The Slow Food USA Blog

How about a crowd-sourced sustainable cookbook?

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We’ve been talking a bunch recently on here about the future of food writing—how is being affected by new media?  How come awesome food bloggers end up getting book deals, bringing it all back to the old fashioned paper format?  (i.e. will the future be jet packs and silver jumpsuits? or something more interesting we haven’t thought of yet?)

That’s why I am interested in this new crowd-sourced digital cookbook—Mastering the Art of Sustainable Cooking—produced by Brighter Planet and their online community. It’s got energy conservation tips, stories, and recipes from different submitters from around the country. I like the hodgepodge mix—how to save energy while BBQing (tin foil, baby); how the freezer can be your friend; stuff like that. I also like how it was made—reminds me of the old church cookbooks, spiral bound and community derived. It’s real short—not so very much there there, but it’s a cool beginning. Click here to check it out.

Brighter Planet is a web-based community that is all about getting people engaged in the fight against climate change. On the site, people can measure their climate impact—various actions are connected to carbon footprint numbers, and by tracking your actions you can watch your footprint change over time as you learn to live more carbon free. Also, it seems to be all about community—online community, that is.  So they’ve got a bunch of online campaigns, including the contest they hosted to create this cookbook (with an introduction by Gary Hirschberg of Stonyfield Yogurt).