[Stoves] Indian Cooking Cycle

Mon Sep 18 10:16:17 CDT 2017

Darpan:

This is a good opportunity to discuss these three papers and, apart from
the modeling consequences, some real issues in wood stove testing and
design. Thank you.

1. I have two primary questions for you, apart from technicalities:

a) Can you define "Indian cooking" before defining an Indian cooking
"cycle"? If not, what really are you after?

b) Have you found coal cookstoves test results for India?

I have rarely seen hard coal-based cookstoves use in India. It was pilfered
anthracite from railways for some very special cooking in the laborers'
household or for large-scale cooking for feasts. On the other hand, I have
some familiarity with the types and qualities of coal available in some
parts of India, and my sense is, household cooking with coal is limited to
Jharkhand and some parts of Orissa and Bihar. You are probably aware that a
couple of years ago, CEEW in New Delhi had done detailed household energy
surveys in some six or eight Indian states. I don't remember them reporting
coal quality or quantity data, but you might want to check if state-level
agencies have something.

>From what I remember of some work - up to 1980s - on direct use of coal in
households and small industries and households in US, China, Vietnam, South
Korea, Japan, my impression is, household coal use is even more varied than
of woods. There are many varieties of coals, and coal is preferred over
wood in most places. I have visited restaurants and factories where coal is
used, and heard their resistance to wood and gas.

All this by way of cautioning that the literature you find on wood or
biomass stove testing may not be quite relevant to the type of customers
and uses you are thinking of. I suggest contacting some old-timers at Teri
and IIT-Delhi who may remember research on coke and soft coke use in
households. (I distinctly remember this in the 1970s - those people are
unfortunately no longer around. This "soft coke" market in Bengal and
then-Bihar (including Jharkhand now) was rather unique.)

I suggest trying to define the "cooking cycles" of the target coal
cookstove users - in and outside households.

Before they switch over to LPG.

And don't worry about emissions monitoring. The Global Burden of Health due
to Household Air Pollution (all from solid fuels) is not based on cookstove
emission rates. There are no measured global data on stoves -> emissions ->
concentrations -> exposures -> disease incidence -> premature death. None.
It's not "Inspecting what you expect" but rather "Inventing what you
intend."

+++++++++++++

2. The Venkataraman paper is available here
<http://cleancookstoves.org/resources_files/the-indian-national.pdf>. The
authors were driven to cook up numbers for the sake of cooking up numbers.
In the belief that anything is better than nothing.

That National Cookstove Initiative went Up in Smoke. (Caravan, 2015)

Also went up with smoke "premature mortality" due to household solid fuel
use in India - from 570,000 in 2005 (Venkataraman paper) to about 900,000
in 2010 or 2012 (GBD; I forget which year).

+++++++++

3. Now, for Arora, et al. (2014), which happened to come to my notice a few
days ago. It is available on www.academia.edu

It is a good paper on measurement protocols basis alone. (They note that
only one study had previously been done, in 2008, on cooking performance
using "Indian cooking cycles" in Tamil Nadu.)

Their broad conclusion is,

"Overall, results show *significant influence* of cooking cycles on
cookstove performance, which *was found to alter the cookstove rankings*.
Therefore, the study thrusts upon the inclusion of user centric cookstove
testing protocols in order to identify actual benefits for targeted rural
communities." (emphasis added.)

Tell that to the ISO TC-285 and other pundits -- that cookstoves are about
cooking, no less. Cooks of WHO and HAPIT may also revise numbers if they
used CCTs for particular cooking cycles.

Interesting things show up when observing specific cooking instead of
boiling (bloody) water. Arora et al. look at rice, pulses, and bread
(rotis). They ignore vegetable cooking, which is a shame.

For Controlled Cooking Test (CCT), they found

"In case of the CCT-UK, SEC was higher during roti making due to higher
> charcoal consumption, owing to the smoldering conditions required to
> maintain low temperature for baking the thinner roti." (UK = Uttarakhand,
> one of the two Indian states where they picked a village.)

It is long known all over India that when it comes to making rotis,
chapatis, very quick deep-frying (or popping seeds and throwing curry
leaves, whole chilies, at the beginning of many dishes), "fuel-saving"
improved biomass stoves fail to deliver the desired power cycle. Even when
other stoves are adopted, certain rotis and similar breads ("bhakra" or
"rotla" in central and western India) are made on traditional stoves.

That is what Arora et al. (2014) find: "The advantage with the TR cookstove
was found to be the process of *puffing u*p of roti which was done on the
glowing charcoal inside the combustion chamber." (TR = traditional charcoal
stove.)

Duh.

I recall a lot of variation on charcoal stoves in Ahmedabad of the 1960s
was around different types of breads. For some cooking, a small charcoal
stove was preferred over another bigger charcoal stove or a couple of
kerosene stoves in my household. Even when LPG came in, millet breads were
made on charcoal stoves until potters figured out that a clay plate with
holes sufficed for most people using gas.

Why, some seven years ago I was in Pune when a long-time stove observer
complained that cooks there did not take to some new biomass stove, which
they liked in all respects but making the millet or ragi breads. I asked
her to import some hole-y clay plates from Ahmedabad. A few weeks later she
told me the cooks were now happy.

Incidentally, this was also a point of contention about electric induction
stove. I don't make rotis but was told one couldn't make chapatis on
electric induction stove. I was half-wrong. What we call "phoolka" roti -
the kind that balloons in the middle when put on direct flame at the end -
cannot be made on an electric induction stove. The thicker, flat rotis can
be, even puffed a little by putting them on top of the induction stove over
a grill, just like I used to do with electric hot plate.

The real point of Arora, et al. (2014) paper is not just that cooking
cycles matter and that CCT is probably a better test but rather the issues of
"stacking" and "controls". People stack stoves because of different tasks
and valuations of timeliness (rotis at the end, quick). People adjust to
gas stoves or gas-like stoves because they can control the flame. Power is
power.

If you permit stacking, and forget the mania about inventing a miracle
stove that completely replaces the traditional stoves, the whole "stove
sector" could at last go somewhere outside of labs and catering to rich
country donor bureaucracies who know practically nothing about cooking in
the Third World.

There is no use wandering into alleys to just confirm that they are blind.
Or producing new performance numbers and ratings without testing usability
attuned to contexts (which differ and keep changing.)

Putting emission modeling before testing usability is putting the horse's
face in front of the cart. These authors get the priorities right:

*"Eventually*, the testing results will help to enhance the* acceptability
of new cookstoves among rural communities with diverse cooking habits*.
These data sets can also be used as an input for cookstove emission
modeling studies in order to create a regional emission database by using
food and cooking fuel consumption patterns of the targeted communities."

Just stop competing on emissions and efficiency; as a cook, frankly my
dears, I don't give a damn. (I care, but I don't obsess.)

----------
A corollary:

Maybe the types of breads Indians eat need to be "outsourced". Injeras,
tortillas, various types of leavened wheat and other grain breads have long
been outsourced. Why, in Kabul and Bamyan, I saw young boys carrying tens
of naans baked in commercial tandoor bakeries for deliveries to other shops
and households. People in apartment buildings were apparently getting used
to merely warming up naans on gas stoves.

Around here in Washington, some ten or more types of Indian breads are
available in the frozen sections of Indian grocery stores. Some come from
India, just as injeras are now flown in from Addis Ababa. And of course
frozen French baguette dough, ready to bake, is shipped from Paris to
French bakeries and homes in the Caribbean.

Not only are are electric rice and stew pots and bread makers (the lump
kind), there are household-size electric automated tortilla and roti
makers. Home-based foods industry is thriving around the world.

The future of cooking is in homogenization and outsourcing. Not in
inventing a miracle cookstove for poor rural households for any and every
fuel cycle. Rather, produce and market multiple stoves for multiple tasks
and volumes.

Which has been going on with charcoal stoves for decades; why not
manufactured wood stoves?

++++++++++
4. The Lombardi, et al. paper - available here
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313846779_Laboratory_protocols_for_testing_of_Improved_Cooking_Stoves_ICSs_A_review_of_state-of-the-art_and_further_developments>
for academic use only - gets to the crux of the problem -- stove testing is
at a primitive stage and in need of much theoretical and empirical
research.

That is of course my personal interpretation of their view - that a
"cooking system" involves many factors that are fixed by assumption or by
neglect in the lab-based protocols to date.

a. "The first common issue to be highlighted is that none of the current
laboratory-based protocols can provide results that are representative of
average stove performance in a real context of use. In fact, real-use
performance are not merely concerned with the stove, but are rather
contingent on different factors, namely: stove design, pot type, fuel and
moisture content, burn sequence [refs]. All those factors together should
be treated as an integrated thermal system [ref] or “cooking system” [ref],
with the last three being strongly dependent on the local context."

By fixing fuel type (chemical composition) and burn cycle, stove designers
are acting like economists - assume away reality.

b. "The second common issue regards the use of current protocols to
determine the use of current protocols to determine the effect of design
alterations on performance or to identify the best stove design, which is
claimed as their main role and purpose. Actually, ceteris paribus, a given
stove will perform better or worse than another one while varying its
design. However, *a design which is best for a given, fixed combination of
all the factors could not at all be optimised when a variation of one of
the other parameters which compose the overall "cooking system" is
introduced*." (Emphasis added.)

To me, this is a bold opinion, a radical departure from the received
theology of cookstoves. Something is fundamentally wrong if we are
expecting the user to conform to our assumptions. (There is only so much
one can do by impressing donor bureaucrats.)

Nikhil

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831 <(202)%20568-5831>
*Skype: nikhildesai888*

On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 4:21 PM, Darpan Das <darpandasiitb at gmail.com> wrote:

> [image:
> https://mailtrack.io/trace/mail/74e710fe77f8a19b982e831c2abcc6c087268a9d.png?u=1788967]Dear
> All
>
>
>
> For how much duration should a cookstove (coal based) be measured for
> emissions so that it is representative of an Indian cooking cycle?
>
> *What is the time taken for an Indian cooking cycle?*
>
>
>
> Some mention about Indian cooking cycle in literature are as follows
>
>    1. Venkatraman et al., 2010 - "*Laboratory tests of cookstoves bear
>    some similarity to those for other consumer devices, such as automobiles,
>    which are not operated at constant load all the time, unlike many
>    industrial devices. It is thus necessary to employ a standard use cycle for
>    every test so that comparisons can be made in a repeatable manner even if
>    the standard cooking (or driving) cycle is not completely representative of
>    use in all situations.Development of one or more “Indian Cooking Cycles” is
>    being considered as part of the National Cookstove Initiative"*
>
> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0973082610
> 000219?via%3Dihub
>
>
> Although I couldn't come across any such Indian cooking cycle protocol
> which mentions the approximate duration representative of Indian cooking
> cycle.
>
>
>
> 2) Arora et al., 2014 in their study assess cookstove performance in terms
> of energy and emissions based on ‘Indian cooking cycles. The results
> measure the variations in cookstove performance using CCT protocol, owing
> to the difference in cooking cycles existing in two different regions of
> northern India i.e. Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Uttarakhand (UK).
>
> Based on their study they approximate 60-70 min for cooking, which
> includes rice, pulses and roti.
>
> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0961953414
> 003456?via%3Dihub
>
>
>
> 3) Lombardi et al 2017 review most of the exising testing protocols and
> point out that 45-60 min is usually the duration of phase during the water
> boiling test measurements.
>
> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0961953417
> 30065X?via%3Dihub
>
>
>
> The above references are linked.*
>
>
>
> Regards
>
> Darpan
>
>
>
> *Note: Articles that are copyrighted cannot be uploaded to the list unless
> posted by an author. TRM
>
> ‌
>
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