Eat with impact.
The following text is the draft intro for a manual we are working on. It’s called ‘Cooking with Principles - A manual for making healthy, planet-friendly cookery cookery simple, efficient and delicious’.
This Manuals Purpose
In essence, the aim of this manual is to help you become a proficient home cook. How do we define that. Well, a ‘proficient home cook is someone who has a basic knowledge of nutrition, ingredients, seasonality; and who can cook a meal with any ingredients without having to rely on any recipes.
The Benefits
By integrating the insights and cooking principles presented in the following with some degree of consistency, you can expect the following benefits:
Simplify everyday cooking, save time and money, reduce waste.
Get more energy to live your best life.
Fire up your inner activist by showing you the power of conscious food choices and how together we can change the world. Be a part of history.’
In 2015 we had a serendipitous meeting of minds. Michael had come from a long career in the corporate food world. He was sick and tired of the old and dusty ways of industry bent on maximising profits above all else. People and planet was not the priority. Michael had grown up in Jutland in a family that that ran a number of small catering operations. Food service was, so to speak, in his DNA.
When Michael and Jens met, Jens was in the process of closing his first food start-up venture. Having grown up surrounded by forest, landscape and sea, Jens had always felt a strong connection with nature. When he was 12, his parents were divorced and his mom’s new husband, who was a major aficionado of classical French cooking, took him under his wing and started showing him the ropes in the kitchen. By that we mean, everything made from scratch. Home cooked meals that the family would gather around. No corners cut. Jens’ love affair with all things food and cooking had begun.
As he grew older he became increasingly aware of the destruction human activities are causing across the planet. It was immensely frustrating to feel powerless in the face of it all. What could one little person do from other side of the world as rainforest is being chopped down on the other.
It wasn’t until Jens started to understand the impact of food choices that he truly found his purpose: to change the world by changing the way we eat.
Michael and Jens together went on to start The Bear Kitchen. It was called, ‘the bear kitchen’ because it turns out that bears, contrary to popular belief, eat mostly plants. And they don’t eat all the highly processed foods and factory farmed meat that are destroying our health and the ecosystems on which we depend.
The Bear Kitchen was going from strength to strength as the philosophy behind it and the food we were cooking hit home with the staff of companies like AirBnB, CitizenM Hotels, Moving Brands, etc. who would have our menus for lunch up to twice per week.
During this time we got really good at cooking pulses, that is, peas, beans and lentils, which would be one of the main protein sources on our menus.
The Bear Kitchen was going from strength to strength as the philosophy behind it and the food we were cooking hit home with the staff of companies like AirBnB, CitizenM Hotels, Moving Brands, etc. who would have our menus for lunch up to twice per week.
During this time we got really good at cooking pulses, that is, peas, beans and lentils, which would be one of the main protein sources on our menus.
Then the pandemic hit and suddenly there was no one in the offices anymore. Business gone. Purpose remaining. So we started cooking free meal for front-line health care workers in the NHS and elsewhere. It was an amazing time, as we could see how the power of purpose allowed us to transition from one field to another smoothly.
We also during this time realised that there is a great demand for what we were doing.
People now want to eat less meat because they know it’s better for their health, better for the animals, and better for the planet. However, they are also really busy and don’t necessarily have lot of experience with plant based cooking.
So we thought, hmm, maybe there’s a really great opportunity to help these people cook meals that contain no or less but better quality meat for flavour rather than being the main thing.
What we want to show you that cooking plant-centric, meals without using recipes, in less time, that are super tasty, and free from anything artificial is much easier than you might have tought. You just need to start thinking about your everyday cooking in terms of principles rather than recipes. Now let’s get started!