Introduction

Abstract

Some people see cooking with solar energy as a neat way to alleviate or even solve several development problems at once:

• Women’s exposure to unhealthful cooking conditions, and their hard, time-consuming work of collecting fuel

• shortage of firewood (read: the energy crisis of poor people in the Third World) with such devastating ecological consequences as deforestation, rampant soil erosion and subsequent desertification

• dependence on nonrenewable sources of energy, with attendant balance-of-payment problems for the nation as a whole

• a lack of future-oriented technologies that would be fit for small-scale application and therefore (could) have a gigantic global market.

Solar cooking also touches upon a basic need: nutrition. At first glance, cooking with solar energy has the appearance of a development-political stroke of luck.