abstract
| - Great Uncle Jules had volunteered for many years at Solar Cookers International. We scoured the SCI website for cooker designs, and in the process learned about and became inspired by their mission to spread the use of solar cooking in areas where sun is abundant and cooking fuel is scarce. We were drawn in by the idea that this simple cooking device could help to address so many social issues, from the health risks of in-door cooking fires to the threat of rape and murder for women forced to scour the landscape in search of fuel, to the economic and social empowerment possible for those who make a business of crafting and selling solar cookers. It was clear how powerful solar cooking is in these humanitarian contexts. Our question was what power could it have for us? Could solar cooking ever be more than just a novelty to those who did not live with the pressures of limited fuel supplies? Could this act of cooking food without the need for pollutants become a viable and important component of a lifestyle centered on environmental justice and responsibility? Great Uncle Jules’ insistence that his solar cooker provides a large percentage of his cooking fuel during the sunny parts of the year emboldened us to explore the idea. With those questions in the back of our minds, I constructed the simplest of the designs Reyel and I found on the SCI website—the “Funnel Cooker,” designed by a professor and students at Brigham Young University. When I presented the awkward, somewhat misshapen contraption to Reyel, he looked at me with marked skepticism. But he set it up outside anyway, with some shrimp packed in a black glass jar in the center, and we sat back to see what would happen. When he cracked open the jar an hour later, and a seething hiss of steam and juicy shrimpy goodness escaped the jar, we were hooked. Since 2004 we have been integrating solar cooking into both our personal sustainability framework, and into our work with kids and adult education programs. We’ve written grants to fund various events, designed curriculum for bringing solar cooking into classrooms, and generally had a blast teaching this skill to many others. What follows are chronicles of some of our solar cooking activities. We welcome comments, questions, and invitations to collaborate on further projects.
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