There is a vast difference in eastern and western cooking. Food is generally cooked and served hot in most eastern kitchens. Only a few items, either vegetable or animal origin, are eaten raw, and these in small quantities.
In the past, dry twigs gathered from neighbouring forests served as fuel for cooking. In India, where draught animals, such as bullocks and buffaloes, and milch cattle, usually cows and she-buffaloes, were reared, it was a practice to collect the dung, mix it with rice or other agricultural fibrous waste, make it into cakes, paste the wet cakes over walls to allow them to dry, and use such dry dung cakes as fuel. These cakes have a long shelf life, and when stored dry, are one of the best fuels that do not give out much smoke and leave only a reasonable ash content. Their calorific value is high and they give out steady heat.
Due to mechanisation, use of animal power for agricultural operations is slowly but surely dwindling and only milch animals are surviving in villages. Converting animal dung by a wet process to biogas is catching up. Of course, biogas can be used for cooking, but petroleum gas has an edge because of its availability in cylinders.
Using tree twigs for cooking has gone out of practice. At one time, the homemaker’s duty included collection of these twigs from nearby forests, which themselves are no more existent. Then again, the minimum wage being earned also has an effect. For almost half a day of toil, the price of fuel collected is not viable. This also had a visible impact.
Price of everything is going up . Household animals such as goats, sheep, cows, buffaloes, donkeys and camels have gone up in value phenomenally. At one time, grazing these domestic animals on lands near the village was an usual practice. Nowadays, that cost has gone up, as well as the risk of losing an animal. A welcome side effect of this has been the natural afforestation happening on erstwhile barren hill slopes, because all said and done, grazing animals are enemies to budding plants.
Direct solar energy utilisation in solar cookers originated in India. Of the approximate 1,000 watts of energy falling on earth surface per square metre, almost 50% is thermal. Unfortunately, earth is not steady, with respect to the sun . It not only rotates on a specific axis, but the axis itself tilts on a daily basis. And then, it requires a free area without shade, and a terrace, of course, is ideal. But the heat from the sun peaks from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Moreover, the solar cooker needs to be facing the sun to get the maximum heat. In an eastern village, agriculturists leave for the fields early in the morning and return in the evening. Cooking is usually done at night and the cooked food is eaten early in the morning and at noon. It is not possible to carry the cooking to the fields. And solar cookers are useless in the evenings and nights since storage is just not addressed in the design.
In towns, the eating hours are just before 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. And in urban homes, hot meals are always preferred. These solar cookers give temperature good enough for boiling, but not roasting or frying. Solar cookers can be used to cook rice and lentils but not rotis.
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