We all want to eat better, eat safer, and just plain eat. Food is important to all of us because without it, we'd die. Even if we claim not to like food, or most food, eating is an essential act.
We have many different ways we can choose to eat.
We can load up on the pre-packaged, processed, and already prepared foods offered at assorted markets like Central Market (one of ther main marketing strategies is that they offer gourmet meals in a take-out case so you can grab it, take it home and heat it up - a step between TV dinner and restaurant) or Albertson's or Super Target's specialty food bars.
We can live off of take-out and restaurant foods - and if done right, this can be a cheaper alternative than keeping a kitchen, but it isn't always a healthy choice.
We can cook all our own home grown food from scratch - nice, but not viable with much of today's lifestyle needs.
We can use a combination of any of the above and invent a few new ways to eat. I hear there are people - reasonably well-to-do people, not homeless ones - who live by eating the discards of restaurants and grocry stores. They call themselves "freegans".
I'm not going to discuss freegans here, because I want to concentrate on us, our kitchens and our eating, not them. So let's move along.
No matter what lifestyle we lead, at some point, we use our kitchens. Maybe it's to reheat pizza or make some microwave popcorn or brew a pot of coffee.
If, in your need to eat, you've decided you want to eat in an environmentally, economically, and sustaining style, a permaculture kitchen might interest you.
A permaculture kitchen isn't a cheap way to do things, not at first, although, given time, it often proves to be a time- and money-saver. If your reason for considering a permaculture kitchen is to save money, then I sincerely apologize, but it won't happen. Modern kitchens require remodeling to reach that goal, some less than others. Unless you have a home where you have a "gourmet" kitchen, you probably have a standard kitchen with a range that combines stovetop and oven, a largish refrigerator, a single or double sink and faucet, cabinets, at least one countertop, and probably a microwave. You may also have a dishwasher, depending on the age of your home and previous residents. A few kitchens also have the laundry room equipment in them - a washer and dryer. If you're lucky, you may have a pantry to work with as well.
Modern kitchens don't give a lot of consideration to food storage, the presumption being that modern families would simply shop on a weekly or even a daily basis for their food. The refrigerator would hold mostly condiments, leftovers, snacks, and a few perishables. A great many foods that shouldn't be stored in a refrigerator are kept there because there really isn't anywhere else to keep them in a modern kitchen.
So, that's what we're looking at, and where we'll start.
The first step is to determine why you want a permaculture kitchen. These are some of the reasons: to eat better, to save time and effort in food preparation, to support your local economy, to enjoy a wider range of foods, to be able to eat even in the event of a disaster - the power goes out in a storm or a strike, for example. Each year, our state has one really large ice storm that knocks power out for a minimum of 2 weeks in large parts of the state and as long as 5 months for some remote areas. Even 2 weeks is a long time to have the refrigerator/freezer out and no microwave.
Saving money with a permaculture kitchen is possible, depending upon your current eating habits, but it shouldn't be the focus of creating one.
Once you know what you want to do with your kitchen, there are some things you need to do to organize yourself before you organize the kitchen.
Converting your kitchen to a permaculture kitchen isn't going to happen overnight. It won't happen in a week or a month, either. Done right, expect it to take you at least eighteen months, and possibly longer. It will, naturally enough, take less time if you are building a new house and take permaculture into consideration when you build the kitchen. It will also take less time if you have enough money and hire professionals to do most of the work. But if you're remodeling an existing kitchen yourself on a budget, expect it to take at least a year and a half. That's how long it took me, doing it all myself, learning how to do the remodeling, and re-doing what I did wrong.
Your first step is a food diary. If you're like most Americans, you have food that's taking on a life of its own in the depths of your refrigerator. Your potatoes sprout no matter what you do to save them. You also have boxes or cans of food in your cabinets that have been there for more than 2 years, and some may be so old you can't remember buying it. We aren't going to worry about that yet.
What I want from the food diary is a record of everything you actually eat - not portions, portions aren't important because this isn't a weight loss diary or a nutrition diary, it's just a record of what you really eat. You need to know how much variety you have in your diet. And you don't need to write down each ingredient for each and every meal - writing down the name of the dish is sufficient at this point, and if you eat the dish more than once (say, pizza or oatmeal onna stick), just put a tally mark beside the first entry of it. Don't neglect beverages - that daily decaf double mocha cinnamon latte with a lemon foam counts, as does the glass of water from the faucet.
I don't care how you tally it up throughout the year - a computer spreadsheet, a little spiral bound notebook in your briefcase or pocket, 3X5 cards. You need to know exactly what your eating habits are so you can either build your kitchen around them or alter your eating habits and then build the kitchen around your new food habits.
Building the kitchen first is a waste of time and money. You want a kitchen that conforms to your needs, not one to which you must bend. That's what permaculture is about - putting things together so they work intuitively together, supporting the activities of each part so the whole functions smoothly and in a way that is pleasing and efficient.
So, anyone who wants to build a permaculture kitchen, that's your assignment. Keep a food diary for one year.
If you're as multi-tasky as I am, just doing your food diary for getting your permaculture kitchen together doesn't feel like you're doing enough.
Don't worry, there are plenty of other things you'll need to do to prepare yourself for that permaculture kitchen.
See, the food diary is the first step towards designing the kitchen.
Now you need to work on redesigning yourself so you can use that kitchen once it's built.
And sorry, but no cheating and getting ahead and building a permaculture kitchen before you're ready for it. If you do that, jump in and build the kitchen, you might discover that it won't work for you because it doesn't suit your needs and your lifestyle, and you'll have to start all over again.
That would suck.
So, to prepare yourself for using a permaculture kitchen, here are a few things you can do:
Consider food. Good food is the central part of a permaculture kitchen. Most Americans eat a very limited diet. This may vary a bit from region to region, and if you tend to eat out frequently, your diet is even more restricted. Allergies and food sensitivities will alter that diet. If you've already made a start towards eating healthier, you may have a slightly longer list of foods, but for the most part, the typical American diet contains these food ingredients - skewed heavily towards prepared foods fortified with vitamins, wheat, soy, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated fats, and preservatives. Hamburgers, pizza, steak and potatoes, chicken and dumplings, potato chips, snack crackers, store bought cookies like Oreos and chocolate chip cookies, instant soups, instant puddings, canned soups, frozen dinners, and take-out. Lots and lots of take-out.
Your assignment, should you choose to take it, is to try different foods. Don't try them in mixes, in pre-packaged prepared foods. Try them as fresh as possible. Expand your meat choices with different types of fish, buffalo, venison, ostrich, quail, partridge, bear, elk, or whatever is local to your area. I live in a part of the country where all of the meats (but not the fish) are raised locally and can buy them direct from the ranchers. Try arugula, rutabagas, turnips, kohlrabi, celeriac, fresh beets (surprisingly yummier than the canned variety), chard, fennel, mustard greens, turnip greens, poke salad, fiddleheads, daikon, canneli beans, flageolets, whatever pops up in the farmer's market or the local produce section of your store. Check out the local ethnic markets, too. There's an excellent locally made tofu in Ohio, I hear (from a foodie friend of mine who lives there and is a devoted locavore). You might be pleasantly surprised that some of your favorite foods are locally grown or made. Check them out. Make it an adventure, a reward for a job well done. Talk to the farmers at the farmer's market, too. They'll happily explain what that weird root is and how to use it, and you'll walk away with a notebook full of recipes and a list of other farmers who grow different things.
This can take a lot of time. You'll add the foods that become your new favorites to your food diary, so it's actually a way to help you with that, too.
Another assignment, if you want to do it, is to learn new cooking and food preservation techniques. You have 12 months. In that time, you can learn 12 new techniques without stressing yourself out or disrupting your regular lifestyle.
If you haven't already learned to can jams, jellies, vegetables, fruits, soups, and such, now is a good time. A small amount of time invested periodically with small batch canning will reward you big time with good food throughout the year. A permaculture kitchen will depend upon you knowing the basics of canning unless you are willing to spend the money to pay someone else to can for you. Unless you are canning for a large family, you will never have to do the massive canning efforts people like my grandmother went through - she had 23 children to feed (not all were hers, she took in a lot of children orphaned by WWI and WWII - and lost quite a few in those wars, too). Small batch canning is possible for even an apartment sized kitchen.
Another technique is brining and pickling. Brining allows you to preserve foods without refrigeration. It also does amazingly wonderful things to some foods when you brine them before cooking. Classic German sauerbraten is a pickling technique for beef, and what it does for beef, brining does for poultry.
Fermentation is also something to explore. Not just brewing, although that's a lot of fun. Think sourdough and sauerkraut. Fermentation is advanced pickling. Bread baking is also a type of fermentation, raising, then killing the Yeast Beasties at the right time to get scrumptious baked goods. Cheese making is also a type of fermentation, along with cider making, vinegar and alegar, fish sauces, buttermilk, chocolate, coffee, black teas, kefir, and yogurt.
There's also the mixing and blending of your own condiments. Gourmet mustards, ketchups that aren't full of salt and high fructose corn syrup and artificial coloring. It can be fun to mix up your own salad dressings, and you may never go back to Kraft bottled dressings again. Many dressings and sauces are quick to make and are easy to make in small batches - enough for a meal or two. And don't forget, you can always can them in the small half pint mason jars.
Another very important cooking technique to master is mise en place - "to put in place". When you go to prepare a meal, before you cook it, consider all the steps and ingredients you'll need and have them ready before you begin cooking. This will reduce cooking times considerably, and all the preplanning can be done in spare moments throughout the day - or even planned out days or weeks in advance. I like to do this before I go shopping, and even before I plant my gardens. There's no sense growing foods I won't eat and no one I know will eat. It's silly to snap up a bushel of plums if no one in your family likes prunes, plum butter, plum jelly, dried plums, canned plums, or stewed plums, no matter how cheap they are.
When you get ready to cook, make sure all your ingredients are ready for you - washed, chopped, sliced, diced, separated out and waiting. You can do this a day or two before (no more if you want the food fresh and safe). Setting out meat to thaw before you need to cook it is also a part of this mind set. And it is a mind set more than it is anything else. It's "cooking in the zone", where you can simultaneously keep the various tasks of cooking in mind in order and weigh and assign each part of the meal preparation process its own priority. This speeds up the cooking process much more than the average person realizes (and is why I can make dozens of Scottish Eggs and prepare meals for everyone helping me during MedFaire while also doing a lot of the administrative work of helping run the largest single weekend medieval faire in the country). Mastering this technique is the hinge upon which a permaculture kitchen rests. During your learning process for this, see if you can't visit a restaurant that has open kitchen and observation counter so you can watch as these chefs prepare and send out hundreds of appetizers, entrees, and desserts in a single evening. Hell's Kitchen has nothing on these professionals. Watch how they do and think about how you can translate this to your own kitchen.
Knife Skills. Knowing which knife will do the best job for the task at hand is also crucial to speedy and efficient cooking, and there's nothing more fun than being able to dice that onion without tears, julienne those carrots in a flash, and diagonally cut the celery for stir fry just so. Knife work also allows you to make festive garnishes and to carve the best pumpkins in the neighborhood.
That's eight different things to learn - enough to get you started and occupied as we discuss other types of practical survival and sustainable living.