the other on electricity.

In the case of gas stoves, they use domestic gas as fuel, which is composed of methane, a gas with a large carbon footprint when burned (it is a greenhouse gas).

The term "carbon footprint" refers to the amount of CO2 emitted into the environment through our domestic and industrial activities.

Domestic gas consumption in the home is conditioned by both the cooking time and the type of burners. In general, gas stoves have small or medium-intensity burners (they consume less gas, and provide a weak flame) and high-intensity burners (they heat more, intense flame). Therefore, an average domestic gas consumption per hour is estimated.

For every hour that food is cooked, 1.2 cubic meters of gas are consumed. But to compare gas consumption with electricity consumption, cubic meters of gas must be converted into kWh so we have that:

In the case of electric stoves, to estimate their consumption each time we cook, we must also consider that these stoves have small, medium, and large burners. On average, one hour of cooking on electric stoves consumes from 1.2 kWh to 3 kWh. Taking the maximum electricity consumption, we have that: