How can you save the world through cooking????

why this?

I need to get a message out to all my friends, acquaintances and business contacts.  I am putting my efforts behind a growing movement to bring basic technology and better health to half the world that doesn't have it. Why would I feel compelled to take on such a hopelessly romantic and gargantuan task? Well, first of all, I'm not alone. Secondly, I visited a very rural, 3rd world environment to teach burn care in a mission hospital. I saw how people suffer burns and what it does to them there. I realized they can never afford what we first-world professionals have to offer with respect to fixing big burns. The only reasonable response to that misery is prevention. The targets for prevention are the common mechanisms by which people get burned. For women and children, it's about cooking at home.

Think about your relationship to food. You're ready to prepare a meal. You walk into the kitchen, put a pot on the stove. You open the refrigerator and get out the ingredients, pre-packaged and trimmed for preparation. You turn on the gas or electricity and proceed to fry, broil, bake, boil, steam, saute, roast your food.  You turn on the flu fan, set the timer,  attend to other tasks and return in time to stir, turn, toss the food, turn it down to a simmer, etc.

 Transport yourself half-way across the world, to a small village in Thirdworldia.  You have picked greens from your garden, hauled water- 1/2 mile in a bucket, pounded corn into corn-meal, butchered a chicken (if you're lucky).  You spent several hours this week walking into the hinterland to gather wood. You carried 25 kg. home in a bundle on your head. Your baby (another 5 kg) rode on your hip in a shawl. You broke the wood up with an axe.  It's the wet season, so you can't cook outside. Your stove is three stones on the dirt floor. With a bit of care, you can balance a pot between them, in the corner of your kitchen/living room/bedroom. You stoke the fire, start feeding wood in from all angles. 25 minutes pass and your water is boiling; in goes the meat, the greens, the cornmeal. 40 minutes and 5 kg more wood later, you have stew.

80% of the heat from that wood heated the ground, the stones, the air, but not the pot. Smoke followed you around the room, gathers in the room down to your waist. The place reeks of smoke.  Your child coughs repeatly. That wood represented an hour's work of gathering. You'll do it again next week, and again and again. Sometimes you have to scavange wood further out; a 4 mile walk out, and back.  There's only time to prepare one major meal a day, and no means to preserve the leftovers.

 This is your life as a woman in Thirdworldia.  And it gets worse...while you were tending your crop, your 3 year old stumbled into the embers of the fire;  He has a nasty burn on his foot. With no local health care, it's a disabling, even life threatening injury.

Your mother in law caught her dress on fire once; she has horrible scars on her legs and thighs, but she survived after 3 months of misery. She limps badly, because one knee won't extend fully due to the scar contracture.  There's a child in your neighborhood who can't use her hands. They are horribly deformed after she tipped over a pot of scalding water and burned both hands badly. She'll be worthless as a wife because she can't work.

Kids in your village have a 20% chance of dying before age 5. They all cough chronically in the rainy season when you have to cook inside. Along with malaria, TB and HIV, they often get pneumonia and die.
Your older women have emphysema. They never smoked a cigarette in their lives. But they cooked for 40 years over open fires, inside and outside. They die at around age 55, looking like they are 75.

You don't have to look far to find this scenario. It's everywhere, in half of the world. And there are solutions within our grasp.

There are words that describe this situation;

energy poverty
food insecurity
indoor particulate smoke pollution
air pollution
deforestation
global warming

These words attempt to describe the consequences of a very basic activity serving  the most primal human needs; burning wood to heat a home and cook food. They completely fail to describe the experience of 3.5 billion people on earth, and the mothers, sisters and daughters who cook for them.
How can we remain ignorant of their circumstance and the very basic and accessible means to make their work cleaner, safer and more efficient? 

stay tuned and I'll share with you what I am learning about how to change that sad reality.