Sustainability starts in the kitchen, says Change Maker and plant-based chef Bettina Campolucci Bordi

 In partnership with E.ON

Thinking about where our food comes from is one of the most important things we can be doing right now to live more sustainably, according to Bettina Campolucci Bordi, plant-based chef and founder of Bettina’s Kitchen, a platform dedicated to promoting plant-based eating.

Campolucci Bordi is on a mission to elevate accessible and affordable plant-based eating habits, by sharing simple sustainability and waste-avoidance secrets through her vibrant cookbooks and online recipes.

Explaining her background, she says, ‘Bettina’s Kitchen came about ten years ago. I grew up around food, having spent the first 11 years of my life in Tanzania where every meal was made from scratch. After moving to Sweden as a teenager, I was inspired by my Norwegian grandmother, who grew all her own ingredients, and my Bulgarian grandmother, who cooked everything from scratch.’

While sustainability was always a big part of Campolucci Bordi’s life, it wasn’t until her late twenties that she had a lightbulb moment after co-founding and cooking at a wellness retreat in southern Spain. She sourced amazing produce from the Spanish farmers’ markets, and realised she could use her knowledge to help people incorporate plant-based foods into their diet.

From there, Campolucci Bordi started writing cookbooks, focused on the diversity of plant-based foods and encouraging waste-free cooking. She hopes that inspiring as many people as possible to eat more plant-based foods will help support the growers and others who work so hard to pull food from the ground. 

Campolucci Bordi stresses the importance of our choices in where we buy food from, emphasising the sustainability benefits of regenerative farming and biodiversity. Healthy soil increases our resilience to climate change by helping to prevent flooding and locking in greenhouse gases that might otherwise be let out into the air.

Campolucci Bordi’s biggest tip for living a more plant-based lifestyle is simply to start incorporating more plant-based foods into your meals. ‘You don’t have to go vegan,’ she says, ‘I don’t believe in labels. You can start by subscribing to a local vegetable box – like an organic one or one that provides misshapen vegetables which people often don’t want to eat.’ Campolucci Bordi suggests trying this to get you out of your comfort zone and into cooking from scratch, and as the food is seasonal, it’s more likely to taste good too.

There’s also root-to-shoot eating, she notes. This means using the whole vegetable in your cooking – like adding texture to salads by using leftover cauliflower leaves or beetroot tops.

Campolucci Bordi often chooses pasta for a quick meal after a long day. Any time of year, you can pack seasonal, local ingredients into a creamy or tomato-based pasta sauce.

Bettina’s Kitchen has been a gradual journey for Campolucci Bordi over the last ten years, and now encompasses wellness retreats all over the world, cookbooks and recipe development for brands. Campolucci Bordi is passionate about helping people tackle the climate crisis from their kitchen tables. 

She tells us, ‘I’m hoping that plant-based food becomes more accessible and affordable so it can be enjoyed by as many people as possible. It’s time for us all to come together to start thinking about where our food comes from and how our choices impact the future of the planet.’

Meet more Change Makers – people who are taking action for climate – at eonenergy.com