Once-a-month-cooking is a style of meal preparation where you prepare enough dinners for a month in one day, then freeze them. This can reduce impact in a number of ways:
- Cuts down on trips to the grocery store, and lowers your weekly groceries enough that you might be able to bike for the rest of your shopping trips (or use a stroller with storage, if you have young kids).
- Allows you to buy bulk, reducing packaging
- Allows you to combine certain energy-consuming steps for some meals so you only use energy once but prep in bulk, e.g., sauteing veggies for multiple meals or browning ground beef. You can even cook two meals at once, freeze one, and then use the microwave to reheat it a week or two later - overall using less energy than heating the oven twice while still getting that oven-cooked flavor
- Encourages you to avoid restaurants and convenience foods that tend to have a larger impact both on the earth and on your wallet
Most people who do this need a deep freezer, which does use some energy, but with a second-hand energy-efficient chest freezer (stand-ups are more convenient but less efficient) it’s actually very, very little (our electricity costs for the freezer are about $2.50 a month).
Search online for “Once a month cooking” to find techniques, tips, and recipes.
The non-environmental advantages to this are:
(a) Prepping this way is much faster than prepping and cooking a meal every day. I can pre-prep one to two dozen meals in a single day, depending on how much I plan beforehand and how repetitive the meals are. If you prep 3 months worth of the same two meals (with some variation so they don’t get boring - e.g., bean soups with different beans and seasonings, or pizzas with different toppings) in one day, it can go really fast - and after three months, you’ll have a different meal every night of the week for 6 days out of your week.
(b) You are less likely to eat out or buy heavily processed convenience foods on a busy night if you have meals ready to go at home. This is both cheaper and (for most of us) more nutritious. Plus, using raw ingredients like rice or beans is much easier if you can cook or soak weeks worth all at once - so you are more likely to use these healthy, affordable kinds of ingredients.
(c) You can do OAMC with friends, which can both make it more efficient and more fun - plus results in more variety - or make it a family activity.
OAMC is sort of the opposite of “slow food”, which I also think is a great movement, but it still accomplishes many of the same goals for families that really don’t have the time or budget for a perfectly cooked, super-fresh meal each evening. People who normally can’t do “slow food” may actually find that OAMC frees up enough time that they can actually spend more time on finding good food sources, eating meals slowly and truly enjoying them, and really making food a way to connect again.
This post was submitted by Ethel.
I’m not organized enough for the once a month thing, but I accomplish much of the same results with a more scattershot approach. Whenever I cook, I try to make at least 4-5 times what is needed for the meal at hand, and freeze the rest in meal-sized portions. It really doesn’t take much more time or energy to prepare more food, and that way you can cook when you feel like it, and when you don’t you’ve got plenty of ready to eat meals without resorting to pre-packaged stuff.
Comment by Rebecca — October 30, 2009 @ 11:01 pm