Smokeless stoves
When I woke this morning and did a quick check of the headlines on the NYTimes and Washington Post, one story caught my attention: the Post has a long piece about an initiative to distribute cooking stoves across Mozambique and other countries as part of the carbon credits industry. The stoves, made of clay bricks and a few pieces of metal, turn out not to have held up. (Here’s a gift article link to the full story.)
As I read the article, I was looking for mention of BioLite, a company that makes better cookstoves and solar-powered lights for the American consumer. They also distribute some of these across India and Africa to promote better health through smokeless cooking. I wrote about the many BioLite products I use in Lights up.
BioLite was not mentioned in the WaPo article. Nor were other ways to make smokeless stoves, such as the concrete form used in Vanuatu.
I don’t seem to have ever written about the smokeless stove that we used on Paama. When we learned we would be assigned to Liro Village, where are training was held. As we returned to Port Vila for our swearing-in ceremony, Erin and I paid some men from Liro Village to construct the concrete, wood-burning stove in the standalone kitchen off of the house we would be using. A pipe sent most of the smoke up and out of the kitchen, and the fire heated pots over two round holes in the top of the counter. We also had a two-burner gas stove inside for heating the tea kettle, and we cooked quite a few meals on the concrete stove.
When my father visited us on Paama for the first time, he and I paid to have a smokeless stove built inside the kitchen of Leah and Noel, our host family. They used their stove regularly but they also continued to make open fires outside for roasting yams and manioc or heating lava stones to steam laplap.
Last weekend I made my annual batch of homemade hot sauce (photo above). As I’ve done the past few years, I cooked the vinegar and peppers on the BioLite HomeStove outside to keep from filling the house with chile fumes. This stove is the model that’s meant for low-income areas in other countries, but I was able to buy it during a short window when the company offered in the U.S. I enjoy using this stove, but it was a hot day even before I stood over the boiling hot sauce.
I plan to make a couple more batches of the hot sauce, but now I have a portable induction cooktop burner that I can plug into the outlet in the garage and cook inside its shade. So, smokeless.
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© Anton Zuiker