Talks and Workshops

Scarity of fuelwood, the traditional cooking fuel for approximately one-third of the world’s people, increases annually, with many nations experiencing a “fuelwood famine” (FAO Statistical Abstracts)  Moving “up the energy ladder” to fossil fuels or electricity is not affordable nor even possible for much of that population, living in nations with inadequate infrastructure and limited resources.  Since one universal for all of humankind is the need to eat food regularly, accessing fuel for cooking is increasingly difficult and/or expensive to households and indeed, their nations.  What can be done to ameliorate this critical problem?

Over the last decades, considerable innovation has occurred in the technology of wood burning stoves: the Mandeleo Jiko in Kenya, the Lorena stove, the Rocket stove, and so on.  All show promise of reducing the amount of fuelwood needed, as well as cutting down on the now recognized harm to households from ingestion of harmful emissions from indoor cooking (known as indoor air pollution or IAP.) In roughly the same time period, substantial innovation has occurred in the old but little known technology of using the sun to cook food.  Dating back two centuries at least, solar cookers are now found in multiple forms (box, parabolic, and panel) and hundreds of models. Since they cook entirely without the use of biomass or other purchased fuel, they are economical, environmentally and health friendly, but have important limitations. 

Solar cookers are not a “stand alone” cooking technology.  Evening or clouds or rain come regularly or periodically, making another cooking device necessary.  The basic message of this presentation is that fuel-efficient stoves and solar cookers are not competitors, but complementary to one another.  Why not an “arranged  marriage” of the two bodies of promoters, thus enabling fuel-short people everywhere to have the most efficient, least costly, least harmful to health, least environmentally threatening cooking equipment feasible today?  

How might this be accomplished?  Corporations routinely use techniques of “cross training” to ensure that specialists are not too narrow in their outlook. One might suggest that proponents of both technologies under discussion here are guilty of that problem.  Could cross training help? At a more ambitious level, friendlier relationships, cooperative work on project development, perhaps a formal or informal coalition might make a major contribution to the lives of those families that still rely principally on the ever-more scarce supply of biomass.  This talk will discuss such options thoroughly, aided by with audience participation. Options for starters are:   Bring leaders together.  Cross train on one another’s devices. Encourage cooperation or coalitions to provide the best possible consultation/problem solving for families and nations everywhere.

Concrete suggestions made will be offered to appropriate organizations, in the search for “integrated cooking” procedures to become widely available wherever needed in the world..