The 2019 Eat-Lancet report has proposed a global healthy sustainable diet, which would provide not only for human health but also sustain a healthy planet. The main recommendations are to increase consumption of healthy foods (such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts), and a decrease in consumption of unhealthy foods (such as red meat, sugar, and refined grains). A critique of the EAT-Lancet diet is that it lacks consideration of local and traditional diets, food ways or systems of production, and the report has limited suggestions for how a global healthy sustainable diet could be implemented (Edman et al., 2019; Jonas, 2019; Torjesen, 2019). This paper firstly explores the sustainability impacts of cooking food, and how different foods have different environmental impacts from production, consumption, and cooking. It reports on a 2019 survey of cooking methods and habits in the UK, Australia and USA, examining how these different nations’ unique culinary and cooking habits lead to different environmental impacts. This paper then examines what dietary shifts are being recommended by current academic literature, and how these dietary shifts may change the methods of cooking in the future
