BRB w/ Nathan P - Greener Concrete, Roasted Monkfish with Beurre Rouge & The Overstory
Why concrete emits so much and how to make it greener, a seafood dish from Thomas Keller, and a thought-provoking read on trees.
Hi all,
Welcome back to BRB with Nathan P - a weekly newsletter featuring 1 Breakthrough, 1 Recipe, and 1 Book revolving around food & climate.
Before we get started, here are some highlights of food & climate in the news this week:
A major dairy company plans to slash methane emissions — but there’s an elephant in the room (Grist)
After the Ohio Train Derailment: Evacuations, Toxic Chemicals and Water Worries (New York Times). A train containing 5 railcars of polyvinyl chloride derailed in Palestine, Ohio. Polyvinyl chloride is a known carcinogen and poses safety risks with air, water, and soil pollution.
Are You Giving Flowers with a Side of Plastic? (Hakai Magazine)
💥 Breakthrough: Greener Concrete
Modern civilization is unimaginable without concrete. I would bet that the very building you’re reading this email on has concrete foundations. Or the sidewalk as you’re walking to work (be careful!). It’s a magical material.
While concrete has been used for millennia, the mass-produced version today originated in the 1830s in a limestone quarry in southeastern France. Today, concrete releases 3 GT (gigatons, or billions of metric tons) of carbon dioxide every year. For context, that’s 5% of the 58 GT of greenhouse gases we emitted in 2022*.
A ton of concrete basically emits its own weight in CO2. Why so much? 2 reasons.
First, limestone and clay need to be heated to 1450F with, you guessed it, fossil fuels. That’s the first half of the emissions. Second, in this heating process, limestone breaks into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide. Hence releasing the other half.
In a commodity business with paper-thin margins, there are little incentives for concrete manufacturers to innovate and reduce emissions. Public and financial pressures will be needed, perhaps in the form of a carbon tax.
There must be greener ways of making concrete. We know this because nature produces similar materials in the oceans with sunlight, water, and dissolved CO2. They’re called seashells.
Conceptually, there are many ways to reduce CO2 emissions from concrete:
Design with less concrete. Not sexy, but it works.
Use cleaner sources to heat cement in the kiln, like hydrogen.
Capture the CO2 emitted from limestone splitting in the kiln.
Reformulate concrete with materials requiring less heat and producing less CO2.
Thankfully, there are promising innovations in this space:
💡 Solidia developed a means of reducing emissions in modern cement kilns by 30-40% and curing cement with CO2 instead of water, cutting total emissions in half and saving tons of water (literally).
🦠 Green Basilisk is making concrete containing Bacillus bacteria, which can self-heal and extend the lifetime of new concrete installations.
🌊 Prometheus Materials makes an allegedly zero-carbon concrete with microalgae, which can produce calcium carbonate through photosynthesis.
Of course, as with any emerging technology, the challenge will be scale.
*Total greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 were 58 GT. If we want to stay under 2°C warming, we can only emit another 400 GT. Total. That’s less than 8 years at our current pace.
🥘 Recipe: Roasted Monkfish with Beurre Rouge
In case you forgot about Valentine’s Day and want to redeem yourself, I suggest making this delightful roasted monkfish tail with beurre rouge sauce. I can almost guarantee they’ll take you back.
Monkfish has a buttery, firm flesh that pairs well beurre rouge, a red wine sauce emulsified with butter. And another glass of red wine on top can’t hurt.
My twist on Thomas Keller’s recipe below:
Ingredients (makes 4 servings)
4 6-8 oz portions of monkfish tail with uniform circumference, skin removed
50g unsalted butter
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
3 sprigs thyme
For the beurre rouge sauce:
3 Italian parsley stems
3 sprigs thyme
8 black peppercorns
400 grams red wine
6 cremini mushrooms
1 shallot
100 grams of cold, unsalted butter in 1/2 in. cubes
Salt
Instructions (total: 1h)
Prepare the beurre rouge sauce. Thinly slice the shallots and mushrooms, and add to a medium saucepan along with the parsley, thyme, peppercorns, and wine. Heat over medium-high heat and simmer until reduced by half, for around 20 minutes. Strain through a sieve into a smaller saucepan.
Preheat oven to 350F. Heat the reduced wine sauce on medium-high until it forms large bubbles and becomes thicker, coating the back of a spoon. Turn the heat to low and add in the cubes of cold butter, whisking constantly until emulsified, then turn off the heat.
Heat an iron-skillet, carbon steel pan, or another oven-safe pan on high heat with enough canola oil to coat the bottom. Season all sides of the monkfish tail with salt. When hot enough for the fish to sizzle, sear each side of the monkfish tail until golden brown, or for 1-2 minutes. Flip and repeat. This is easiest on the extremities of the pan.
Add in the butter with the sprigs of thyme and finely diced garlic, and baste the fish with the butter. Cook in the oven for 12-15 minutes, or until the fish is 135F internal. Let rest for 10 minutes after the oven.
To plate, add enough beurre rouge sauce to coat the bottom of the plate. Place the monkfish in the center, and garnish with the oven-roasted thyme.
📚 Book: The Overstory
I finished this book over the weekend and adored it. The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, and for good reason.
The Overstory advocates for a mindset shift to see the world as designed and dominated by trees rather than humans. It begins with short stories of nine Americans whose lives have been transformed by trees.
The Hoel family treasure a chestnut tree on their farm in Iowa; Adam’s family plants a maple tree to celebrate his birth; Stanford computer whiz Neelay Mehta falls out of a California live oak and is paralyzed; Patricia sheds light on how trees communicate chemically. All stories mesh as characters unite on a crusade to fight deforestation.
There were 6 trillion trees 12,000 years ago. Today, half remain. And another half are at risk in the next century. The Overstory beautifully depicts the roles trees play in ecosystems and our lives, and how the status quo fights back when attempting to protect them.
My favorite quotes to reflect on:
This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.
A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.
What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.
Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.
That is all for today - BRB next week ✌️
About Me
Hi there! My name is Nathan Paumier - I’m an avid reader, food enthusiast, and climate optimist. I started this newsletter after frequent questions on food tech, reading recommendations, and my secret recipes.
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Nice looking recipe... that I had the opportunity to taste on top of looking at it!
Very inspiring parallel between greener construction and the Overstory reminding us that trees and forests were on the planet well before humans got here. An opportunity to write about biomimicry in another BRB with Nathan P? well done Nathan!