Thanksgiving Special Green Tip #48: Green Thanksgiving Dinner

Welcome back! It feels so weird to be writing this on a Wednesday. But climate change doesn't take a vacation, so neither should I. Today I'll be talking about something that is probably the essence of this holiday: overeating.

You've probably heard a lot about Green foods like free range beef and organic mashed potatoes and soy turkey and mycoprotein turkey and all that good. Well, there's a good thing and a bad thing about this whole organic food movement. The good thing is that they are usually much healthier than foods that are more Brown (not environmentally friendly). The bad thing is that they usually taste HORRIBLE! (oh, don't deny it you hippies) This can be illustrated by the following axiom:

The IGR Green Food Axiom #1:
The Greener (or healthier) a food is, the worse it tastes. This can be seen in figure 1.

Figure 1

So what is the environmentally conscious chef to do when preparing a Thanksgiving meal but want people to be able to actually finish their meals? I like to use the rule of ten. Place your food on the line above and see what the Green Factor is. For example, let's look at organic mashed potatoes. You can see that the Green Factor for them is about a 35. Not too bad. Divide that 35 by 10 and you get 3.5. This is the ratio of gravy or sauce you want to use to drown out the bad taste. So use about 3 and a half times as much gravy as organic mashed potatoes and you're in good shape. Regular turkey falls at about a 1:1 ratio, which is pretty accurate.

Ah, mycoprotein turkey substitute. Let's address you for a minute. For those of you that have not heard of that, do yourself a favor and don't look it up. It's gross and that's all you need to know. Trust me. You're going to want to load that up with a 9:1 ratio of gravy to 'turkey.' And that might not even be enough. It's really up to you.

Let me give you a real example that comes from my experiences hanging out with the environmentally conscious crowd during my college career. I've had tofu and it was really gross. I mean, if you can't figure that out just from looking at it, you need help. But I found out that tofu chili is actually pretty good. The difference? The tomato sauce and cheese and other chili ingredients were probably in a 4 or 5 to 1 ratio with the tofu. See, the rule of ten works again!

Alright everyone, hopefully that will give you some ideas when you're preparing your dinner for tomorrow. If you're not passed out from eating too much, check back in tomorrow and I'll have some ideas for how to be environmentally friendly while shopping during Black Friday. Enjoy your days off and make sure you take a minute to remember how thankful you are for the things you have in your life, like headlamps and giant solar reflectors in Asia and robot clones of your family.