Before we started this project, I had no idea that there was such a big stover community out in the world. Go on the web, type “cook stove”. You’ll be amazed at how many hits you’ll get: clay, metal, ceramic, wood-burning, charcoal, solar, new biofuel… you name it, someone’s tried it out. Heck, I would meet random people in Stanford, tell them I was working on a cook stove project and strangely enough, odds were, they were too.
To make my point, the technology we’re using is nothing new. Many people have seen the scarcity of fuel and smokiness of cooking on an open fire and have thought of creating a stove that would change that. But too many of these stoves are all about the technology—how efficient, how cheap, how easy it is to make; not enough are about the customers.
I’m not just talking about the need for a user-friendly stove; many stoves that are sold in developing countries are already easy to use and have addressed issues of safety to some extent. What I’m concerned about is that few stoves are designed with the area’s culture of cooking in mind.
Take a solar oven, for example. It uses zero fuel, can be made out of cheap materials, and has virtually no moving parts. As a technology for extremely affordable cooking, it’s pretty compelling. But will a woman used to seeing a large flame while cooking on an open fire trust that putting her pot into a black box (literally) will cook her food? Will she endure the passive wait time of what is closer to a baking process, or will she miss stirring her pot and checking to see that the food is cooked just right? If she has an indoor cooking hut, is she willing to cook outside, and only when the sun is out? What will the rest of her family think of a wife that lets the solar oven do all the work for her?
What will the food taste like?
What kinds of food will she be unable to cook?
Will she still enjoy cooking?
Expecting customers to use technology that is such a radical departure to their culture of cooking is asking them to turn their backs on traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation. It’s like telling an Italian to make his risotto in the microwave. It just doesn’t work.
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against solar ovens, and new technology. Maybe a solar cooker would be perfect for a culture where women are used to baking their foods in the hot sun for long periods of time. But technology itself isn’t going to have a lasting impact if none of the women really want to use it. In my next post, I’m going to explain how respecting culture has affected some of the design decisions we’ve made on our stove that make it a compelling product, not just another technology.
