What could be a more quintessentially human activity? Our food tastes better and is usually much safer to eat when it’s cooked. (There is something to be said, don’t get me wrong, for the raw foods approach too. I’ve been a vegetarian for … what year is this? … a long time and I do take various “non-traditional” approaches to food and nutrition seriously.)
The question remains for most of the 6.5 billion of us: How do you cook? In much of the developing world, in hundreds of thousands of villages, people gather biomass – scrub wood and dung mostly – and cook over open fires. This leads to massive exposure to smoke by the mostly women and children who are around the fires. It requires a lot of time and effort to gather the biomass. When you are clearing scrub or forest for firewood, you are destroying valuable local cover that holds the soil and provides windbreaks, among other things. And, it turns out, you are making a massive contribution to climate change. The black carbon – soot, or particulate matter – that is the major component of the smoke, not only ruins the health of those immediately exposed to it, it also is a powerful source of “radiative forcing,” second only, it now appears, to carbon dioxide.
I wrote about the question of black carbon and low-tech approaches at “Teach us delight in simple things …” I met Elisabeth Rosenthal, the “NY Times” environmental reporter based in Europe, at an event in February. We spoke a bit about getting at low-tech solutions and she’s been very much on that for awhile. She wrote an important article last week, Third-World Stove Soot Is Target in Climate Fight. She said what more and more scientists and climate activitists have been noting about black carbon with “….recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide. Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively cheap way to significantly rein in global warming – especially in the short term, climate experts say.” Here is an excellent slide show from the “NY Times” on The Threat of Black Carbon.
How do you reduce black carbon? I wrote about the Kyoto Box winning an international contest recently. This is a simple, cheap “solar box cooker.” Rosenthal looks at some of these cookers here at a follow-up at DotEarth, the excellent “NY Times” blog. As always, some of the most stimulating content here is in the comments. For further reference, see the fascinating “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition from a couple of years ago, and the good folks at Solar Cookers International, the truly superb NGO that has been spreading the word and the technology both among international aid agencies and on the ground in the developing world for a number of years now. See this powerpoint show for an introduction and use their website to learn more.
