Most of the people that the Kitchen Sisters profile are not particularly eco-conscious in the hip, modern meaning of the term. They mostly don’t buy organic produce. They don’t seek out foods that were locally procured. Why, then, am I writing about them?

What’s special to me about the heroic cooks of Hidden Kitchens is not how they manage to create meals out of thin air. Their greater success lies in engendering community—like the Club from Nowhere, a secret civil rights kitchen in Montgomery, Alabama that baked pies and cakes out of beauty parlors to pay for the gas and station wagons that ferried people to work during the post-Rosa Parks bus boycott. Or the 150-year-old burgoo tradition in Owensboro, Kentucky, where the town’s men stay up all night grilling food for parish picnics that raise funds for church committees, not to mention feeding the town. Or the Brazilian lady known only as Janete who cooks bollinhos and hot salgadinhos in San Francisco cabyards for hungry cabbies at the end of their shifts.

Sustainability isn’t just about the natural environment. We also need traditions and community to survive. To me, that makes the Kitchen Sisters, heralds of the culinarily unsung, champions of sustainability, too.