These Five Cuisines Are Easier on the Planet

So happy to see Vietnamese cuisine included! I grew up eating meat in portions where 1/4 lb. of beef would go into a stir fry feeding 4 people... Was shocked to grow up and meet others stating that much as serving size for ONE, and that rice / noodles/ bread etc. Is BAD. Really???? And yes, if you're going to eat meat eat ALL of it, offals and everything. You can duplicate chicken breast with tofu, but liver / heart/ tripe/ gizzard/ tendon?? No way. Nom nom nom

This is an absurd take on paella. It doesn´t demand fancy ingredients and it doesn´t need special pans and bomba rice is terrific stuff but you can make a great paella with just about any decent short grain white rice. It´s just un arroz, a rice dish made with what´s available, always has been.

They are all corollaries of Lappe's still valuable "Diet for a Small Planet." In the forty years since publication the concept of diet for all got corrupted by diet for me. One might not think that a bad thing as "buy-in" is crucial, but the problem with individual obsession, even if over a "healthy" diet, is its subjection to the odd idea, fad and fetish. Hence, the recent keto and cave man craze which even if cage free and range fed, is ecologically unsustainable.

all tree huggers, give up your beef not your car

As the daughter of a Venezuelan immigrant with loads of family struggling in my father's home country, I am very disappointed that the section on Venezuela's cuisine makes no mention of the starving people it belongs to. I always feel guilty when I just pop into my local grocery store in the US and grab a bag of Harina PAN, knowing that even basic staples like it are nearly impossible to come by for my family members and their neighbors. How can we discuss Venezuelan food without acknowledging this?

EASIER on the climate eat local, unprocessed, Organic foods, in season. Eating foods shipped from Chile out of season is no climate friendly! eating new zealand lamb is not climate friendly. Eating California avocados in UK is not climate friendly.

Who knew? You can eat extremely well - mmm, paella! - and heal the planet. Just the meals mentioned in this article looks to be a very sustainable long term "diet". Regrettably industrial food just makes it too easy to eat, grow fat and harm the planet.

To each their own personalized delicious cuisine with fresh herbs and spices that provides balanced nutrition and is easier on the planet. One person's cuisine is another poison. Common ingredients that make food flavorful in most cuisines is salt, starch, sugar and saturated fats. I call these ingredients my mine field. These ingredients are not cleared easily when in excess and can be toxic to those with diminished ability to clear them out of the body. Significant amount of the inhabitants of our planet have abnormal clinical conditions like hypertension, obesity, blocked arteries, diabetes, dementia due to what we allow to enter our body through our mouths. Having a planet with increasing numbers of sick people causing self inflicted harm to themselves is very hard on our planet. A pinch of any of these ingredients would be okay if that is all is used but anything in excess is poison and excess for one person could be no big deal for someone else. But that is a mirage. Ultimately it will get to most and a planet full of unhealthy people. I love trying a variety of cuisines but I try to be selective in what I order from the menu and then get it customized before it comes to me or continue the process of diminishing excess. I only go to restaurants that can keep salt low or if they cannot because it was already seasoned with high salt, I dunk it in water. Greens &Eggs GEGGZA has become my precision staple food. https://crimsonpublishers.com/ntnf/fulltext/NTNF.000516.php

Has anyone noticed how expensive fruits and vegetables have become? Usually I buy only 1 or 2 kinds of fresh fruit and the same with vegetables. Otherwise, it’s canned or frozen for us. Also, I lived in Florida and if I buy more, it only goes to waste. Frozen veg are just as nutritious as fresh. Just a thought on how to decrease food waste.

This article is easy and soothing. I felt as if I were in each location enjoying a meal as described. I eat a pescetarian diet, continuing to focus on the importance of consuming a variety of foods (and variety is a focus with the author). But who knows? Tomorrow I may return to a more vegan diet. I don't judge! I'm older than many and find that new flavors attract me slowly, so I most often eat the foods I grew up with cooked in a different manner. But I am interested in the earth, conservation, my health, and my wallet. And eating around a table with others. This article is not preachy, but full of information and didn't necessarily give me new ideas as much as it sent my mind twirling this morning with my own new ideas. No matter what we do or eat on a regular basis, for me, being reminded about something important, is always appreciated.

This article has a lot of good suggestions but it ignores the reality of food in America. Most of our wheat, soy, and corn are GMO's that are dangerously identical in genetic composition over vast acreage and therefore lack the genetic diversity to survive climate change. Think the European potato famine of Northern Europe. These crops are grown on what was once the Great Plains, where farmers practice intensive tillage and other farming practices that are major consumers of petroleum products. Tillage of grasslands like the once formerly Great Plains results in loss of top soil to the wind and rain and ultimate impoverishment of the soil - again over a vast sea of acreage that once supported an astonishing diversity of life that is now gone. Those plains are where the bison mentioned in this article once grazed - along with antelope, elk, and deer. Eating food that is produced from this triad - bread, tofu, cornbread, noodles, etc - that is industrially produced in this country goes a long way towards contributing to not just climate change but crashing biodiversity. My point is simply that it isn't just what you eat, but where it comes from, and how it is produced. There are unfortunately no simple answers. There are just too many people on the planet. There has never been 8 billion of any single mammal species on Earth before.

My memories of growing up in Kansas is country's best but the far less "easy on the planet" BBQ. Happy to know that there is a planet-friendly, tasty alternative. Maybe the way to approach Kansas is to import the Vietnamese way -- less BBQ, but not BBQ-less.

Really interesting and fun read! Focusing on cultural staples that are also sustainable is a great way to inspire a more global and interesting food culture that can be widely enjoyed. Thanks so much for the perspective!

The author is wrong in her claim that the Indian pancake DOSA is made from Pigeon Pea (Toor Dal). As all of India knows, DOSA is actually made from Black Gram (Urad Dal).

Another "light fair" article for the hungry meat eaters we are! It skirts about one big ole fact: beef consumption is one of the primary drivers of climate change! Do your research folks: animal ag and particularly beef are one of the biggest contributors to climate chaos. Steak + coal powered power plant + refrigerants equals big trouble !! Look around, take it personally, and cut out the beef today for the sake of your grandchildren.

"And then there’s dal, the savory lentil stew without which no Indian meal is complete". How so? Dal ( yellow split pea) is common in Northern Indian cuisine, not so much in the south where other peas are used, not with every meal.

I loved Anthony Bourdains food shows and was impressed by the segment profiling India. Bourdain was a confirmed carnivore, but in the show profiling the cuisine of northern India he said of the mainly vegetarian diet, something to the effect 'if we could get food that tastes this good in the U.S. I might be able to give up meat." If we consumed much more legumes and pulses we might just be able to feed the planet as well as reduce environmental degradation. Your food dollar goes ten times farther when eating protein loaded plants.

Very enjoyable read! While I personally know the research behind many of the claims, rarely do we see articles about food choice with individual profiles, let alone from around the globe. It made for a really nice end to my evening. And a major thanks for highlighting native Kansans in the article. Native peoples all over the world have a lot to teach those of us whose ancestors haven’t been in the same location for many hundreds of years or more!

The author describes herself as a "personal chef to a growing, ravenous child" Is "personal chef" meant to be witty - maybe an allusion to inflated resumes? Or is it serious ? I think it's the latter. Children don't need a personal chef, nor should they have one. She's a mom who cooks for her kid. That's enough. Please don't embellish.

Very nice article thank you.

Great to see Kansas and indigenous American traditions included!

The key issue for the planet is not what we eat, but that we are too many. Eat less met, sure, but then we will have to feed the 7 billion of us something, vegetables...sure... Agriculture in its modern version is destructive to the soil, water resources, wildlife, human health... Nuts...sure, they are water intensive crops, and like vegetables, they require large swath of land to be cleared and artificially (read chemically) maintained “pest” free. If we (industrial countries) ear less, we will just slow down the inevitable...by the times humans are done with this planet it will be lucky if monocellulari organisms survive. If you really want to save the planet, don’t procreate.

As my father would say, this is a penny wise and pound foolish type of article. So much big picture to deal with. Do that 1st. Then we can move to the minutiae. I'm starting to skip all the climate change articles because it's becoming the boy who cried wolf

How do you include an avocado in any recipe that’s planet friendly? 72 liters of water does it take to grow one avocado.

Cuisines aren’t wrecking the planet - people are wrecking the planet. There are just too many people. Cuisine is one of the most intrinsic parts of culture. To abandon ones culture for sustainability sounds like a admirable goal, but it is really a poor workaround for the real problem which is overpopulation. Today, legumes and mussels, tomorrow seaweed and insects, after that.....soylent green?

The problem is our association with food. It’s deeply personal for most of us. We can’t move too far away from what we grow up with. Most of my “adventurous” friends settled into what they grow up with as they gotten older. So we need to start making smaller changes so we can move toward a sustainable model over a few generations. We need a way to decouple the food preferences conversation from politics. There’s nothing inherently “leftist” about vegetarianism. Serious conservatives in India are vegetarians. We need to shift the cultural biases.

Dosa is made with split black gram (urad dal) not pigeon pea.

Nice article. Many of us would like to "save the planet" in the big and small ways that we can. Of course, there is the "save the planet" irony that, if you try to access the mentioned recipes than can help save the planet, you're blocked by the NYT's pay wall for recipes. I have this suggestion: In general, require NYT's subscribers to pay the extra fees for accessing recipes. But in the case of a special article like this, provide access to at least some of the recipes for free. Who knows, maybe you'll even attract some new recipe subscribers.

Sorry NYT halloumi is the national cheese of Cyprus!!!

Moderation and avoidance of wastage are key in preserving our planet and its resources. Food, is a cultural by product, a blueprint from thousands of years of habit and tradition. This article picks up a few simple examples and illustrates well. It is not advocating a particular method , tradition or thought but rather showing us how to use food optimally and avoid wastage. I love the regional selection of diets.

The author does an excellent job of describing many non-fattening foods. The article would read better, if it were not couched in the mumbo-jumbo of the vegans and leftist radical Democrats. Call a spade a spade, the species Homo sapiens Linnaeus 1758 is panphagous or omnivorous, with a varying tendency to carnivorousness.

Sorry, I just didn't find much new here: eat more grains & vegetables; use meat as a flavoring. Disappointing article.

Thank you! Delicious AND creative. Most of all, see if you can get off CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feed Operations) and try to buy local when you can. CAFOs are wasteful and inhumane, and require vast amounts of toxic chemicals to provide food that is not dangerous. And, as Florence showed, the waste (especially since deregulation serves short-term profiteers) will spread around and is dangerous.

Agree with another commenter's opinion on the so-called "Kansas Cuisine," and I'd like to add that Halloumi cheese is a Cypriot cheese, and even though it's enjoyed by endless other countries including Lebanon, there is no overt cultural link that justifies the title.

The indigenous diet of Mesoamerica is one of the most sustainable on the planet, and along with the Japanese indigenous diet, one of the most nutritionally complete: maize, beans, squash, chiles. And some avocados. Everything is better with avocados.

I know this will make me sound extreme, but in my opinion, no one who advocates eating animals is serious about their concern for the future of the human race. The planet will be just fine thank you. It was here before we arrived and will be here after we are gone.

eat food, mostly plants - not too much ... a nice article reminding us that too much meat is not good for us

I really, really love this series of articles! I love how these foods that are kinder on the planet are also often kinder to ourselves. and so delicious! Shout out to Ethiopian and Indonesian food, which I could eat every day, and which always feels like a treat.

Love seeing the variety of meals, the spices and herbs, and legumes. Definitely more exploration is due in my kitchen. Thank you for the inspiration!

I love this series... wonderful work!

the writer takes the (albeit good) eating practices of a single person on Kansas, and extrapolates that to approve of the eating habits of the 'cuisine of Kansas'. If she were to spend any time in Kansas, she would realize that it is in fact beef-eating country, as is much of the Midwest. Kansas is in the top 5 in the country in head of cattle on farms and feedlots. And no, buffalo are not replacing cattle to any significant degree. Meat is generally at the center of the meal in the Kansas, the Midwest - along with a lot of other places in the U.S. Outside of cattle, Kansas also produces vast amounts of commodity crops, which are often watered by depleting the Ogallala Aquifer. So the author is discussing less the sustainable cuisine of Kansas, than the sustainable cuisine of a single individual.