Sustainable and Safe Food: Solar Cooking

Sunlight is a useful thing. It sustains the life of the world by allowing plants to photosynthesize and make food for animals. Every 12 hours or thereabouts, it provides people with light and heat, waking them up to do their daily activities. It can also be a source of sustainable energy, and best of all, it can cook.

If you've ever been in the Scouting or Guiding movement, you know about solar cookers. You may have even constructed one with a conglomeration of materials like cardboard boxes and aluminum foil. You may have been amazed by the ability of sunlight to cook food. More likely, you got a little impatient waiting for the cake to bake.

Solar Cookers International distributes these cookers around the world, and it's not to irritate small Scouts. Their cookers are a lot more efficient than the ones you made at camp, and they save lives too. In many countries, fuel collection places a large constraint on cooking. People must walk for long distances to get water, which is scarce. The same applies to fuel. Finding fuel wood in areas that have long been picked-over can be difficult and can take a lot of time. Buying fuel is expensive. Cutting new bushes and trees for fuel also has a negative impact on the environment, specifically on soil erosion. Dead trees equal more soil movement equals a more desert-like environment.  Air quality also suffers when people use poor quality fuel for cooking, causing lung damage.
Cooking is also a good food safety technique, especially in places where other ways of ensuring food safety are scarce. In the absence of a lot of soap and water and in places where water supplies may be contaminated, boiling water and soup or cooking food is a good way to kill off the germs that cause disease. Diseases like diarrhea are huge and unnecessary killers caused by lack of access to safe food and water, and these diseases kill a disproportionate number of children. Cooking food is also a good way to increase access to foods that need to be cooked for a long time. Nutritious foods like lentils require a lot of cooking time, and poor families may pass them by if they don't have the ability to cook these foods.

Solar Cookers International has some pretty swish cookers. There's a large parabola cooker for institutional use. There are smaller roofed cookers for home use. Best of all, these cookers work at moderate temperatures like a crock pot. They're safe to leave along because the food won't burn, and this frees people up for other household tasks.