Wellness | Sustainable Living
If you’ve ever stood in the grocery store wondering whether your choices actually make a difference, you’re not alone. The connection between what we eat and how it affects the planet can feel overwhelming — and a little preachy, honestly.
But here’s the thing: you don’t need to overhaul your entire life to make an impact. A few simple swaps in your diet can quietly reduce your footprint, save money, and — surprisingly — make your meals taste better.
Here are five easy places to start.
1. Swap Beef for Lentils in Any Bolognese or Chili
Lentils are one of the most sustainable foods on the planet — they fix nitrogen in the soil, require very little water, and produce a fraction of the greenhouse emissions of beef. And when cooked with the right seasoning, they have the same hearty, filling quality you’re after.
How to do it: Use green or brown lentils 1:1 in place of ground beef. Add smoked paprika and a dash of soy sauce to get that deep, savory flavour.
2. Switch Dairy Milk for Oat Milk in Baking
Oat milk is currently the lowest-impact milk alternative — using significantly less land and water than almond milk, and producing far fewer emissions than dairy. It also behaves almost identically to dairy milk in baking, making it the easiest swap on this list.
How to do it: Use it cup-for-cup in any recipe calling for milk. It adds a very slight natural sweetness, which works beautifully in muffins, pancakes, and loaf cakes.
3. Replace Eggs with Flaxseed in Baked Goods
One flax egg (1 tablespoon ground flaxseed + 3 tablespoons water, rested for 5 minutes) binds ingredients just like a regular egg. Flaxseed is also packed with omega-3s — so it’s a genuine nutritional upgrade, not just a compromise.
How to do it: Works best in cookies, muffins, and quick breads. Not ideal for recipes where eggs are the star (like frittatas), but for everyday baking it’s seamless.
4. Use Chickpeas Instead of Chicken in Curries and Soups
Chickpeas absorb flavour beautifully, hold their shape in liquid, and provide a genuinely satisfying protein hit. Swapping chicken for chickpeas in a curry or soup cuts the carbon footprint of that meal by roughly 80%.
How to do it: Use one 400g can of drained chickpeas per 2 chicken breasts the recipe calls for. Add them halfway through cooking so they warm through without going mushy.
5. Make Your Own Stock Instead of Buying It
This one surprises people — but store-bought stock comes in packaging, uses significant transport energy, and is mostly water. Making your own takes almost zero effort and uses scraps you’d otherwise throw away: onion skins, carrot tops, celery ends, herb stems.
How to do it: Keep a bag in the freezer and throw vegetable scraps in as you cook. Once it’s full, simmer everything in water for 45 minutes, strain, and freeze in portions. Free, sustainable, and genuinely more flavourful.
Ready to Go Further?
If these swaps have sparked something and you want to explore plant-based cooking properly — without the overwhelm — the Complete Plant-Based Cookbook is one of the most practical resources I’ve come across.
It’s not about perfection or going fully vegan overnight. It’s about having enough genuinely delicious recipes in your back pocket that plant-based eating becomes the easy choice, not the hard one.
👉 Check it out here: https://plantbasedcookbook.com/?hop=freshrts
Small changes, made consistently, add up to something real. You don’t have to do everything — just start somewhere.
Freshroots Living 
Leave a comment