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?
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
