Solar Cooking: The No-Fuel, No-Emissions Way to Make Dinner
When the sun’s high in the sky, solar cookers sizzle in the developing world and on the city sidewalk.
By Rachel Nuwer
This post was originally published in Edible Manhattan
Arline “AJ” Lederman didn’t intentionally set out to study what open-fire cooking means for the world’s woods and women.
For years, the art historian split her time between her Hoboken home and rural Afghanistan, studying traditional embroidery that women there specialize in. But during the village visits, she saw that women spend most of their time on something else: searching for anything to burn — sticks, leaves, animal dung — and that as a result much of the country’s former forests had been stripped bare. The problems didn’t end there: back home, they and their families coughed over open fires in smoke-filled rooms.
“I saw how hard their lives were because of the need for fuel,” Lederman says. “It was wrenching to see that women who had such skill and talent, who could create such a high level of beauty, were trapped.” Trapped, that is, in the constant search for flammable fuel.
After retiring from academia, Lederman’s memories of Afghan women crouched over fires stuck with her. That’s when her friend Mary Frank told her about something called solar cooking — the no-fuel, no-emissions, no-cost method to bake anything from lentil curry to peach pie, simply by reflecting the rays of the sun.
“I instantly realized that solar cooking was an answer for the Afghan women and, by extension, for billions of women around the world,” Lederman says.
That’s right — billions. According to the World Health Organization, nearly half the planet’s population — some 3 billion people — subsists on food cooked over open fires. That may sound romantic, but the traditional task is devastatingly dangerous and destructive. Lung cancer, emphysema and blindness can all result from daily hours spent cooking over a smoldering fire, making cigarettes look like vitamins. Each year, an estimated 1.5 million people lose their lives to diseases or complications caused by indoor cooking pollution, including, on average, 500,000 women and 800,000 children.
The environment is another casualty as the resulting black carbon is a major contributor to global warming. Just as our power plants and tailpipe emissions affect people around the world, all those smoldering fires in India, Sudan, China and beyond likewise impact us.
Solar ovens, on the other hand, call for no fuel, require no flame and produce no smoke. Women no longer need strip trees for wood, which provides another valuable asset: time. Give a woman a solar oven and, in a place like Afghanistan, you change her life.
“You see a woman who previously could do nothing but look for wood, then stand and cook and take in all of that smoke, become liberated when she gets a solar cooker,” Frank says. “You see hundreds of cookers — it looks like a religious phenomenon, these shiny objects out in the desert — but there’s no one there.” Now, those women can spend that extra time with children, tending livestock or learning a new skill.
And they don’t just cook dinner. Solar cookers’ heat can sterilize water for safe drinking, something we take for granted but a billion people worldwide lack.
All of which is why the United Nations and UNESCO frequently sponsors international solar cooking conferences.
Find a list of resources — including links to where to buy a solar cooker or how to make your own, plus a national geographic video about solar cooking — here.
