The greenest kitchen in the world
I've joined a group at CERES that is working on a curious problem: how to create the greenest kitchen in the world.

CERES has one cafe, and one training kitchen. The new centre that's starting construction shortly will have a second cafe, and another commercial-grade community kitchen for training and local enterprises. We have a chance now to influence the design of these two new kitchens, and our aim is to make them the greenest in the world.

It's quite a difficult problem, and also very easy. It's difficult because a cafe kitchen is a huge consumer of energy and water, and produces huge amounts of waste - not just food waste, but also in the form of heat, pollution, greenhouse gases, waste water. So there's a long way to go. But it's also an easy problem, because very few kitchens around the world have tried to be green, so it won't be hard to do better than they have -grin-.

There are a few things we could try. One is to be all on green power, and have all our cooking electric. It's kind of a cop-out though because we're not actually changing any of our practices. It's an invisible change. And our current cafe is already on green power, so it wouldn't be new. Another option is to try something like the 100 Miles cafe in the city (which I still want to visit), and go for local and seasonal food on the menu. It means both chefs and diners accept certain restrictions on what they can order or create, but you're saving environmental costs due to transport and/or storage. A third one that's been floated is to make it a refrigerator-free cafe. We probably can't do that with the new kitchen, but we certainly can change our current cafe over to refrigerator-free. It just means shifting the menu almost entirely vegan-vegetarian. Whether we want to do that or not is another question.

Water-wise, our current cafe's actually pretty good. All its waste water output is currently treated and re-used on site, for irrigation of the gardens. It's got mains water going in, but I'm in the process of changing that over to rainwater, I just need to get the correct filtering system sorted out and connected. So then it'll be mostly off mains water input, and completely off mains output. The new cafe will be on a different system as part of the new centre, but it'll have the same kind of thing. So we're not really making any changes there, we've already got a full commercial-sized demonstration system in operation.

So, it's all complicated, but interesting. What makes it more complicated is that the new centre is planned to be completely carbon neutral, averaged out over the year - and will be producing its own power and hot water. So whatever we do to the kitchen has to work within the energy systems we're building into the total plan - if we decide we need X amount of energy at peak in the kitchens, the building has to be able to produce that, and that means making sure we've sized the system correctly. It's all very cool.

Any thoughts from foodies and enviro-minded types about what would make a green kitchen are completely welcome.