I try to resist the urge to turn off the heat immediately before serving food because the pan is still hot for tens of minutes – all wasted energy. I try to turn off the heat ~10—15 min before the food is done cooking. Most people are impatient, addicted to convenience, lack self-control, and probably don’t even consider the wasted energy.
Electronic pressure cookers at least steer people toward using residual heat because when the cooking is done pressure protections block access to the food until pressure drops. OTOH, that’s due to temps being higher to begin with (above boiling).
Anyway, cooking food is rarely critisised as a significant climate factor. But you have to figure 8 billion people worldwide are wasting energy in this same way on a daily basis. Maybe it should be studied?
Although you’re right that that energy is not spent cooking, it is helping to heat your home, and save you mental energy. Energy you can spend calculating how much energy you’re actually saving.
You’re talking about a couple hundred watts. You could cook non-stop for your entire life and you still wouldn’t waste as much energy as a single flight with a modern airplane.
We’re spending more just typing on our phones today, considering the phone, the inefficient charger left plugged in, the server of the platform we’re posting on.
Try seeing of any of the lamps in your house can be upgraded to led. That could save you hundreds of watts for hours every day. (hundreds of watts per hour).
Go to work by bicycle, or train, or bus. (thousands of watts a day)\LED are a massive reduction in power consumption. You can feel the difference, even in a 25w bulb.
My 1600 lumen led bulbs put out less heat than a 25w incandescent, yet are the light equivalent of a 100w+ incandescent.
LED are typically about 10% the power consumption of an equivalent incandescent. And today you can get color-selectable LED.
As a bonus, all of the ones I’ve tried last way longer than incandescent bulbs, by a huge margin (at least 5x longer, some far more).
LED’s are awesome! I replaced my bathroom lights when I got into this apartment, that saved me 90 watts. And this may be unusual, but those are on for about 8 hours a day here
tens of minutes
But I suck at using cast-iron cookware.
At least 3 billion people still cook with open fires, and there are surely variances in other cook types like induction vs gas vs electric.
Either way, while there is certainly some truth in an efficiency gap for cookin, the vast majority of our climate issues are not coming from individual daily choices but rather industry wide decisions at scale. It would be much more simple and effective to nationalise industry and end profit driven decision making than to change the daily habits of billions of individuals
