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

[tmiles at trmiles.com]

Nikhil,

 

We all know the potato story. Of more use to this group would be studies that  "Track households adopting clean and/or efficient cookstoves and fuels across all tiers for efficiency and emissions" (GACC). As I have commented before, there are too few impact studies of all aspects surrounding cooking devices, including stoves, retained heat cookers, and 3 stone fires. There are a few very good ones but not so many. Careful impact studies of 200 cookstove projects that have been in operation 5-10 years, or more, would be very useful to identify how cooking solutions suit family or community needs. Projects lasting that long should have adapted to local needs.   

 

Tom   

 

From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Nikhil Desai
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2017 7:05 AM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Cc: David Stein <ambwat at gmail.com>
Subject: [Stoves] When Boiling Water may be a good proxy for cooking

 

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  <https://cleancookstoves.org/binary-data/RESOURCE/file/000/000/190-1.pdf> "success" 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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