To Celebrate Earth Day, Start in Your Kitchen
Happy Earth Day.
This is your friendly reminder that you don’t need to force the festivities today. The point is not to celebrate our world in the way it’s packaged, produced and sold back to you, between linen dresses and new gardening shows, but to practice living in alignment with it. The point of the day is more personal, introspective. It happens in your kitchen. It happens without an audience.
And you already know how to do this. You cook simply. You respect the ingredients in front of you. You eat what’s under your hands, right where you are. You waste less, reusing and repurposing and stretching meals.
Nobody has shaped this way of thinking for me more than Tamar Adler, in her book An Everlasting Meal. Living somewhere between the stove and the cutting board, my well worn copy has been a source for turning leftovers, scraps and bits and bobs of old meals into entirely new ones for years. In the book, Adler writes poetically about how cooking a pot of beans once can carry you through the week. About how simply boiling vegetables in salted water can open up an opportunity to use that same water to elevate grains or soup. She tells us how to turn stale bread into something crisp and golden instead of throwing it away without thinking. These suggestions are not recipes as much as they are reminders that one meal is always in conversation with the next.
And for me, this is what sustainability actually looks like. It’s not a dramatic reset, but a series of small, everyday, simple decisions. Last night’s pasta becomes today’s lunch. Herbs on their last legs become a bright salsa verde or spicy chimichurri. Scraps become starting points if you are paying attention. There is something heroic about taking what’s about to be lost and saving it.
Especially when you live on an island. Here, you don’t get to opt out of awareness. Between vog and volcanoes, hurricanes and tsunamis, fire and flood, you tread carefully between the fine lines of how simultaneously fragile and powerful the ‘aina can be. And practically, with more of our food arriving by boat than what is harvested on our shores, the intentions driving Earth Day are not theoretical. Mother is not something you think about once a year. She is present, insistent, and entirely in charge every single day.
And maybe that’s the place to begin today. Not with a grand gesture, but with one small shift. Cook something once and let it carry you. Save what you would normally throw away. Pay attention to what is already in your kitchen and ask it what it wants to become next. That is the conversation Tamar Adler invites in An Everlasting Meal. It is simple. It is practical. And it is something you can do, wherever you are.
What’s one thing in your kitchen right now that you could carry into the next meal?
