Barbecue Baked Lentils

It's Earth Day tomorrow! Let it be an occasion to (re-)commit to reducing your environmental footprint with your food choices, and urging others to do the same. 

That message is even more powerful coming from the kids who will someday inherit the ecological legacy of our choices today. Be inspired by the student council officers at my backup dancer's elementary school, who starred in this new video that I helped put together for Earth Day:

I recently read a New Yorker article about the youth-led environmental Sunrise Movement, and one piece of the article nagged at me. The author described a Sunrise Movement member's hesitance about ordering a meat dish, only to be reassured by other members that "The biggest driver of emissions is the political power of the fossil-fuel industry, not individual behavior," leading the author to conclude, "if you want the beef, get the beef."

I don't question that the fossil fuel industry has plenty of political power. But consumers play a role in giving them that power, for one thing, and for another thing, even though policy changes are critical for halting climate change, that doesn't make individual behavior irrelevant.

Why NOT eschew the beef? If we all frequently eschewed beef instead of chewing beef, we could make a dent in the sizable greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising animals for food.

I read a really good Nieman Reports opinion piece in which the author stated that "it’s hardly fair to dump this [climate] crisis on the shoulders of individual people when large corporations and governments are profiting from it," but let's flip that on its head: it's unfair to individuals to assert that we don't have an opportunity to enact change. Along those lines, the New York Times recently published a profile of some young climate change activists who are focused on how individuals can work toward solutions, and that resonated with me. 

If it resonates with you too, then instead of beef, you could try "Barbecue Baked Lentils" (A Way To Garden). 

Just don't make the same mistake I did, glancing quickly at the numerical designations of time in the recipe--"30 minutes" to simmer, remove the cover for "15 minutes"--and assume you will only need 45 minutes to cook this dish, overlooking this sneaky non-numerical text: "Bake, covered, until the liquids are absorbed, about one hour." If you make this mistake, you too may look like this:

Lacking the requisite additional hour that night, we ordered in, and the unbaked lentils went into the fridge before getting their hour in the oven the next night.

The lentils didn't blow our socks off, but they were perfectly good served with rice and broccoli.