Welcome to KidsCookDinner.com: a website my brother Max and I (Alex) started in 2015.* Originally we posted about kids’ cooking (usually dinner, but not always) and tried to draw attention to the fact that a lot of people don’t have enough to eat.  Along the way, we won a prize for our domain name, donated over $17,000 to Action Against Hunger, and competed against each other on Chopped Junior on Food Network.  

We have had a lot of fun but recently I’ve become really concerned about climate change and its relationship to food. I’ve learned about food’s carbon foodprint (the greenhouse emissions produced by the growing, harvesting, processing, transporting, cooking, and disposing of the food we eat).

I’ve realized the way I eat (and most Americans eat) has a negative impact on climate change. The mass production of food, especially of animal products like meat, dairy, and eggs generates a really big foodprint. For example, commercially produced beef has a really high carbon footprint because of the methane produced by the animals themselves and the methane from manure lagoons and pits. (Methane is a greenhouse gas linked to global warming.)

I also learned that food waste is an enormous hidden contributor to climate change. The United States wastes roughly 40% of its food, and when it goes to landfills, it breaks down and produces methane. Finally, the warming global temperatures and increasingly violent weather linked to climate change are negatively affecting communities’ ability to grow sustainable crops–resulting in more global hunger. (If you want to learn more about food’s foodprint, I recommend these two sites:

https://foodprint.org/issues/how-our-food-system-affects-climate-change/ and

https://www.earthday.org/our-work/#food-and-environment )

Given all that, I decided I wanted to try to change the way I eat and also use this website to encourage others to be more mindful about the food they eat (and the food we waste). I am trying to reduce the amount of meat and dairy I eat as well as try out more plant-based recipes on this website. And, I want to try to be more conscious of food leftovers. I want to try to find ways to use them in new recipes, and when we do have compostable waste, actually compost it! We used to compost vegetable scraps every week at the local farmers’ market but we stopped during COVID. Now, I’ve started doing it again and want to work with local organizations to raise awareness of the availability of compost drop-off containers in the neighborhood. For example, I found one close to the dog park where we take our dog!

*For those of you who want to learn more about the story of our website, we created it when my mom said we couldn’t keep posting food and cooking pictures on her Facebook page. When we registered the domain, we checked a box to register it in Verisign’s national domain name contest and then had to make a video about the website.  Amazingly enough, we won the contest and $35,000!  Click HERE for more about the story of our domain name. Since we have enough to eat, we decided to donate $17,000 to Action Against Hunger–a charity dedicated to saving the lives of malnourished children and helping vulnerable communities become self-sufficient. We were lucky enough to get to visit the Action Against Hunger office in New York and meet some of their amazing staff. (Below we are sitting with Alex Cottin, Director of External Affairs, and Andrea Tamburini, CEO of AAH-USA, in August 2015)