There’s some stories that got overlooked last week, what with the holiday fooferaw. Since the endless labors of billions of women and children to provide cooked food fall into the ‘Vagina Outrage’ category for me, I was interested to read Jonathan Alter at the Washington Monthly on “Toxic Dinner“:
The consequences of cooking may be the least-known major health problem in the world. According to the World Health Organization, almost 2 million people a year — mostly women and children — die from diseases (pneumonia, cancer, pulmonary and heart ailments) that are connected to smoke from dirty stoves and open fires. Toxic fumes from cooking in poorly ventilated dwellings kill more people than AIDS and tuberculosis, and twice as many as malaria.
__
More than 3 billion people worldwide live in homes where food is cooked with wood, dung, makeshift charcoal or agricultural waste as fuel. That means that almost half the world’s population is vulnerable to severe health problems from the smoke that such fuels produce…
__
Other severe environmental and social problems flow from the absence of modern stoves. A substantial amount of deforestation has been linked to the combined effect of cutting down trees for fuel and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through burning. Old approaches to cooking are simply unsustainable. Experts in East Africa estimate that in 25 years, supplies of firewood will run out altogether.In the meantime, women in the developing world spend 20 hours a week, on average, searching for wood and other fuel for cooking. This is time that could obviously be better spent helping in the fields, educating children and building small businesses. If they live in war zones, these women and girls face the threat of assault or rape when they leave home searching for fuel and other necessities….
__
The good news is that the world is finally mobilizing. Last year, I watched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appear before the Clinton Global Initiative and announce a new public-private Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, with the aim of distributing 100 million of the new appliances by 2020.
__
Unlike open fires and old stoves, the new cookstoves — run on electricity or gas, depending on the model — recirculate smoke through filters to reduce pollution. They can now be manufactured at a relatively low cost, sometimes as low as $15…
__
In the U.S., officials from the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other agencies, are placing new emphasis on the issue. Recently, one technologist designed a new fan for old cookstoves that reduces pollution sharply without replacing the old units…
Kudos to the Obama Administration, Secretary Clinton, the NIH, the CDC, and all the researchers who are dedicated to this important work, even if it doesn’t get much attention from the Media Village courtiers.
trollhattan
Awesome! Allow me to give a shout-out to Solar Cookers International, a local group who’ve been tackling these issues for decades.
solarcooking.org/
Not only do the cookers, well, cook without fuel, they can also pasteurize water.
Maude
@trollhattan:
Thanks for the link. This what technology can do and do well.
Loneoak
What a coincidence! My wife’s cooking is the most significant toxic threat in our household too!
/rimshot.
Just kidding, my wife’s cooking is great. I’ll second the recommendation for Solar Cooker’s International. It’s where most of my charitable donations go because it hits all the perfect notes: public health, liberation of women in poverty, and ecological protection.
kindness
Yea except I cooked the whole holiday meal & then cleaned it all up afterwards. The Mz? Stayed in her PJs all day long.
I’m not bitching though. I like cooking & if I didn’t clean it up it’d still be there in a couple days & then it’s harder to clean.
Villago Delenda Est
Since there is no massive corporate profit involved in providing $15 cook stoves, the Village cannot possibly be interested in it.
An example of small things that can mean a great deal to a great many people, but are of little concern to the Kochs of the world. In fact, since they tend to make people less destitute, they’re a bad thing to the likes of a Koch brother.
Shade Tail
And, of course, they’ll make sure the people they give these stoves to have the electricity or gas needed to run them…?
Or will they make the same stupid mistake they’ve been making for who knows how many decades, and give people living in subsistence conditions “good” stuff that they can’t possibly use?
jibeaux
I “got” my dad for father’s day last year a solar cooker donation for some charity, after reading Kristof writing about it. He has given some great exposure to women’s and world poverty issues.
meander
@Villago Delenda Est (#5) wrote: “Since there is no massive corporate profit involved in providing $15 cook stoves, the Village cannot possibly be interested in it.”
I don’t know about that. The market size for cook stoves is in the hundreds of millions, and the devices will wear out, so that replacements will need to be provided someday.
Cookstoves seem to be simple devices, but in reality they are quite challenging, especially if you are going to deal with cultural traditions (e.g., a stove in Ethiopia better be suitable for making injera). A 2009 piece in the New Yorker ($ub req’d) a while ago talking about the complexity and how the market is evolving. Also, KQED’s Quest did a piece on a project in Sudan (video should be easy to find on-line).
There is also a climate change implication, as a piece at the La Vida Locavore blog explained.
gnomedad
Check out Amy Smith’s TED talk. Why hasn’t this gained more traction by now? The woman is (one of) my hero(es). Also check out the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
deep cap
@trollhattan: That’s an awesome link! Thanks!
Jay S
@Shade Tail:
I’m pretty sure that statement about using electricity or gas is wrong, or at the very least misleading.
If you go to the Global Alliance Web page they talk about the cleanest stoves up front, but the actual work they are doing seems to be in using native fuel more efficiently. That can use electric fans driven by batteries or generated by the heat of the fire and gasifier stoves that create gas from the fuel for more better burning. They are talking about replacing interior 3 stone fires that have no ventilation with stoves that include external chimneys.
West of the Cascades
@meander: fortunately, someone has developed a solar injera cooker: solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Solar_Injera_Cooker
ericblair
@meander:
I remember that piece: there’s an enormous amount of tweaking that has to be done to get the stoves to cook the local staples correctly, or else nobody will use them. General social inertia is a huge issue. It’s a complicated design issue, and not just a simple fix that was waiting for a bit of cash to implement.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
That in itself is absolutely terrifying.
Mino
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Madagascar
Short Bus Bully
Before this could ever qualify as a Village interest one question would have to be answered: “Is this good for John McCain?” Until we know how that figures in the horse-race we can’t tell if it’s SERIOUS or not.
MikeJ
What’s amazing is that a group is helping a hundred million families and in less than 20 blog comments a fair chunk are people who believe that after reading 100 words on the subject they’ve found the fatal flaw that never occurred to those do gooders.
catclub
@MikeJ: So BJ is heavy with physicists. Who knew?
Kira
My old alma mater has been running a program working on that particular problem for some years now: they’ve built a gel-ethanol fueled stove (basically, it runs on Sterno, which can be produced locally — they have a fuel production business up and running in a Ghanaian village.) Not an engineer myself, but I had the opportunity to talk to some of the students who were working with it while I was there, and it’s really fascinating stuff.