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For climate journalist and Le Cordon Bleu–trained pastry chef Caroline Saunders, saving the planet is a piece of cake. Literally.
After years covering climate change at Grist, Caroline made an unexpected career move: she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Her mission? To explore how dessert can be an entry point for climate action.
In this conversation with Victoria Riskin, Caroline reveals how sustainable baking might be the path to transforming our food systems, with chefs and bakers leading the way. “Talking with Caroline completely reframed how I see my kitchen,” Victoria says. “For so long, I’ve viewed dessert as a sin or a negative choice. It made me rethink my own habits. We don’t have to sacrifice joy to protect the planet.”
From flour to sweeteners, this episode will change how you think about dessert.
In This Episode, You’ll Hear:
- Why Caroline went from climate journalism to pastry school, and how dessert became her vehicle for climate storytelling
- The three sustainability principles for climate-smart baking
- The truth about the flour industry and why it is vulnerable to climate change
- Which desserts work well without eggs and dairy — and which ones need traditional ingredients
- Natural sweeteners that actually work
- Why eating beans and lentils (pulses) every day could be one of the most impactful climate actions we can take
Read Caroline’s writing: https://bluedotliving.com/author/carolinesaunders/
About Caroline Saunders:
Caroline Saunders is a strategy and operations leader working at the intersection of media, climate, and sustainable food systems. She is the managing director and editor-in-chief of The SUNN Post, a national nonprofit student newspaper amplifying young voices.
Previously, she served as chief of staff at Grist, and she has written about sustainable food for outlets like The Guardian, Bluedot Living Kitchen, and SAVEUR. She also holds a pastry diploma from Le Cordon Bleu Paris, bringing a unique perspective to food and sustainability.
Meet the Host:
Victoria Riskin: I am Victoria. I’m always looking for the best life has to offer despite a turbulent world. I find comfort in the environment and joy in friendships. We have a great team of all ages at Bluedot who inspire me every day as we work together to build community.
Transcript
Victoria Riskin: Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Bluedot Living podcast. I'm Victoria Riskin, founder of Bluedot Living, and on this podcast, we imagine if people were actually making progress on climate change because every episode we talk to people who are helping to move the needle.
So our goal is to leave you feeling a little bit more informed and a little more optimistic about the future. I am very excited to have a special guest here today who I have known for a very long time because she writes and contributes to Bluedot Living, and she's a wonderful culinary, creative spirit. I love what you write for Bluedot.
Just a quick background for you: You went to school at Vanderbilt University and you studied English and journalism, so you have that foundation in how to put words together brilliantly. And then you also did a pastry diploma at Le Cordon Bleu. So I'm really eager to talk to you about that.
And then you were chief of staff for Grist, which is a wonderful online news service about the climate. And you've written for The Guardian, Sliver, Wired, and Salon. But I'm trying to figure this out here, Caroline. You care a lot about climate and what's happening, and you care a lot about food. You put those things together, but you do it through what to me is almost improbable, and that is dessert. That’s a trifecta: It's helping the climate, helping the planet, and then talking about really good food and ingredients and packing that into dessert. So, explain yourself, because I don't think that's possible. How could that be?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. So what a fun intersection, right? But I'll give you the context on how I got to thinking about these things together. So, like you were saying, I started my career coming out of undergrad. I started at Grist Magazine, so I was there immersed in this world of looking at incredible climate journalism and storytelling. Grist journalism has only gotten better and more robust and more investigative and important over time. But I was in this position. I was in some operations and project management roles there.
I did a little bit of writing, but I spent the last few years there as chief of staff, and so I was thinking for Grist about strategy and operations, and where do we go, and how do we have the biggest sort of impact that we possibly can in this landscape of climate journalism. This was up until 2021.
And so I had the great fortune of often looking out at the climate storytelling landscape around the country. And one thing that I noticed was that at that point in time, there wasn't as much storytelling as I would've liked to see writ large around the country, certainly on food and climate. I know this is something you all think about because it's a topic area you cover in tremendous depth at Bluedot. And I specifically felt like, gosh, I wish I saw more storytelling being done about the role that chefs and food tastemakers play in shifting food culture toward the more sustainable, or the roles that they could play, and an evaluation of how well that's working or not.
Grist had an amazing program, and still has it, called the Grist 50, where every year they choose 50 sustainability leaders across different sectors. And I was always so taken when there would be a chef on the list. So anyway, that's all to say I felt like there was a little bit of storytelling being done on how our dinner plate would need to shift in order to adapt to climate change and to be more sustainable and to cut carbon. But I would like to have seen more at that point.
And then there was also nothing being done around how our dessert plate needed to shift to adapt to climate change and cut carbon and be more sustainable. And I just felt like, well, number one, we want to imagine the totality of how our food culture, and what we eat in a day, and how we make meaning from it and enjoy it, evolves. But also I would say that there is an outsized role for dessert to play in enabling this food culture transformation because it is this point of extra delight. And I just had this idea in my mind that I sort of couldn't shake: If we’re going to transform the way that we eat to adapt to the reality of climate change, why not start with dessert?
And to me, that meant seeing what bakers and pastry chefs out there were doing to champion regenerative grains and incorporate them into their recipes, to make stuff plant-based where it made sense to do so from a culinary perspective, and to cut waste. And so long story short, I was like, I want to be able to write better about this stuff, and I want to be able to experiment with some of this stuff myself. So that's why I then went to pastry school at Le Cordon Bleu Paris. I was just like, let's just immerse for a year and then see what comes of that on the other side in terms of how I can plug into food and climate media.
Victoria Riskin: Well, that's like going to bootcamp at the highest level. My niece went to Le Cordon Bleu for a summer program, and she loved it, but it was very, very demanding. A little story that made me laugh: She said when she would get the instruction and then go off to make something, the French teacher would come by and look and say, “Bye-bye,” which meant you've made a mess of this, get rid of it. So all summer when she came back, we would be in the kitchen and I'd say, “Bye-bye.”
Going back to dessert. So for me, and for a lot of people, Caroline, dessert is a sin. You know, everything else can be healthy, but you can then sin, and it's a negative way of looking at dessert, don't you think? And I look at it that way because most desserts are very heavy with wheat and butter and sugar. So ingredients are really important. Take us through how you've reframed the kinds of ingredients you use to get the beautiful desserts that you make, or how you think about desserts, and the blending of ingredients, and where we can find hope in our dessert experience. Right?
Caroline Saunders: Totally. Yeah, so I put on my sustainability hat and think about three main things when it comes to dessert. It's sort of like a three-prong thing that I apply to desserts at large. And I think about applying one or more of these to every dessert. I think: How could a dessert be plant-based? And often, but not always, that means it's going to be a little healthier. But I'll come back to the health thing in a second because I try to think about that a little separately, since it demands its own attention.
So from a sustainability standpoint, I think about low-hanging fruit desserts that could easily be plant-based, like panna cottas. There are very good ways to adapt sorbets, certain cookies, certain quick breads, and loaf cakes adapt themselves pretty well compared to something like a chiffon cake where you need so many egg whites that I wouldn't want to mess with that.
And then I think about another axis, low waste. I think more about: How could we better champion desserts that naturally are making use of ingredients that otherwise go to waste? It was fun at pastry school to learn about the long tradition of French pastries that use up little bits and scraps. Like of course, pain perdu — bread pudding, a.k.a. “lost bread.” The direct translation is a classic, obvious one, but there are others like this little cookie twist called palmiers, which are little puff pastry ends that are the result of making something else fancy with puff pastry, but then you make these as a waste-saving thing.
But anyway, I think about it. When we turn to dessert, it feels like the time to bake on a Saturday. Could we just select something that is going to make use of something that’s going to go bad? And then similarly, I think about replaceability and fungibility of ingredients. Could it be mix-and-match and just use whatever fruits you have that are wilting in the fridge?
And the third thing I think about is: How could we incorporate more climate-smart, regenerative, resilient ingredients and weave those into the fabric of what we use day to day, starting with dessert? And I think that flour is a particularly easy place to begin. If you just think about substituting 20% to 25%, which is pretty much always a safe amount of flour to substitute without creating issues, take your AP flour, but instead use, for instance, drought-resistant millet flour, which I've written about for Bluedot. It's this nice, soft way to pepper in sustainability.
Victoria Riskin: Let's talk about flour, because so many recipes just say regular flour. Tell me about regular flour. How is it made, and then what is your go-to to have a healthier, more sustainable choice in flour? And I’m going to ask you the same question about sugar or sweetness, but let’s start with flour.
Caroline Saunders: OK, great. Flour is so interesting to me because it sort of is the backbone of Western baking, right? And so it is just ubiquitous. And so it's interesting to me to think about a product that is so important and yet has, I think up until quite recently, largely escaped the sort of sustainability and ethical scrutiny that has been applied to many other things.
So flour grows across vast tracts of the hemisphere. You start with a grain, and then it goes through a milling process. And one of the things that is most interesting to me in the history of flour is that, like many other agricultural industries, it has consolidated massively over the past century and a half. There used to be thousands and thousands of regional flour mills around the country supporting thriving local and regional grain economies. And now there are just vastly fewer. I don’t want to throw out a number so I don’t get it wrong, but so few mills produce flour.
What happens is you are starting with the flour, which has this starchy endosperm, the germ, and these different parts. And when you end up with processed flour after it’s been milled and refined, it’s got a certain amount of protein that is considered standard for an all-purpose flour, but it is a lot of just starch, and you lose the stuff — like the oily germ — that is very healthy, but is also going to make the flour go rancid more quickly if you were to retain it. So when we think of whole grain flour, it’s got all those parts.
And so when I think about it — I’ll say briefly also that flour is increasingly threatened by climate change. There has been really interesting reporting from major news outlets in the last couple of years about how, as with so much of climate weirding, a lot of our staple crops are at increasing risk of really bad stuff happening in simultaneous places around the world. They call it the risk of “multi-breadbasket failure,” and it is rising. It’s not imminent, but these are things that could create meaningful price shocks and real food security issues. That’s before you factor in geopolitical mayhem, obviously.
When I think about resilience and also health, it’s fun with flour. They really do go hand in hand. I love to source — whenever I can swing it on my budget — flour from New York state producers. But also buying regionally from brands that are thinking about the baker but also thinking about the farmer. There are some New York-grown brands that have really great whole wheat pastry flours and stuff like that.
Victoria Riskin: Can you name a couple? Because people might want to go and find it themselves if they can.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. The one that I really love in New York is called Farmer Ground. This is an amazing brand. The other one that I just adore — and there are many great ones — is Carolina Ground out of Asheville, North Carolina. And they also have a wonderful cookbook. They have done tremendous work in creating and restoring a robust Southern grain economy. Then I also think of folks who happen to be in Seattle or Western Washington. Skagit Valley has some amazing ones. Cairnspring Mills was my favorite when I lived in Seattle.
Victoria Riskin: This is great because now when most folks go to get flour or even bread at the market, it says “enriched.” And what is that telling me? What does enriched flour mean? And I also want to get into: If I can't get to Carolina Ground or one of these, what about some of the bigger brands like King Arthur? So could you unpack more about that? We could do a whole show on this!
Caroline Saunders: I know. There’s so much to it. It’s incredible. So, enriched means it’s had vitamins and stuff added back into it.
Victoria Riskin: Right. That’s what I understand, that they take everything out. They bleach it, they clean it, they extract, and then they throw some stuff back in. I don’t know which vitamins get thrown back in, so it’s kind of been cleaned out of all the nutrients.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. And then they're like — it’s the same thing with these processed cereals, right? It’s like taking all the good stuff out and then adding ostensibly a smattering of some of those good things back in, which the logic of that breaks down pretty quick.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah. So “enriched” is kind of misleading, we would say, maybe.
Caroline Saunders: When I go to the grocery store and I’m in the flour aisle, I definitely love the brand Jovial, which sells einkorn flour and maybe some others, but that’s a real favorite of mine for einkorn flour, which is an ancient wheat. I also really admire King Arthur as a company. They have partnered with the Washington State University Bread Lab in the past on releasing some climate-smart wheats. I think they’ve since discontinued them, but they were running a very exciting climate blend for a while that I bought a lot of and used extensively. I thought it was just an amazing whole wheat, super flavorful, but also mild enough to work in brownies and stuff. I just think they are cool and ethical and will probably do more fun climate-smart products over time.
Then, right adjacent to flour, I am super into some gluten-free grains. Some of them are technically seeds, like buckwheat, for instance. I'm a huge fan of using buckwheat flour in certain types of desserts. And then millet, too, is super awesome. I was experimenting with it in some recipes last summer because it has this almost cake-batter-like flavor. So it’s really nice where you want to bring that out, whether in a pie crust or a flour. It works really well as a blend-in and has this awesome advantage of this super tiny micro-millet economy springing up, particularly in the Great Plains where there are a lot of water scarcity issues. It is so drought-resistant and can do so much with so little water that it’s a really fun and compelling option for some farmers out there that are looking toward the future.
Victoria Riskin: Oh, that’s great. Now let’s move a little bit into the sweet department, because sometimes I see recipes that say cane sugar, and I know how bad sugar is for people. We have to admit that.
Caroline Saunders: Oh yeah. Terrible.
Victoria Riskin: It's terrible. So how do we bake something? I mean, there's organic cane sugar. I don't know if that’s better; that’s maybe one step up. But are there other things that we can do in baking to get that yummy sweet high that we all want?
Caroline Saunders: It’s a great question. And it’s the inherent tension of baking, right? To me, it’s the single most interesting, troubling, thought-provoking trade-off. You know, I think about a couple things. I’m so focused on dessert as an entry point to climate conversation and thinking about food system transformation, but it’s also not like I'm pounding dessert all day every day, or I’m never going to say anybody should do that. You should not, to be clear.
But it will always be such an important part of the tapestry of our food culture, right? And so I do think about moderation being the most obvious principle in the world and quite an important ground rule to set when we’re talking about the role of dessert in health and sustainability.
That being said, one piece is that I feel like there are plenty of desserts where, from a chemical standpoint, the structure that sugar gives — specifically white cane or beet sugar — is necessary. A lot of our sugar comes from beet; a decent amount comes from cane. The products are interchangeable in home cooking, which is why you will never see on a bag the specification of which it is. But in so many types of baked goods, the baked good will not be what you want it to be without the specific chemical properties and reactions that sugar enables.
I will give you one specific example: a chocolate chip cookie. You know how when it spreads in the oven under heat, sugar is what enables that spread? And sugar is also what creates the crunchy edges. I did a story for The Guardian a couple of years ago on this question of how essential sugar is to baking and where the line is — how far can we push desserts to rely less on sugar without messing them up?
I interviewed some folks, including a contributor to Bluedot Living, Brian Levy, who is a fantastic recipe developer and cookbook author. I want to throw out the name of his cookbook, which is super relevant: Good and Sweet. It is exclusively desserts that are sweetened with fruit and other natural sources of sweetness. But he was the one who walked me through all the ways you need sugar for a chocolate chip cookie.
But while there are some recipes that do need it if you want them to be in their original form, there are a whole bunch that can just be delicious versions with only fruit sweeteners, flour sweeteners, and nut sweeteners. My favorites that I learned about from Brian are this amazing coffee panna cotta that is sweetened with either coconut cream or coconut milk and dates. And then I know that his sticky toffee pudding, which to this day is in my top two favorite desserts ever, is exclusively sweetened with dates and white miso paste and dried milk powder.
Victoria Riskin: That’s amazing. Well, dates are so sweet. They’re so intense.
Caroline Saunders: Right. They’re so intense.
Victoria Riskin: They’re so intense. What a brilliant thing. I’m so excited to actually hear you say that. I do not do dessert, but I’m about to change my mind because you inspired me to try it. I like to eat it when it’s served to me, but I always enter this conversation feeling like it’s bad, I’m going to gain 500 pounds or get diabetes. I have this bad neon sign on dessert, even though I have a cookie thief in my house that I’m married to.
Caroline Saunders: Yes, I get that. I am a cookie thief.
Victoria Riskin: So you’re kind of bringing me back here to this lovely place where I can start trying desserts. I’d love to try a dessert with millet. Do you have one in your collection that you love?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. I think my favorite so far is a galette recipe that I developed with millet. I went down this really fun rabbit hole that Nicki, the Bluedot editor, enabled me to go down last summer. I wrote this piece about millet as a viable grain for the future of the Great Plains, and then wanted to develop this galette recipe to go with it that starred millet but also used other ingredients that are key to a regenerative future for the Midwest and Plains broadly.
I made this stone fruit and hazelnut galette, which was basically peaches and some other fruits that are being considered as viable regenerative crops by the Savannah Institute, a really interesting research nonprofit. And then a hazelnut frangipane, which is a fun switch to the typical almond one. And then the galette crust itself was a blend of whole wheat and millet flour.
Victoria Riskin: All right, so do we have that on our website? Because I am going to try it, and then we’ll have another conversation, and I’ll show you my result. It would be like I’m going into a whole new world, and it’s called the Dessert World.
I'll tell you a very quick story. You probably know Anne Willan. She's written several cookbooks and won James Beard Awards. She did a beautiful edition called The Country Cooking of France. She went to each region and talked about what was local and beautiful. Anyway, she had a tarte tatin in that, and I did a book party for her where I invited nine couples and they all had to make one thing from the book.
Caroline Saunders: Oh, that’s fun.
Victoria Riskin: And one woman made the tarte tatin, and she said, “I don't think it came out right,” so she did it all over again. I thought, I would never have done that! But she felt like she was bringing it to the goddess of tarte tatins. But what I’m experiencing even in talking with you, Caroline, is what a joy it is to make food and then deliver it to people. Almost every chef or cook I know, when I ask how they got interested, they say, “When I was young and I cooked something and brought it to people, they smiled. They were happy.” What got you going?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. Oh, I love that question. For me, it was a couple of things. I grew up helping my mom bake. She would make amazing, incredible three-dimensional birthday cakes for my sister and me when we were little, and I always wanted to help on my own birthday cake. There was a three-dimensional dolphin leaping off of a plate and an ombre cupcake tower back when ombre was new as a concept.
The other thing is that on my mom’s side of the family, there is this huge baking obsession. My Aunt Julie hosts an annual dessert buffet right before Christmas, and that is our extended family reunion every year. The whole shtick of it is that we all fly in from all around the country, and we go to her house in Virginia on a Saturday, and we spend morning to night consuming like 40 different types of desserts she has spent the last two months preparing. No one is allowed to help at all.
Victoria Riskin: Oh my gosh. What a gift she wants to give to everybody. That’s remarkable. I think you touch upon something that I find really important, and that is hanging out in the kitchen is actually bonding. It’s a lovely thing to do. I suffer from an acute case of “don't come in the kitchen when I'm in the kitchen” because you’ll distract me. I’m trying to remember how many teaspoonfuls of something and then I smell something burning. It just always happens. So I have to clear the decks and say, “No, don't come in and help me.”
Caroline Saunders: I totally get that. I’m basically the same way. I think like my Aunt Julie — if I have engineered the steps of the cooking down to a science, I can allow people in at the last moment when there’s very little left to do.
Victoria Riskin: There you go. “You may serve this; you can take this to the table.” But it is such a joy. I want to add my own personal experience. My whole journey on climate started in the kitchen. I was thinking: What am I supposed to do here? Am I supposed to compost paper towels? How can I help? And then you begin to see that food is such an amazing entryway. The more we do it for you, me, and everybody else and you go to the supermarket and say, “I want this product,” or you start buying from these wonderful organic farms or the flour people, you are helping to shift the consumer scales towards these healthier, better products.
I live on Martha's Vineyard and you have to come and visit. But apart from that, nothing makes me happier than having 10 people sit around a table for a nice dinner. I actually usually get someone to help serve and clean up because doing the dishes is not the fun part. That’s my little gift to myself. I don’t buy a new pair of shoes; I get someone to help me. It’s about sharing conversation and putting the right people at the table so there’s a harmony and a depth of experience at a time when we’re all feeling so pulled by the craziness out there. You can make a food bubble.
We usually close our shows with a segment called “Imagine If.” It's just a wide-open question and we’ve had all kinds of answers. So I’m going to put it to you: What might be your “imagine if”?
Caroline Saunders: My “imagine if” —vand I thought hard about a dessert one — but I wanted to go speaking from the heart. I’m going to give us an “Imagine If” about beans. And that is: I want us to imagine if every day of the week, everybody ate some amount of a pulse. I want us to imagine this because prices are really high right now, and beans are an inexpensive, healthy protein. If we subbed just a little bit of red meat for delicious burrito bowls or dal, it would be this awesome climate action that we could take individually. And then it would also be so good for our health to eat more legumes. So that’s my big imagination. I’m manifesting it for myself and hope others will join.
Victoria Riskin: I love that. I’m so grateful for what you do. Thanks.
Caroline Saunders: Thank you so much.
Victoria Riskin: Thank you for joining us on Imagine If from Bluedot Living. If you want to explore our recipes, products for your home and lifestyle, and read interesting stories, you can find us at bluedotliving.com. And for daily inspiration, you can follow us at Bluedot Living on Instagram. If you enjoyed this conversation, share it and please add your thoughts in the comments on YouTube. I’m Victoria Riskin, and we’ll be back next week with more stories from great people doing amazing things in their little corner of the planet.
