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

Sun Dec 17 09:10:26 CST 2017

Tom:

Thank you. Your post prompted two ideas about what I would like to do when
I return from India. I hesitated in sending these out as they need
detailing. The first one is where I volunteer my time for a critical - but
not a cynical perspective, and ask for help in selecting project and
documents; the other is my own whim which may not appeal to anybody.

1. A review of documents to develop a view on impact evaluation and link
impacts to project designs, financing rules, and organizational capacity.

2. Developing some ideas on what I will tentatively call "Household Energy
and Environments for the Bottom of the Pyramid in 21st Century."

About (1):

I full agree with your "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. "

I volunteer my time for any new evaluations or - as I have frequently done
in the past - evaluation of evaluations. I expect to be critical but not
cynical. It is only the frothy excitement of saving the world that I make
fun of; I have some idea of the unexpected difficulties of project design
and execution and those who work close to the ground usually find me
empathetic.  (If there are people on this list who have found  me
overbearing in the field, please make  your complaints now.)

I happen to think that some projects and technologies got an unwarranted
bum rap; Since I never took seriously grandiose ideas of "impacts" on
forest resource, indoor air pollution, sexual violence, gender equality or
climate change, it never bothered me if such goals were not achieved.
Promises for those impacts are excuses to raise money but have in turn
opened the door to critics who, when they don't find the "results" they are
looking for and declare the projects "failures". Unless the cooks are
understood before and after - not by a survey instrument but observing
whether they use the new technology excitedly and how it affects their
behavioral patterns - we wouldn't know what to do next.

My proposition is that careful impact evaluations based on the processes
that have led to behavioral change, in the particular contexts of choice of
fuels and in time allocation for women, can emphasize the non-technological
variables that some of the past evaluations (from Manibog 1983 to the World
Bank status report in 2013/4 or most recently in a SE4All report that I
have yet to read in detail)  have emphasized. How does one go about
capturing processes of change, in cook's behavior and in her home
environment (family dynamics to availability of drinking water, say, which
influence cooking patterns and free the women to do other things) and local
biosystems?

Then a natural progression to the follow-up question - understanding that
history of demographic and immediate environment  over the last generation
or so, and projecting, to the extent one can, such changes over the next 20
years, how we divide market segments of both customer desire and
receptivity on the one hand and the human, institutional capacity to ignite
the change (to borrow from GACC book) and sustain it at high power and low?

About (2)

Now about the second idea - it will basically be a project concept note
about how to select fuel supplies and stove technologies for government
subsidies and/or other forms of public and private donor finance to create
and nurture local entrepreneurship, leveraging local knowledge, skills, and
capital (financial, human, social). I would like to do it with an intense
study of particular contexts, but that will have to wait.

The basic premise is that demographic and environmental changes, combined
with changes in livelihoods and family dynamics, make the challenge of
modern energy transition for this emerging cohort (born after 2000, say)
unlike other such transitions in the past. Not only are the sheer numbers
huge - this post-2000 BOP cohort alone will be a billion people by 2030 and
add a couple of billions more born since 1950 and likely to live till 2030.
(Making adjustment for people who are no longer in BOP. Changes within this
3 billion class have also been pretty interesting, with significant
modification in what UNDP calls "multi-dimensional poverty".)

A majority of these people in some sense are poorer, in absolute terms,
than some 80% of world population 200 years ago. It is not just households
but the surrounding ecosystems of productive activities - farm and non-farm
employment, social services - that also suffer from low-level energy
poverty equilibrium.

What is to be done? I don't have a good idea. My work on electricity access
suggests to me that, as it comes to thermal energy for the ecosystems of
energy poverty, not only is there a problem of what economists call
"effective demand" (translating need into market demand) but changes in the
biomass systems - farming practices in particular - can help transform the
energy markets at the BOP. (Wood itself is too valuable for other uses,
including charcoal. But there seems to be a huge increase in crop/tree
wastes and there can be energy crops.)

I can research and write on these grandiose ideas; so far, I haven't found
any statistics in FAO or bioenergy literature to stimulate specific ideas
for specific location, but I will keep looking.

Or I might just focus on the cooking problem -- how to reduce the drudgery
of traditional biomass cooking. A stove is only a part of the answer, and
we have been distracted by the "global" environmental or gender
discrimination theories and lost track of what the problem is, whose
problem it is, whether what we think we know is correct and adequate, and
how the ground reality of the BOP has been changing in economic, social,
cultural, technological terms all around over the last 40 years since the
"improved stoves" recitations began.

I have a simple notion - look at the cook and please her. The proof of the
pudding may be in taking a taste, but first the pudding has to be cooked
and served just right. And a simple metric - autonomous scaling up, with
subsidies and other forms of financial support to strengthen the production
and delivery, repair chain. This is also my way of taking on Kirk Smith's
rather disingenuous challenge to the biomass community. Just not in the
name of "truly  health protective" and certainly not by forcing "no
stacking" mantra except in some dense neighborhoods and as a part of an air
quality improvement strategy.

I have zero respect for GACC's "Track households adopting clean and/or
efficient cookstoves and fuels across all tiers for efficiency and
emissions" , in part because I do not hold their metrics of efficiency and
emissions as indicative of stove usability and in part because I have no
faith in the theories of quantified change from efficiency/emissions to the
grandiose claims I just described. Their notions of "M&E" are to a) serve a
parasitic class of evaluation specialists who get fat churning out
mindless studies and econometric regressions, computing "benefits" and b)
the gypsy moth middlemen like Gold Standard, Goldman Sachs, and C-Quest
Capital.

You and all know that tirade. I think GACC's work on "international
standards" and "M&E" is fatally flawed science and will disgrace all the
other good work it has done. I happen to think GACC is dead, but long live
GACC -- move it to a different platform.

Comments welcome. I know I haven't yet proposed my method; that will take
time. Everybody knows I have more questions than answers, and my
questioning is rather uncomfortable.

Nikhil

tmiles at trmiles.com via
<https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en> alum.mit.edu
Dec 13 (4 days ago)
to *ndesai*, Discussion, David

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 "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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