[Stoves] When Boiling Water may be a good proxy for cooking

[Nikhil Desai]

I will leave aside the arguments about the WBT and the IWA metrics. I have
been wondering how the cognoscenti of combustion - but not of cooking - may
have found boiling water of great significance in the culture of household
fuel use. (Not only is cooking an art, beyond the reach of thermodynamics,
fuel use is culturally ingrained.) Now I have an idea -- that boiling water
for potato may have had historical significance. I came across a book title
- The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Redcliffe N. Salaman , W.
G. Burton - and found this in a review
<http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/237372> by William McNeil:

"He, or someone else, should explore the relation between the spread of the
potato and the industrialization of Europe. It seems plausible on a priori
grounds that the potato facilitated, if it indeed did not provide an
indispensable precondition for, the development of large agglomerations of
populations in the regions where coal and iron deposits existed but local
food supplies were inadequate to maintain a dense population prior to the
adoption of the potato." (The Journal of Modern History, Volume 22, Number
4 | Dec., 1950)


I don't know if such explorations have been done in the 67 years since the
review was published, but I take McNeill at his word (a delightful
historian). The potato can be cooked in many ways but I suspect that for
Europe's poor people in the 17th Century and well into the 20th Century,
boiling was the most common way of cooking. It may also be that boiling
meats and vegetables was also a more common way of cooking them among the
European working class or poor farmhands, and for the simple reason that
open fire in a pit or a woodstove was all that they could afford. Without
some kind of an oven, boiling might also have been their way of eating
wheat - boiled whole or as flour dumplings. I think vegetable oils -
peanut, sesame, corn, soybean - might not have been common in Europe and
that olive oil was limited to southern Europe or the Mediterranian,
limiting fat use to animal sources. That is, boiling as the dominant
cooking method came because of open fire, not that they only wanted to boil
once they had better or different options such as grilling, roasting,
frying, controlled drying, smoking or brewing, distillation. Which would
explain the persistence of "stacking" until a) most cooking can be adopted
to a controllable technology such as with gas and electric appliances, and
b) the rest is given up or outsourced. The appeal of "modern stoves" is not
that they are "truly health protective" but that they make time management
an easier task. This is also the reason for switching to noodles - those
made at home and stored or bought in the market. And also, as David Stein
taught me some years back about the Pacific Islanders, rice replaced
traditional tubers because it was easier and quicker to cook. So, boiling
water has its uses; it is a proxy for some cooking in some places. Whether
the IWA metrics
<http://cleancookstoves.org/technology-and-fuels/standards/iwa-tiers-of-performance.html>
have any general applicability is not even a matter of debate; never was,
except for some high-level agreement to agree on a place holder, after
which EPA simply rammed the IWA down the throats of another jumboree of
experts. Apart from the ISO TC-285 exercise to create a rationale for LPG
promotion and selling of aDALYs - something like Bitcoin - the WBT and IWA
also gave GACC a handle on claiming "success"
<https://cleancookstoves.org/binary-data/RESOURCE/file/000/000/190-1.pdf>
on the basis of dubious theories of change and no baseline data. Time to
wrap up and send people home. Whether or not 100 million "clean cookstoves"
are in use by 2020, nobody needs monkeying around with super-pretentious
M&E experts serving the fiction of "implementation science". GACC wants to
"Track households adopting clean and/or efficient cookstoves and fuels
across all tiers for efficiency and emissions"; will keep on stuffing pages
of peer-reviewed, pal-pampered publications and continuing the
song-and-dance of Clean Cooking Forum. Time is up; stop making more water
vapor,a potent GHG.
Nikhil
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