Seems like a new book on climate-friendly cooking is constantly being released. Do they matter, or do they unfairly place the burden of political economy and social change on the lowly consumer? What type of cooking might actually be impactful, and why? Why do we even bother cooking anyway?
In today's Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori Cofounder and Director of Creative & Marketing, Ross Kenyon, is joined by Tamar Adler, a James Beard awardee and author of several books, including An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z, and Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revised.
Tamar shares her unique approach to cooking which emphasizes the beauty of the endless transformation of ingredients, utilizing and elevating leftovers, and making food an enduring lifestyle rather than a collection of discrete meals.
This focus on transformation, leftovers, and creatively utilizing so many of the parts we often throw away, has an obvious climate angle. But Tamar isn't convinced that's the best reason to pursue her way of cooking, and in fact, doing it for political purposes may make it hard to sustain for the same reasons that diets are hard to sustain: if it isn't joyful, it's a burden. And if it's a burden, it is so much harder to sustain.
Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of An Everlasting Meal, and subscribe to Tamar's new Substack, The Kitchen Shrink, where you can ask her all of the cooking questions you've kept locked in your root cellar.
More from the show
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
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Resources
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace
The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z
Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revised
The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon
The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You're listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I'm Ross Kenyon. I'm one of the cofounders of Nori and the Director of Creative and Marketing here. Today I have with me Tamar Adler, the Chez Panisse alum and the author of several books including Something Old, Something New; The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A–Z; and An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace. And you're also the author of The Kitchen Shrink, which is a Substack that you're producing. Thanks for being here, Tamar.
Tamar Adler: Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: I'm — I'm not — I'm trying not to be a little too starstruck, but I am a little bit, because you've helped me out so much. I've long experienced cooking as fairly stressful, and I've plateaued. I felt like there were a couple things that I could cook kind of well, and as long as I stayed within those parameters, I was somewhat safe. But it was a suboptimal safety zone, and An Everlasting Meal was the first book that I read — and I've read lots of books on food — that I felt pretty well unstuck me.
It was a very elegant slap in the face. It's a beautiful book to read, and it chilled me out, made cooking more fun and easier and the output better. I don't know how you achieve all of those things at the same time. It sounds like it was just a Pareto improvement with no cost, essentially, and I imagine I'm not the first person to tell you that, which means it's probably a running theme for people kind of like me. What did we miss along the way about cooking? How do we put ourselves in a position where it is stressful and difficult and hard to learn?
Tamar Adler: Well, I'm so glad that the book helped you — that's so wonderful to hear. And yeah, people have told me that it's helped them, but every single time it feels — yeah, it just feels like all of the work that I have put into trying to help people cook is bearing fruit. And so that just makes me so happy.
I don't know if it's that we're missing things about cooking. I think there are a lot of parts of our culture and society right now that conspire to make cooking difficult, and also conspire to make it seem like something that it isn't. What I talk about a lot in An Everlasting Meal, and also in my most recent book, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, is to what a great degree cooking is not a concrete, very staccato process — that cooking really is ongoing.
It's kind of like a tide more than it is like, you know, a photo still. It's not a single event. It has to be an ongoing process, and it is, and it always has been. I think right now in time, culturally, it's really hard to understand that, because there aren't that many examples of it, and because we mostly get cooking through media that make it seem very sort of concrete and like photo stills. You know, you start at the beginning and then you stop at the meal, and what I've written about is that that's not the case. That doesn't make sense for anybody. Nobody can do that.
And even just yesterday, I just wrote a Kitchen Shrink column. It's called The Mystery of Mr. Eat to Live, because somebody wrote me and said, here's my Zen question: how do I make time to cook? And my response ended up being very much about the same thing — that cooking isn't what we think it is, and that is what makes it so hard. But if we can see what it actually is, it's much more doable.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it's a beautiful, thoughtful answer. I think once I started treating it less like a chore that I had to complete for my family, and something that was pleasurable for its own sake — it's not something to get through so I can go watch the movie I want to watch or the activity I want to do, but it was actually the thing itself. Even Sunday meal prep with my family became a really fun thing rather than the "oh God, we've got to do that today." And I think that shift was at least partially inspired by your work, where this could be a zone of creativity and joy and not drudgery. And for a lot of people, I think cooking feels like drudgery.
Tamar Adler: Yeah, well. So why did it become fun? Do you remember what shifted for you?
Ross Kenyon: I think one of the things in An Everlasting Meal that started me thinking this way was just: get some beautiful vegetables from the farmers market and just cook them. Not everything has to come out hot — in fact, we fetishize hot food in a really perilous way — and just start thinking about making stuff ahead of time that can be transformed later in the week, even if you don't know how yet. Some of those basic transformations can unlock other types of creativity. So you don't just have an entire fridge full of raw things, but you have things in various states of transformation that can then be recombined. And it opened up a lot of new configurations that I hadn't previously conceived. I think that was the first step.
Tamar Adler: I think — yeah, I mean, I babbled. I babbled a bit when I answered your first question. But I think you just put it really well, which is: what's so hard is thinking that we have to do all of our cooking right before a meal. But it sounds like you started doing — and what I always recommend that people do is do small amounts of cooking all the time and then take advantage of the cooking that you've done, so that you're never starting from absolutely nothing and you're never at the end. You kind of have something to work with all the time, which makes it so much easier.
The same way — you know, we know this from behavioral economists and stuff — it's so much easier to do anything when the cognitive lift is a little bit lower, when it's a lighter cognitive lift. And when you have some squash cooked or some rice cooked or whatever, that's that much more of a meal that you already have cooked and you don't have to start from absolutely nothing.
Ross Kenyon: That's definitely a huge part of it. And then also, I have found plating to be historically a trigger for me, because I want everything to come out so it's hot, it hits the table, everyone's happy, and there's steam pouring off of it in the most cinematic way. And that has been hell, and it very rarely actually works out like that. I often feel like one thing has become cold in the plating of the other, and then there's an expectation that it will come out hot. And I just relaxed that, and I feel a lot better about it now. And then you've also just said a lot of things are good cold. In fact, a lot of things are good several days after they've been cooked. They've sort of become themselves in the process of waiting patiently for you.
Tamar Adler: That's a beautiful thought. I mean, I kind of wonder also where that made-up orthodoxy about hot food even comes from. What I was just picturing when you were talking was like kids' cartoons, you know, where you see the cartoon steam lines. Like the rotisserie chicken, yeah, with the little lines coming out of it, where it's almost entirely manufactured, right? It's not even real food. And I'm like, maybe that's where it comes from — having seen, as kids, these fake steam lines coming off of cartoon food signifying hot, and you're like, food must be hot. And that's not even true. I mean, it's just not true anywhere.
Ross Kenyon: It can't be. I mean, there are places where it's distinctly false. I think if you serve meat that hot, it probably hasn't rested, so it's probably not at its peak anyways, right?
Tamar Adler: Yeah. And like heat lamps in restaurants are very rare. That's a very kind of — I don't know, that seems like a kind of antiquated thing.
Ross Kenyon: No, I just — do they just let food cool at the pass?
Tamar Adler: They don't do heat lamps really anymore. No, they stress. I mean, some places have heat lamps. Everybody stresses and runs around and makes sure that they get everything to the pass at exactly the same time. But that's stressful. Nobody would — nobody does that at home, and you shouldn't. That's like — also you've got all people getting different — you know, when you have one person getting fish and one person getting steak and one person getting couscous, that's a different operation than if you're just giving everybody the same meal. I think that's part of going back to your first question: restaurant food and home food are different. We are not trying to make our homes into restaurants. We totally shouldn't. That would be awful.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Yeah, that's a thing where I understand that we see a lot of restaurants on TV, or see a lot of chefs acting restaurant-y, but it's not pleasant and it's not the same thing. Do you want your sacred domestic space feeling like The Bear? I don't. That's sort of how I experienced it. Internally, my superego is just yelling at me to make sure everything is hot and perfect.
Tamar Adler: No. Yeah, no. That's ruining my life. I mean, yeah, I didn't even — I didn't watch that show because I didn't really need to see that again. There are lots of things where we acknowledge that they function differently on a professional level and on a domestic level, right? Like, we don't — on a commercial level and on a domestic level, we don't. Tons of stuff. It's fun to sit and make a birdhouse with your child, and she gets glue everywhere, and you guys have made a little birdhouse, and it's a sweet, tender birdhouse that you then put up in your backyard.
And you don't compare it to a beautiful Thai carved ancestor house that you buy in Bangkok — you know what I'm talking about, they're like beautiful ancestor houses. But you don't sit there and go, oh, I really should have had a lathe, and I should have whittled away the molding. You're like, no, I made this with my child. That is the work of a professional. It's not the same thing, and it shouldn't be the same thing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I find that to be a very grounding thought. What is it about leftovers that always feels so second best? I like your rehabilitation of the idea of leftovers, especially as regards to things like soups. You're saying the first day is actually not even the best anyways, and it's OK to wait. But I feel like if I told someone that, they'd be like, uh huh, that serves your interest a little too well, and you're just trying to serve me something that you made several days ago because you're lazy.
Tamar Adler: Well, first of all, they're just wrong, and I'm sorry that they are not yet educated in the [unclear]. It's soup. I always feel bad when I serve soup the day I make it. I feel like — for a different perspective — I feel like I could not get ahead of my game, because if I were really staying organized, I would have made the soup the day before.
Because even just a couple months ago when it was still summer, I had friends over who were professional chefs, and they make really delicious food. I was making them pappa al pomodoro, which is literally stale bread tomato soup, made of some of the liquid that was leftover from blanching tomatoes to freeze them, and then some kind of rotting tomatoes and some frozen. It was just all over the place. Super delicious, but so much better the next day. And I'm philosophically opposed to ever apologizing for what you serve somebody. But I did have to bite my lip the entire meal while they were like, oh, this is so delicious, and be like, don't apologize for not having made it yesterday. And indeed, when I tasted it the next day I was like, this is — see, this is the soup.
There are so many things that we acknowledge need aging, so many things. And this is an example. You could even think of it as: it actually takes 48 hours to make great pappa al pomodoro. You do the original cooking, and then you have to put it away and let it chill, age. I did serve it the first day, so I'm not saying you should be a reverse snob, but it was better 24 hours later, and the very last time I had it, it was just transportive, just epically delicious.
Yeah, it's again just kind of a shift in our cultural orthodoxy, I think. I think we live in a culture that really places a premium on things being new. But we all — Americans travel to Europe all the time, where a premium is placed on things being old, and marvel at it, and they're so happy at the old architecture and the old recipes. It's all about preservation. It's an entire continent that places that premium on what was. And I think that makes it hard to acknowledge in our culture, because it just doesn't really vibe with the compulsive need to make new things and buy new things and come up with new things and grow new things — to acknowledge that the old thing is good, like maybe even better.
Ross Kenyon: A lot of your work has this theme. I mean, Something Old, Something New certainly does. But one of the tasks that I self-imposed upon myself and my office was to cook an entire leg of lamb in the Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb style, which I had to justify that expense on the company card. I am — this show better be damn good, Tamar. You better start bringing it.
Tamar Adler: I think it already is good.
Ross Kenyon: Look, we've gotten "old is better than new." What else?
Tamar Adler: Well, we'll just — we're going to — we'll ratchet it up. We'll ratchet it up.
Ross Kenyon: No, I'm loving it, and I'm obviously just teasing. What I loved about it — and maybe I can run this by you and tell me if I've internalized the lesson that you're pointing to here, and he is as well — is that the old way of cooking meat was not always at the center. So all of these dishes with the leg of lamb: the goal is to have 30-something servings come off of a single leg of lamb. But a family could just — you could roast this in the oven and that family would demolish that leg in one sitting and not think anything of it. But his way of cooking it in various different braises and stews and fried rice, and using the bones to cook down into stock — this is a way of really using every part of it.
It almost reminded me of old peasant cooking, essentially — of just really trying to make sure that the animal is a way of storing calories for hard times, and you're making sure that you've maximized this and honored the animal that died to sustain you. And I thought that was a really beautiful lesson of how wrongly we are eating meat. And also it was just a series of beautiful, tasty meals as well. It wasn't like I gave anything up. In fact, I found this to be very creative and fun and slow in the best kind of way. Did I do this right? Do you agree with what I'm saying?
Tamar Adler: I completely agree with it. And I've tried periodically writing something about the corruption of materialism — which I know this sounds super, super digressive, but it isn't, in the sense that I feel like we misinterpret what real materialism is. And I completely forget now who said this, but another religious writer — obviously Robert Farrar Capon is, or was, a priest. He was like a — he was defrocked, or he gave up being an Anglican, or a vicar. I don't really understand. I mean, he's a strange man, whatever happened.
Ross Kenyon: I love him. I love him. I don't know about his defrocking. I'll read up afterwards.
Tamar Adler: But there is something religious about that incredibly preservative and conservative treatment of a living thing. But it also strikes me as a version of what this other religious writer — whose name I now am totally blanking on — said, which is: God doesn't hate material things, God invented them. And the idea of that is that it's not terrible to love the material world, but to love something is to treat it with care and cherish every part of it. And I love how religious that is, because that is the approach to food that I take, and that makes the most sense to me. But that's not out of some sense of moral superiority. It's the cheapest and most delicious way to eat.
And what happens when you cook a single leg of lamb and then make a gajillion meals out of it is, of course, you are truly cherishing that material, right? Everything that went into that is being amortized in your enjoyment of it, and how much you're thinking about it, and then the conversations you're having, and then the gathering around the table, and then this conversation. You're eking so much life out of that single leg of lamb. And it deserves it. You know, it carried a life.
And I feel like that's — back to your leftovers question — I think the reason I treat leftovers the way I do is for the same reason: that the farro that is leftover grew on a stalk, and a stalk grew in soil, and the soil was part of a whole incredible ecosystem. And it makes me happy to talk and write about it, because it does feel like that's more payoff from the use of that resource. And so I just think it's so beautiful and meaningful to acknowledge that we're using resources. You're using resources, and a lot with meat — meat takes the most resources of anything. So particularly with meat, religion aside, since you are allowing all of those resources to be used on your behalf, you should be making a lot of it.
Ross Kenyon: I like the religious or spiritual focus on this as well. I like that in cooking in this way it's not disembodied, it's very embodied as well. And I have a leg that I have sawn through and interacted with, and working with my son on it too, and being like, this came from a lamb, we're trying to honor it and use every piece of it. I'm trying to make sure that — an animal died to feed our family. How can we best make the most use out of this and not be wasteful or flippant about an animal's life? I'm trying not to be nearly so didactic about it at every moment.
Tamar Adler: I was picturing my son. If I said that, he'd be like, Mom. He'd be like, you're embarrassing.
Ross Kenyon: But I don't know, I try to — eh, kids sometimes are a little more subtle than that. So I just try to make it clear: this came from an animal. It's not just something that falls out of the sky into a piece of wax paper and you're done with it. And it's good, we got it from a good place. I got it from Beast and Cleaver, which is a whole animal butcher that's down the street in Seattle. And they're incredible. And they also do a bunch of old world — we got black pudding from them recently. And they do all sorts of strange pâtés and terrines and foie gras and stuff. But sourced very well. So an animal that came from a place where it was loved and treated well, it went through the slaughtering process in a way that was well treated, and then afterwards it was honored all the way through.
And I think that has made me — yes, I'm still talking about it, I'm still thinking about it, I'm still appreciative of it, in a way that the steak that I got, the New York strip or whatever, that thing's long gone. I'm not thinking about that anymore. And I think one of the things I also like about that too is that if you aren't that great of a cook, you can often substitute time for skill in a way that I think really makes cooking better, and I thought this was a good example of that.
Tamar Adler: Yeah, I completely agree. And I also think there was something really valuable and noteworthy in what you were describing — the butcher shop. All of the things that you described them carrying could sound like delicacies, do sound like delicacies. You said pâté, foie gras, black pudding, all of this stuff. If let's say somebody was just tuning into this right now, they could hear that list of things and think of gourmandism and elitism and only the finest and French delicacies, and like pâté, da da — all of those things are of course whole animal ways of using the whole animal.
And even though foie gras does come from the gavage process, where you're force feeding ducks or geese grain, it is still using the liver of a bird. And pâtés exist because people who have raised animals have always wanted to use all of the animal — and more than wanted, needed to use all of the animal. And so I think it's really interesting that all of these things that the butcher shop is selling as delicacies, and things that are costly, or sort of like only a fancy person would buy them, are ways of making the most of every single animal that is killed.
And I think that's a place where great cooking and great economy, or spiritualism and gourmandism, or cooking in general and pleasure intersect. And those are the places where we should — we're so lucky, we're so privileged that these things intersect where they do. Because it means that if you really want to have something delicious for an appetizer, you buy pâté. But that pâté also means that a pig's liver and all kinds of other parts don't go out the back door. They go into a [unclear], or a terrine, or whatever.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that is a beautiful thing. And maybe I wonder if that was something that, you know, New York City, that estuary was littered with oysters and they were the cheapest thing that you could eat. And now I barely had any the other day and got a $70 bill and wanted to scream. I'm in Seattle. I think I got like 13 of them or something. I think they ended up being like five bucks apiece, and I didn't check, and I ended up being way over my head.
Tamar Adler: But other things were way worse back when there were a lot of cheap oysters.
Ross Kenyon: That's — I'm sure they were dumping horrible sludge in there, and yeah, the lives of a lot of people were a lot worse. So I think it stinks that it was $70, but all said, we're still better off, even though the oysters were like a cent apiece.
Tamar Adler: Well, yeah, I'm not going to take the other side of that argument. Don't, don't try and put words in my mouth like that.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I don't want to make that trade either. It's more just the transformation of these things that used to be sort of proletarian fare, and now they're not. Was that the same with pâté, where now it's associated with high class luxury? Maybe foie gras always was, because that is a decadent thing. But maybe organ meats, despite being very nutritious — I imagine those were not the first choice of the aristocrats who were living in the manor.
Tamar Adler: Yeah, not at all, right. That's what you said about peasant cooking. So much of what we now treat as a delicacy came from necessity, and certainly pâtés and all that are part of it. And to your point about time, they're things that take very little investment other than time, right? You already have the innards and the offal, and all you actually have to commit to it is a willingness to sit around, willingness to clean it, smush it all together, season it and cook it.
Ross Kenyon: It's not even just for meat either. A lot of your writing has to do with — the same holds for vegetables as well. There are plenty of parts that maybe are not primarily edible but are secondarily edible, and you can turn them into broth, or under the right treatment can have a second life. And it might otherwise go — if you're lucky or good, it would go in your compost pile or in your municipal compost, but otherwise it'll just end up in a landfill. And there are plenty of ways to retreat ingredients that you might not even think of as ingredients. And that's — food waste is a big thing people on climate change talk about a lot, and this is one of the places where maybe your work dovetails with that thinking.
Tamar Adler: Yeah, I think where it dovetails the most clearly is when it comes to pleasure and appetite. Because I think that the issue happens when we talk about food that is actually good food as waste. We talk about it as — you know, it's not waste until we say it is. And it's not particularly wholesome or morally superior to cook your waste, or to say I'm going to throw nothing away. I don't think that's a good driver of behavior.
It's like the same way the only thing that we know about diets is that they guarantee weight gain. That's the only thing that we know about any kind of restrictive eating: 98% of the time it means you'll gain weight. So don't do that, that's not a good idea. And with throwing out food, I think that holding oneself to some standard of I'm not throwing anything away, or I'm a food waste warrior, could result in that kind of feeling like, oh God, I just want to friggin' get Mexican takeout and get all this stuff and eat what I want and then throw the plastic containers in the garbage and throw the leftover beans in the — whatever. And I don't want to be good anymore, because it's really hard to be good.
And so the reason I think pleasure matters is because if you just focus on things being delicious, wanting things to taste as good as they can with the actual materials that you have, that in and of itself is a hedonistic reason to use everything that can be used. And if you can just go with that, then there's nothing to rebel against. There's nothing restrictive. You're not being good, you're just making good food. And that's what I always want to encourage — therefore my most recent book, which is a leftovers encyclopedia. So you could either think of it as the CliffsNotes version or the advanced version of An Everlasting Meal, because you can look up anything. It could be either.
But I had originally, when I was writing that book, I wanted to put in recipes that were, like, not really — some of them were just mediocre — and have a guide, like a little visual guide, so that if they were great you'd have a mouth with the tongue out, or a thumbs up. And then if they were kind of good, you'd have somebody being like — and then if they were like, only make this if you're starving, I would have another sign, like thumbs down. Or, here's a thing you can do if you have to, but don't do this unless you have to. And then my editor told me not to do that, which I think was a good idea. That was not — my idea was not a good one.
But I'm really glad that I left them out, because I realize now that the most important thing, the best and clearest way to use all that we can, is to use it all well. And that putting in mediocre recipes could have actually encouraged the other kind of behavior, where you're like, well, I guess I can make this thing with kasha, but now I feel like I've done an extra good deed and I'm going to compensate by, I don't know, with Cool Whip or something.
Ross Kenyon: It's a really wise way to thread that needle. I like that too. It's also just not sustainable, in the same way that diets are not. You might say that this is a lifestyle change, it's a new way to approach cooking. This is not something like, just cut out this, or if you make anything, use 100% of that, even though it's terrible, even though you hate it, even though your body's going to rebel against it and you're going to break all these rules that you set up for yourself for essentially no reason. So in effect, you might end up on net worse off than when you started after reading Tamar Adler's books. I don't — I haven't personally experienced that. But the wrong person might read your book if it had that wrong taxonomy of smiles, and ruin their lives, essentially.
Tamar Adler: Ruin their lives. Yeah. I just think, you know, I don't think that trying to be good is fair to yourself, and I think that thankfully that's not what you have to do. You can just try to make good food, and that will have a more lasting result.
Ross Kenyon: You're cracking me up, because you're so good with words. I don't like flattering guests too much, but it's really a beautiful book. I think there are many parts of it that I ended up circling, just being like, this is just beautiful for its own sake. And what did you just say? I don't know that it's wise to be good. What did you just say?
Tamar Adler: You're making me very self-conscious.
Ross Kenyon: I know, that's the thing. That's why you don't want to do that to guests sometimes.
Tamar Adler: But thankfully I have this dog here to pet, so I have a therapy dog, so I will try to metabolize all of that flattery. When hosts say nice things about you, you have to just outsource that to dog love. And that's the only thing you can do.
Ross Kenyon: I know that we spoke about this a tiny bit, about how some of the climate and food angles are maybe less interesting. I don't want to put words in your mouth. I don't know how you would describe it, but maybe not something that is as exciting to you as perhaps I might have thought, given your work on leftovers and thoughts on meat and things like that. Is what you just said a pretty accurate way of rebelling against the climate and food link in your preferred way, or is there more to it?
Tamar Adler: No, I think that my argument against making too much of a connection between individual food choice and climate change is a little bit crotchety. And it's the same argument as kind of realizing that BP invented the idea of carbon footprint, right? That too much attention to individual behavior can obscure the systemic problems. That is all that it is. And I worry about people feeling too complacent because of small good choices. The problems with resource use are not limited to and cannot be solved by individual choice.
So it's awesome to use silicone bags instead of plastic bags, and to make banana peel curry, which is delicious, and to save and reuse your tinfoil. And all the small choices that we can make are great, and I've kind of at different points in the past sneered at them a little bit, even though they're how I live and they're what I write about, so it seems a little bit hypocritical. But I think what I want to say is, it's really important not to lose focus on the larger issue, which is our food system writ large is a really big problem. It's owned by a couple of small corporations. It's incredibly resource intensive. It is absolutely exhausting to land and humans.
And it's connected a little bit, in that I think of being able to use all of what you have, being able to use all of your leftovers, being able to use all of your ingredients and all of your meat, as a kind of sovereignty. When you can do all of that, you can be less reliant on this very destructive food system, which is good, right? And it means that they don't have quite the same hold over you, and you don't need to go back to the big supermarket and buy the boneless skinless meat that allows the system to keep grinding. So that's good. That degree of self-sufficiency is important. It's not just good, it's important and necessary.
At the same time, individual food choice, individual food waste is not the problem. The fact that — blah blah subsidies, blah blah, no conservation, blah blah, big corporations — you know, it's capitalism, dummy, is the thing that, when I'm feeling crotchety, that's what it comes down to, right? I don't care if you keep the tops of your strawberries and your strawberry leaves and use them in a salad. It's capitalism, dummy. You know, that's the crotchety version.
I just don't want it to — it's not an individual choice thing. And the fact that so many people can't make individual choices is bound up in a larger system called capitalism, dummy. So I know it sounds like a little bit — I don't know, I don't want to sound cynical. I think all of that sounds a little cynical. And loving life, loving all of the materials in your life, feeling resourceful, feeling ingenious, feeling competent — all of that matters so much to even having the energy to hope, to make changes to the systems that are actually destroying the planet. So in that way also, food matters.
Ross Kenyon: It's a thoughtful answer. I think whenever there has been a question of, does what —
Tamar Adler: What? No, I said, I just babbled for 10 minutes and said "it's capitalism, dummy" four times. It's kind of thoughtful. [unclear] What else is there to say?
Ross Kenyon: No, I think whenever there is a question of this collective action versus individual agency question, this comes up everywhere. And it comes up in the case of individual carbon footprints and other places within climate. But one of the things I have read is that believing that you have no agency, even if your agency is extremely circumscribed, is, as far as happiness goes, very bad for you. And something like the way that you describe your experience with cooking, even inside of an admittedly imperfect system, there's a lot of joy that can be had there.
And I think joy — finding joy to make your individual action independently meaningful to you, independent of a broader societal effect — I think that is one potential way out of that classic sort of dichotomy, at least for your own personal happiness. And hopefully, if enough people can find joy in that, maybe some of those decisions add up to something else. Or maybe it's just necessary but not sufficient, and that will never be good enough to do it that way. I don't know.
Tamar Adler: Right. But it's not — I mean, you're right, it's a false dichotomy, and I think that's definitely the way out, right? There's no point without joy and pleasure and community and ritual. And the more you can do — if you even just approached it from the perspective of what is the most personally sustainable way, not environmentally sustainable way, but how can I gather people around most regularly, most affordably, most economically from a time perspective — you would land in the same place, right? It's like using all of everything and saving my stale bread. That's the answer. So just that. And of course, if we don't gather, then we're screwed. So we have to gather. We have to perform the rituals of moving through life together. That would have to happen for any system to change anyway.
Ross Kenyon: I have a question that might be a little on the personal side, but your writing strikes me as being very literary, more so than lots of cooking writing I read. I read plenty of brilliant cooks who do not write with the same type. But clearly you like literature, clearly you love working with words. It's very obvious reading it. That's not true of everyone. But would your life not be easier if you weren't trying to appeal to nerds like me? If you were writing this like How to Be a Climate Cook at Home, and you wrote the book that was immensely popular and sold thousands and thousands of hardcover copies? Is there not a little bit of, did I make the wrong turn here?
Tamar Adler: Yeah, there is. So many yeses. You just — you, Ross — you just gave word to my deep crisis. I wish that I could fully — and I mean, I wonder that all the time. And I keep on doing it too. It's not like — I wrote my first book, which is this kind of book of very meditative essays about cooking in a more sustainable, more sort of — yeah, more holistic way, I guess. And then I just couldn't let it go. I've kept on writing sort of these not terribly commercial books, without really zingy words like even zero waste.
Yeah, like the [unclear] or zero waste — I haven't used any of those. I definitely wonder why I can't just use the words that sell the books, and then also write the books in the words that everybody is sort of accustomed to using, or maybe is Googling at that moment when everybody's thinking about zero waste. I don't know, it's a problem of mine. But you know, I guess luckily it keeps me from being too much of a hypocrite, because you don't make very much money if you don't do commercially viable things. So my engagement with capitalism stays more minimal.
Ross Kenyon: Perhaps. I don't think of it in those terms. And also, those — it seems kind of cheap.
Tamar Adler: I wish I could do it. It doesn't seem cheap to use phrases that actually are ones that people connect to. That seems great. Like, zero waste means something to people, to readers. And that's great, and I wish I could use it. I end up — you can even tell from, you know, I just speak in Henry James-esque lengths.
Ross Kenyon: You do?
Tamar Adler: Yeah. And so I don't like when there's just one symbol for something like zero waste, when that refers to a whole field that I can't define. And I feel like there's always more that I want to say about it. But I do think there's real value in using terms that are easily accessible. And I wish that I could do it, because I think my books would reach more people and I would make more money.
Ross Kenyon: Well, it maps onto what we've been saying earlier too about this. Your writing might require a bit more engagement, because some of the cookbooks out there, they're really recipes, and often if you're cooking by the book you are going to the store and you are getting those three artichokes exactly, and they weigh this much and whatever, and you're following it. Your work requires an intellectual investment where you have to think for yourself a little bit. Some of those cookbooks feed it to you a little bit. There's a fast food element to them. They don't necessarily need you making improvisations based upon what's in season and what's in your fridge and what's about to go bad and what can you transform.
It's like a way to think and a way to cook more than recipes. In fact, I pulled very few recipes out of An Everlasting Meal. There's some in there that I've used before, like the salsa verde that has made the rounds around my home. But a lot of it has just been the way that I think and approach it generally, and I think that's a much more valuable thing to teach. But I'm not sure everyone is always ready to be taught such a lesson that requires such a cognitive lift.
Tamar Adler: Well, I mean, I think it can — we can all go together, right? Like, ideally once you have started thinking about cooking as a more continuous process, then you can apply that to all of the wonderful cookbooks that are out there. And sure, the flip side of a recipe that has lots of ingredients and you have to go to the store for is that you can learn new flavors and have access to cultures and their traditions that you wouldn't have otherwise. And so I kind of think I could just be — I don't ever hope to supplant any of the other cookbooks in the world. Ideally I could be like a handmaiden to them, even to ones that are about zero waste and whatever and have great graphs. I'm not good at doing kind of poppy visual things.
But hopefully whoever understands things or engages with things best kind of in text can bring me with them when they encounter all the other cookbooks. And the reverse is true also. I read cookbooks constantly and I get so excited to try something, or even just bring a flavor or a spice or a method into what I'm doing otherwise. And so I think it's, as with anything, it's learning, right? It's being on a path and having all of your friends with you. And I just want to be one of them.
And I also made this whole big to-do in my first book about recipes and how not helpful they were, because they start and stop in these very discrete places. And then my third book is literally — I don't even know. We were going to put the number of recipes on the cover, but then nobody wanted to count them all. It's 1,500 plus or something like that. It's more than that. And they don't start with three artichokes, but they start with any leftover you could have.
But I, after 10 years, after having written kind of so scornfully about recipes, I wrote a book with thousands of them, because maybe that's what people need. And I don't know, I'm too old to be, honestly — I think I'm too old to be disdainful. I think however a person can find a path in, and something that excites them, they should. And I feel so grateful to all of the people who are taking the time to write recipes, and everybody connects to somebody. And there's someone out there who's getting so excited about cooking from a book that I might throw on the donate pile. So I was too mean to the recipe.
Right. I was being kind of mean too when I was saying bad stuff about zero waste, because I think there's no — I'm just not good at it. And I think it's not even meanness. I think it's like, I wish I could express myself in more commercial terms, and that can make me bitter. I think it would be great, because I would reach more people. But that's not about the term. That's about my own inability to be concise.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for sharing all that. I think that's a pretty vulnerable spot. I think it's a beautiful thing to have shared, and I think it's an honest part of writing books. People think when you write a book you've got it made, and it's done and you've arrived, and that is not actually how writing books works.
Tamar Adler: Oh no. But there — I mean, it is wonderful, right? It's so lucky. It's lucky to be able to write books.
Ross Kenyon: Are there more on the way?
Tamar Adler: Yes. Yes, I'm not — yes.
Ross Kenyon: This is like Substack territory, you're trying to — I imagine that's probably going to turn into a book. That's what people do, right?
Tamar Adler: I don't know. That hadn't occurred to me, no. That, along with not being good at using any commercially saleable terms — I also don't have any of the professional strategy that one might have. So it actually had never occurred to me to turn the Substack into a book. But I am working on another book, but I'm not going to say anything else about it now. And then also another one. That is the sound of Papa Bean shaking herself. But yeah, I'm working on two books right now. And yeah, maybe the Substack could be a book. It's my favorite thing in the world, because all I want to do is give culinary advice. Let me — stop it.
Ross Kenyon: Next time I have an issue, I'm going to be reaching out that way. Oh, sorry — were you talking to the dog?
Tamar Adler: Well, no, no, I was — not about Substack, but about scratching the chair. But I would really love that. And you know what's so great about it is that also, I often feel like I have nothing to say about cooking. Like, I've said so much about cooking, what could there possibly be left to say? And answering people's questions solves that issue. Because it doesn't matter if I feel like I've said it in a book already. If somebody has the question, then they need — I haven't answered it yet. And so I love that. I loved that aspect of it: that even if I've said it before, I haven't said it either to them or in a way that makes sense to them. Also — what are you doing?
Ross Kenyon: I often wondered if I was ever going to [unclear] on a podcast to do, and part of it is being able to ask questions and read and keep making those connections. I think you have to find ways to do that. And I think maybe the relevant part of An Everlasting Meal here, that I think is one of the standouts of the book, is your chapter on how to fall in love with cooking again after you hate it and wish it did not exist at all. I think there's a lot of good advice in there about how to redo that. Maybe you found your own way; maybe it's answering questions as a way to review your own work. And yeah, you obviously have lots and lots of stuff to say here, but maybe you just need to repackage and new prompts. That can be exciting too.
Tamar Adler: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's like — if I'm asked a question, my entire being rises up in desire to answer it and to help and to find a way to inform my answer so that it could be bigger than just — yeah, I want to answer not just the question, but where the question comes from. And that is absolutely what I needed. This is completely the writing version of how I get myself out of a cooking funk.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, make sure you sign up for The Kitchen Shrink on Substack. I'll put a link very prominently in the show notes here. Pick up a copy of An Everlasting Meal. It's a wonderful book. I also like listening to it, that's available, if that's your thing as well. Tamar, it was such a sincere pleasure to have you here. Thanks for taking a flier on a climate food podcast where you're going to come on and dunk on everything I care about.
Tamar Adler: No, this was really fun. Thank you. No, it's great. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that'd be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
