Luther Krueger: "Goldilocks Tech? A Solar Oven Overview” | The Great Simplification #119
It's a distribution problem. I remember reading this long ago, the food is here, you got to get it there and it just doesn't get there. Well, the same for this particular tool for when they do have the food, but they have no way to safely cook it. They get it to them. Today I'd like to welcome solar cooker expert, Luther Krueger to the show. This is an odd topic for this show. We're going to talk about solar cookers. I have one,
I've always been fascinated by them. This falls right square in the middle of the Goldilocks tech category where we get a very important human need, cooking food, with very minimal energy input. Luther Krueger has been collecting, designing and promoting solar cookers for over 20 years through community education courses, demonstration at farmer's markets and recently, he's been traveling across the US to create video interviews with solar cooker pioneers and practitioners using solar ovens. He and I discussed the basics of using solar cookers, how they might apply to
a future with lower energy throughput. This is a great whirlwind tour of the different technologies available to cook food outside using the sun. Please welcome Luther Krueger. Luther, great to see you. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. You are welcome. You are an interesting guest. Former policeman turned solar cooking
forensic museum scholar and practitioner. Yeah, just quick correction. I was a civilian with the Minneapolis Police Department, so I would've been a hazard to others and myself if I had to carry a gun. Happily, 28 years, no weapons. How did this transition come about? How did you get interested in solar technology? Sure. Well, I've always been an environmentalist
since I was in junior high and read Rachel Carson's book that I'm sure a lot of people have read. I probably only read a chapter or two, but it just struck home how badly we are taking care of the planet. We weren't taking care, we were destroying it really. Forever it's been in the back of my mind and eventually I just discovered solar cookers, the actual manufactured ones, when I picked up my brother after he got out of the Navy in Norfolk, Virginia, and I didn't have time to talk to the guy with the store, but he gave me a book called Cooking with the Sun by Beth and Dan Hallisey and they were solar engineers in the fifties and sixties and out of just plywood, you could make a box with a cut at a slant, put a sheet of glass over it, reflectors aluminum foil, and you're talking almost 300 degrees worth of cooking power, just straight sunlight fed into the pot, and so I was convinced. We're going to get into all that. A footnote is if Rachel Carson were alive today, I think she would be very upset. Things have gotten unbelievably worse since she wrote that book.
I agree. At the core of why I want you, as a guest on this program, is I think, and I know you follow the podcast, that we're headed for a world in coming decades where we're going to have to get 80% of the things that humans need and value with 20% of the resources we're using today. If that. I'm starting to refer to this as Goldilocks technology, not too hot like colonizing Mars and flying cars. Not too cold, stone tools, but something that assumes that interconnected society
holds together but needs to use less fossil energy and more appropriate tech. I don't know a lot about solar cooking other than I do have a solar oven that I use in the summertime and I can put anything in there in mid to late morning and it's done by mid to late afternoon, but I don't have to worry about it overcooking and I don't use any energy in my stove or my oven or anything. We're going to get into that, but let's start at the broad macro. As a primer, can you inform our guests, of course, almost all of humans in the world cook their food. Could you tell us the current landscape of the most popular cooking methods in the world, whether environmentally, sustainably or low resource use or not? Okay, so if you're talking about what we are pretty much everyone is cooking with right now, gas ovens, electric stoves and so forth, that's really the current, 99% of the households have four or five variations on that theme and they all draw energy from fossil fuels, most likely, maybe some of their electricity is from wind or solar, but they're part of the grid, they're part of the pipeline for gas and the situation is such in some cities. New York City, I believe, has said they want to phase out new construction with gas and go to totally electric because of internal pollution inside the home. California, I don't
know the status of it, but they were looking at statewide doing the same thing and it should have come to light years ago, but now it's starting to, the chickens are coming home to roost. Okay, so that's United States, Canada, Europe. What about all 8 billion humans, though? A lot of people in India et cetera still cook with wood and dung and other things, yes? Yes, and that's a big concern because of deforestation. When I first heard about deforestation, of course, I pictured a bunch of stumps of trees, but when I had it described to me how one particular mountainside got deforested and then the erosion happened and then the villages flooded and then the cascading detrimental effects of that were just beyond catastrophic. I mean, killing people and so forth, but people have to cook with something if they want to make sure they have safe food to eat and they're going to get it. If they have to walk 10,
20 miles. The stories in Africa are chilling how far they have to walk just to get that. I was just in India last month, two months ago, and even in the relatively well-to-do area that I was, every day you saw people with stacks of twigs that they had to walk and pick up and they were bringing that to cook their food. There's two issues there. One is the sustainability of how big are the forests and how much deadfall is there to sustain a community. There's also the burning of that has carbon and soot and other air quality problems. I have this solar oven, it's made out of plastic and fossil inputs, but it's made once and so far I've had it for seven years. It doesn't work as well as it originally did, but every time I use it, there are zero
external inputs. I just get the incident sunlight and I have to move it once or twice to follow the sun. That's why I contacted you because why is that not more prevalent in the world, especially in Africa and India that have a lot of insulation and more material poverty and more deforestation? It makes no sense to me. Bring me up to speed. What are the key issues that I should be aware of and then I'll have some follow up questions. Sure. That's the eternal question. Solar Cookers International, which has done a lot of work overseas to try to answer that question.
They have several answers. One of the first ones is the cultural barriers. Can this thing that we're handing them as the western world solution to their problem, can it cook that traditional dish the same way? Some of them want the smoke in the flavor. A lot of it, my opinion, having talked to over 100 people who have tried to promote solar cooking in the US and abroad is if we're not doing it here, they're going to say, "Well, why should we?" That's another cultural barrier. Do they really believe it? Why are we bringing it to them but we're not using it. There's a lot of suspicion there. And by the way, the woods, they are still there. They're only 10 miles away now instead of eight like last year. It's sad, but it's their experience also, one cultural thing that they have found is a lot of those walks we think of them all walking through war zones. Some of them are very treacherous areas of conflict, but a lot of them
are through their friends and relatives villages. There's actually a little bit of a social activity being able to go get the firewood. One story I heard was this family said, "We don't want to do it 'cause we'd never be in touch with uncle so-and-so five miles away and get the latest scuttlebutt on the rest of our family tree." It's not like these people are sitting there
doing the cost benefit of how many fossil fuels and what's the environmental externality and a solar cooker would clearly be the best. It's how it fits into their current life and culture and social interactions. That's largely it. On the other hand, several that have come back from areas like Haiti or several countries in Africa, they'll say they will give a presentation and talk about all the environmental benefits and the people will say, "We get it. We do know that." A lot of them, they understand that. Of course, even though they're missing some of the traditional interactions with their villages and so forth, they do start to resent all that extra walking they have to do, so it's a little bit of everything there.
I'm getting ahead of myself because I'm so excited about this topic. Let's take a step back and for those people that have never heard of this, maybe you could unpack what is a solar thermal cooker? How does that differ from solar PV? What's a little bit of the history? You are the purveyor or how are you related to the solar cooker museum? I mean, you have a lot of knowledge on this topic. Sure. Well, the museum is my collection that I built up over 20 years. I've got just short of 90 unique cookers that have been manufactured around the world and in ordering them and trying to find them, I've interacted with the makers of them. Some of them haven't been made for 30 years, and so I've learned a lot about how they have put them together, what troubles they had trying to sell them. One fellow told me, you want to make a million dollars with solar cookers, you start with $2 million.
The business is... Not enough people know about it and realize the benefits. Plus, I mean in this country at least we're so spoiled. We just turn the dial on our stove and our chicken is frying, so there's that part to overcome. It's a convenience thing and it's a sunk cost momentum thing. This house where I'm, my office here, has a stove and an oven and a microwave,
so why would I need to go out and buy a solar oven because I already have this office and all the infrastructure is ready to cook food. If I was starting from scratch, I might say, "You know what? I'm going to use a solar oven. It's going to cost me a little bit more time," over the long run, especially in a world headed for less availability and higher costs, it will be more resilient, more healthy for me and cheaper, but I'm not sure that I would make that decision given the sunk cost of my current situation. Sure. In fact, I think a lot of people think, well, it's got to be a lot of extra work. I'm going to have to learn this new device. Well, you had to learn your stove top range or your induction cooker. If you have an induction now
or your halogen has different characteristics, it's really no different. I actually think it is a lot simpler because remember that Popeel advertisement, just set it and forget it? Well, look at your cooker there. You pretty much forget it unless you got a lot of volume and you got to move it around a little bit. Right? Well, what is a solar cooker? Let's start there. Yeah, we'll start with the solar thermal,
essentially. You got the sunlight hitting the ground where you're at or hitting the wall of your apartment building. All the charts I've read up on, it's a kilowatt per meter squared worth of energy. Variations based on particulates in the air from pollution or haze, hazy clouds, what your altitude is and so forth, but basically that's the purest energy, there is. There's no intermediary force that's stopping you from using it. If it hits the ground, you can use
it. A solar cooker, thermal solar cooker takes that energy, captures it, concentrates it, and it transfers to the food through a pot, through any cooking vessel. In some cases it's a turkey bag with the food right in it in a hot pot or what have you. That's solar thermal. It's pure solar energy converted to cooking heat for the food. Does the solar thermal cooker, what is the efficiency and ease and time differential depending on if the sun is directly overhead or early in the day or late in the day or in winter? Does that angle of the sun make a huge difference? It does make a difference. Although, I have
to say it just depends on the cooker you have. If you have a nice sized parabolic, you can basically start collecting that energy at the sunrise. It probably won't be enough to cook with for maybe a half hour or an hour because it's going through a lot more atmosphere at that low angle. Once you hit nine o'clock in the morning, 10 o'clock in the morning here in Minnesota where we're at 45th parallel, basically up here in Minneapolis, that's going to be enough to cook for 6, 7, 8 hours, in the height of summer, you can go eight or nine hours really with that. In the
winter you might only have three or four, but with a parabolic you can cook several meals, multiple meals in a row. If you use a hay basket to put them aside one at a time and put another meal in. Box cookers, they need to be insulated to really be effective. The commercial models out there, such as the one you have, I believe it was the Solavore Sport, that one is very well constructed, very high-tech insulation, and as you mentioned, it's plastic but it's not single-use. Those are
solar thermal cookers and they range from simple panel cookers that just cook in a pot with a reflector that hits the pot. Often the pot is covered with a Pyrex bowl or the turkey bag as they call it, the oven bag. The box cooker does the same thing only as a dedicated space that contains the heat. Parabolics, those are like the stir-fry cookers. They
hit very high heat and you can fry with them. Okay, so that makes sense. That's solar thermal. How's that different from solar PV cooking? Sure. Well, with solar thermal, it's the direct sunlight hitting basic elements, basic pieces of a cooker to concentrate it on the food in the pot and the food. Photovoltaic is the panel that might have wires directly to a cooker. For instance, you could do a DC cooker. I think the microwave, I know one fellow told me induction cookers can
be DC and as some have done, which I think is it Kris De Decker might've mentioned they have a DC just direct to a heating element. I visited Alexis Ziegler in Virginia to see his Living Energy Farm in February when I was able to take a quick trip out there to capture that. That's exactly what he does. Solar panels that go direct to a very highly insulated oven box that over time can build up the heat and cook for a dozen or more people that live on the farm. Of course, the steps are you
need to get the panels. Before that, the panels need to be made. Before that, the stuff has to be dug from the ground, etc, etc. There's a lot more involved with making it and putting them to work. It's also a level a little beyond most people's DIY, which you can make any solar cooker
without a lot of skills. A thermal cooker. I have very little DIY and so I bought this solar, you know what I have, right? I showed you it's just a square with the plastic on top. It works great. I don't have to do anything. How much energy do we use from ovens and stoves and microwaves as a percentage of our energy? I don't know if you know that.
All I know is for my household, we just installed a heat pump and before that we looked up our gas a percentage, 90% for heat, 5% for heating water, and 5% for our stoves. Now, that 5% was based on the quote we got to install the panels and we have been doing solar cooking every possible way to not even use the electricity from that. We want to get paid for it since we're on the net metering system. How much of your food living in Minnesota living that you cook is made using some form of solar oven? We are probably only a quarter at most. I like to say we live in the variety weather belt. We're at the mercy of the clouds might be-- Just like solar panels for 24/7 electricity and wind turbines, et cetera, there's intermittence for watching a football game might be okay, but intermittence for eating, not so much. That's something that's important,
right? If you planned on only cooking your food using a solar oven, there would be days or even weeks that would be tough, yes? Yes. On the other hand, one trend that I hope increases is the manufacturer of hybrid cookers where it's a solar thermal cooker, but with electric backup, it's an ingenious cooker because you don't need to be near the grid or have solar panels or batteries, but you can still use wood or biomass and it's a rocket stove that shoots right through the box of a solar cooker. If the clouds come in, you just stoke it up and fire up the wood and you're good to go. The reason behind that is a lot
of people are not going to give up wood entirely, but they'll adopt a solar cooker if, oh well we'll still cook with it, but we'll just put wood in as well. A dual use or a backup system is needed. What about Kenya or Tamil Nadu in India that have sun almost all the time? I mean, this makes complete sense from an environmental and a resource standpoint, doesn't it? Absolutely. Just for just the cultural problems that you said earlier. What would not the best top of the line and not the uber basic, but a solid usable that has a five plus year lifetime solar oven cost, if someone in Africa were to buy one or to be donated one? Sure. The manufactured models out there in
the States, there's the Haines panel cooker, which he ships with his own pot at a cost of $65, $70, and he's been involved with shipping whole crates of cookers to various countries in Africa. He's actually explored the use of carbon credits. That's at the low end and it is just a plastic foldable cooker that it'll pretty much last forever. It's just windshield reflector material, aluminized mylar, that's the least expensive. Moving up to where you have, that's probably
a three or $400 model a few years ago. A box cooker, every bit as reliable, probably needs to, my Haines, I just set at the point where the sun will be at noon at nine in the morning and by five we have a piping hot stew for a family of six. A very low cost, and I don't know what he's charging to get it to Africa, but it's got to be pretty infinitesimal.
Luther, as usual, my mouth is faster than my brain and I have overly too many questions for you and I wanted to follow a logical sequence, but I'm too curious. Sorry. Sure, no problem. Does the food taste any different? Can you notice or let me ask it this way, you as a solar oven museum curator that has 90 models in your garage or your basement, could someone do a series of meals, an entree like fish, some potatoes, some cookies or something like that? Could the difference blindly if it was cooked in a solar oven or in a conventional oven by taste or by texture? I don't know if I could, with a blind taste test, I feel I have about half the taste buds of your average person, so I need a lot of spice and so forth. Everyone I've talked
to that cooks regularly with solar thermal cookers, they'll say, it tastes different, it tastes better. Joe Radebaugh, who wrote the best book on solar cooking to date, and it's 20 years old, it needs to be updated. He said he talked to chefs who said the longer you can cook something at the lowest possible temperature, the better it's going to taste. It
gives the right amount of time for the proteins to break down, for the sugars to be developed, what have you. It doesn't wreck things. You don't get charred food. You get actually cooked food and I see that you've frozen again, but I have, whenever I do my banana bread, that's my old standby, it's the easiest recipe to remember. It always tastes better than when I have it in the gas oven. For one reason, the gas oven will dry out more food necessarily. Instead of with a solar cooker, you tend to not dry it out, so it's going to taste better because you want that moisture to be retained as much as possible. Can you overcook things like if you wanted to
have them out for three hours and then you forgot and you came back at six P.M.? Yes, you can. I mean, energy is not going to stop, and if you leave something out long enough or if for instance, in a parabolic, if you step away for about 20 minutes, it might get out of focus and it won't cook enough, or you might not realize that it's charring in one corner of the pot because it's not quite calibrated right for the focal point. People say they have burnt stuff
in box cookers, which is hard to imagine, but they're down in Tempe or Albuquerque where the sun is more powerful, they're at a higher elevation, so forth. They're getting more of the concentrated energy and it's a little bit of risk. If you have one of these solar ovens, maybe a higher end one or even a solar PV one, can it be used for things other than cooking? Absolutely. There are whole development programs they're trying to establish around the world
for drying fruits and vegetables. One of my favorites is Juana Maria Hernandez in Chiapas approached the family who said they produce a lot of milk and they'd like to sell more of this heirloom kind of dried cheese. That was their specialty for the Chiapas area. She worked with them to put together a solar dryer that would get it at just the right temperature, make sure the humidity level didn't drop too far so it got too dry too fast and so forth. There's all sorts of possibilities for that. In Arizona, the Kerr Coal Sustainable Living Center, they have a solar dryer, which a lot of people in permaculture use, and it's surprising how few of them actually do solar cooking, but they dry a lot of stuff in what almost looks like an industrial scale dryer, but it's entirely solar thermal. Because it's
dried at the right temperature with the right ventilation and so forth, the food loses very little of its nutrition value. It's going to be a lot better than drying in your electric spinner thing with the electric heating element. Let's just take today's economic landscape and ignore what you and I might infer about coming decades, but using today's costs for equipment and costs for energy, natural gas, electricity, et cetera, what are the cost benefit analyses of a solar cooker for someone in the United States or for someone maybe in India or Africa or elsewhere that is sunny? Sure. Well, the analysis would be fairly simple with solar thermal because you're paying nothing for the sun for the energy itself. There's no other way to put it, the materials. It just depends on how far you want to go with the DIY models for a couple bucks worth of aluminum foil and cardboard and you've got a cooker that's every bit as powerful as a manufactured one. Oh, so you don't have to buy a cooker,
you can make a cooker. Yes. In fact, on the SEI wiki, solarcooking.org, there must be 100 DIY models, and I don't know why people keep trying to make yet another one because they all work. I mean, it's the free energy. If they're somewhat parabolic in shape, even if they're kind trapezoids, they will cook plenty for next to nothing or found material.
Wait a minute. Here's another thing. For people that have apartments or small residences and they have air conditionings running and then they're also heating their food, for a few bucks, those DIYers or even 50 bucks or 100 bucks, they can go and create a solar, make a solar oven, and then not only are they getting the health benefits and the other things you mentioned, not only are they not having emissions, but they're also not heating their home while the air conditioning is going at the same time, right? Absolutely. That's yet another thing that's just a common statement from the people I interviewed is I just got tired of the hot kitchen and the AC wouldn't keep up with it. Here I'm out in the yard, I'm gardening at the same time I
get things done. I don't have to be stuck in a hot kitchen. It might be hot out, so what? I get myself in some shade, but yeah, and the inexpensive DIY models, if you want to just start, there's all these models on the Wiki and get your feet wet. Just about everyone I've talked to that started that way within a year or two, they said, "I really want the juice of these really powerful ones. Maybe the parabolic, maybe a box cooker, something a little more official," but there are some people they've still been cooking with the plywood and cardboard insulation, glass sheet over the top for years. I just interviewed Ed Eaton, Peonia, Colorado. He is a member of a Solar Energy International, I believe is based out of there. He still has this
massive plywood cooker with just a glass window. He put it on a trailer and he brought it to demos and he'd be able to cook for 20, 30 people at a time for next to nothing, the cost of scrap plywood and a sheet of glass someone threw out. Are there any places in the world, any nations or even subsections of nations where thermal or PV solar cooking is quite prevalent? Both are still way down at the bottom as far as adoption. Interesting that you just went to India because their perception here in the United States is that India is light years ahead of us, but the Indians that I have talked to have said, oh, still no one really knows about solar cooking there. Where I was in Auroville, there is a place called the Solar Kitchen, which is the center organizing meeting place for everyone in the community. They go there for lunch every day, and that is solar cooking, but not solar thermal. They have solar PV and a big solar oven on. It's like industrial
scale, but they do all their cooking with solar. As far as individual people having the things you're discussing, I didn't see that anywhere. No, and we still have a lot of work ahead of us. We have so many that I sent you that solve a lot of those problems. One particular that came up at the Solar Cooking Conference in Portugal 2020 was, hey, we're in Madrid, and Madrid is a lot of high-rise apartments and condos, and so we can't solar cook up there. Well, this Millen Kulkarni in India heard that same thing from Indians with all they're building up rather than sideways for housing. They don't have sprawl. They got, what'd you call it? They
got it tall. He came up with this cooker that you can hang from your balcony that's a slow cooker. It'll cook for a family of three or four, the sun dish, and it's based on a seashell. You sent me this PowerPoint. Maybe we should just go through that and you could speak for a few seconds or 30 seconds on each of them and give the audience a little bit of overview of what we're talking about. Sure. Well, that first one, it's one of my favorite interviews, this humble inventor, he thinks of himself as just an inventor. He came
up with this because he believed in solar cooking and too many of his friends said, "I can't. I'm on the 15th floor or whatever in Mumbai." He says, so long as about two thirds of that building is going to get sun during the day with enough time to cook, you can just hang this thing out of your balcony. It's a Tiffin pot. You probably saw plenty of those, three stacked pots, kind of wire snap together and it'll cook for a family of three or four, at least. You can scale it up to cook for more people. Let me just ask you a question. In theory, if you're on the side of the high rise, that is the one third where the sun doesn't go, you could just walk across the hall and make friends with your neighbor and do some barter or something.
Yes. In fact, there- Using their balcony. Yeah, and there are lower- Hey, hey buddy in 103, can I borrow your sun? Exactly. Give me a cup of sun. Absolutely. I mean, that's where it can help build community too, because there are people that aren't going to be in the most advantageous spots to do it.
Number two, that's the sun oven. That's probably the most prevalent box cooker possibly in the world. It's been around for probably 40 years, and it is just a box insulated with a kind of pizza grade fiberglass is what I understand. A sheet of regular glass over the top and then four reflectors that basically triple the amount of sunlight that gets reflected into the cooker, and it's an oven for baking. You can get up to 400 degrees. I've had a version of this in the past, and what I noted is you could cook fish or rice or anything in just the box, but to increase the temperature, like if you wanted to make cookies or something, you would need the reflectors. Yes, and in fact, I think if the model that you have is the Sport you can order it with or without reflectors, they advise not using them, except maybe in the winter when you have it at the winter angle to get that extra grab of sun.
I use it all the time in the winter, again, for banana bread using the reflectors. Okay, number three. Okay, and this one is a parabolic, and it's one where I try not to play favorites, but it's hard to not. It's the Sunplicity. Alain Bivas, my undergraduate was in theater and he was a mime, a professional mime who stumbled across a pamphlet on solar cooking by Joe Radebaugh, who later turned that pamphlet into a book. Alain told me, he said the day he saw that, he said, "I'm done miming. I'm going to design the best solar cooker ever made," and he's come damn close. This thing is a parabolic, which is a very powerful shape to
begin with. Totally collapsible into about an inch and a half frame, maybe two feet by eight inches, 10 inches, 10 pounds. You can bungee cord it to a backpack. I put it in the trunk of my car whenever I go on my solar cooking road trips, it's the only cooker I use when I go out. How much would that cost me if I ordered such a thing? Well, the great thing with Alan is he said, "A, I don't want to use any plastic parts." Right away you're talking metal, so you're talking more expensive. It's what they call spectral
grade aluminum. Very highly polished and kind of a ceramic coating to prevent scratches and let it age. It won't corrode over time. Right now it's in the 500 euro range, 450 to 500 euros, which is about 550, 600 here. How long, if I took care of it, which I haven't with my other ones, 'cause I leave them out in the rain and the wind because I forget, but how long would this last, do you think? The Sunplicity, I think pretty much forever. It's a very high quality aluminum, spectral aluminum high quality metal frame, very solid. I have cooked on a snow bank and it's taken tumbles when the sun has gotten the
base warm enough where it melts and it's slid off and I've had to restart over and it survived. Is wind a factor? Is wind a factor? Can you cook when it's 20 mile an hour wind here in Minnesota? You can. You do want to brace your cookers because as you can see from parabolics, they're pretty much like a sail. They will grab, you got to weight it down, but once you do, it almost has no impact on the temperature because you're talking hitting up 350, 400 degrees in the parabolic pretty easily at the bottom of the pan.
The parabolic gets to be 400 degrees. What couldn't I cook? I might not be able to get a crispy broil sort of texture, but you could cook anything at 400 degrees, right? Oh, absolutely. In fact, the Sunplicity was meant to be portable and a small family, you could cook an entree for a small family in it, but there are a much larger parabolics. Germany, for instance, the SK-14 from EG Solar, that hits close to seven or 800 Fahrenheit in the focal point. You're talking wok stir fry cooking. You can get your braised chicken, steak, whatever you
want in one of those, or boil a gallon of water in an hour and purify it, pasteurize it, or stew. Number four. Sure. Now, this is in fact, this is exactly the parabolic I was talking about, the SK-14, one of the best stories about solar cooking halting deforestation, demonstrably halting it. In Nepal, Bhutanese refugees had to cross the border
into Nepal, and it was on the order of 110,000, I believe, total with eight different camps. Martin Olthoff from the Netherlands, who was a firm believer in getting the solar cooking message out, heard about this, saw that you could literally, basically define every 10, maybe 10 meters worth of forest was going to be taken down every day for people to cook for 100,000 people. He said, let's get a group together to put these parabolics in their hands in this refugee camp. He raised the funds and the interest and the infrastructure to get 7,000 of them,
which pretty much got them cooking right away as soon as they got there and stop the deforestation. It's one of the biggest success stories, very direct impact on refugees, but also preserving the environment for them as they settled in. Cool. What about number five? Sure. Well, this is a parabolic, but it's what I call the community scale solar thermal cooker. It's the kind that you may have seen in India about Deepak Gadya and incredible work. The parabolic that he has used as Scheffler reflector. He has it on whole campuses of buildings, heating
the water, cooking the food, heating the building, everything. While it's a very well-designed cooker with a tracker, so you don't even have to think about it. The picture I sent, the video is of the Présage restaurant in Marseille, so it's a double duty. It's a economic engine for restaurants where they don't need any fossil fuels. Marseille is a fairly sunny part along the Mediterranean, and we had a great time visiting them for an episode that should be within a week or two going up on my channel. What is your channel?
It is Solar Cooking Museum on YouTube, so @SolarCookingMuseum, YouTube.com/@SolarCookingMuseum. What's number six? Number six, actually the next three are the insides of the cooker of the Cafe Le Présage restaurant. They have a sign out front that says, Le Snack where you can get snacks, quick cooked food because it's such a quick cooker due to the high power of the Scheffler reflector, and basically one of their main cooks showing us how this three foot by five foot griddle cooks everything for people. While he interviewed Pierre-Andre Aubert, who was the proprietor,
every minute or two, another three, four people were coming up and being served, and he's got a permanent restaurant there that should open up in a month. He's looking at April or May. It's kind of fun and exciting, isn't it? And hopeful. Absolutely. In fact, I have been catching up on your interviews, and I got to say it can be a little bit of a downer, but I'm not cowed by some of the messages because I can see this as being an integral part of people surviving what is to come, but starting now where you're going to survive those high gas costs and so forth, so anyway, I'm optimistic. I'll get to that. Let's finish your little collage here. What about number eight?
Okay, number eight, that's another cooker. It's a vacuum tube cooker, and it's about a nine or 10-inch diameter cooker, maybe two feet, two and a half feet long. Le Présage, again, uses that to cook one of their signature dishes. When he pulled that out, it smelled and looked like mushrooms, braised buttery mushrooms, just beautiful. It's actually eggplant and it's one of their signature
dishes that they cook in high volumes, and it's a France-based cooker that restaurants can use. Are these a little bit more popular in France? I think they're gaining ground due to simplicity. Alain Bivas really hit the ground running with marketing it. I mentioned he was a mime, but he got some kind of engineering award for this thing. Yeah. Well, also there's collapsologie, which there's a collapse aware demographic there that is a much higher percentage of the population than in the US. Yeah. Yeah. What about number nine?
Number nine, that's yet another community scale cooker, but it's a box cooker. The Sun Oven, the one people mostly know about is the actual family size box might hold two four quart pots in it at the most, but this thing can cook 40 loaves of bread at a time, probably six, eight trays of pizzas or croissants and so forth. This one, it's back in production with the third owner of the Sun Oven Company in Kansas, the couple there, they put it this way, they pestered the guy because they tried to just send them overseas using NGOs to get them into the countries that are most in need, but they got the brand new version of it there. I mean, there's so many different reasons this makes sense. There's the climate low carbon emission reason. There's the let's save our
forests reason, there's the not heating our kitchen reason. There's the let's save money on future electricity and gas reason. There's the health of the food and the simplicity, and there's the DIY, I'm in control of cooking my own food without relying on these external things, but just focus on the climate reason. What would, I mean, are there any plans or such where NGOs and philanthropists and institutions from the global North might donate huge amounts of these ovens to people in Africa and India where they just have to start using them and maybe see the benefits and then word of mouth? Could something like that happen? Is something like that happening? Just about every manufacturer I know has tried, or they do have limited programs overseas in Africa, Asia, primarily Africa. It seems like they get a little bit more of an ear bent toward the cause
by governments. Kenya in particular, they've been working with Solar Cookers International to work it into their national scheme to address climate change and pasteurizing water. I know one of the reasons I ratcheted up my involvement in promoting it was hearing about kids with river worms or bacterias in the nearest source of water, and if they live to be 10 years old, maybe they were blind or lame, and it's just a tragedy on a current level. This is before we're talking losing fossil fuels. Pretty much every manufacturer has done that. Solar Cookers International, they're the best source on their wiki, at solarcooking.org they have by country, which countries have been involved, which have tried things. Some of them, when I check in, they say, "Well,
that was 2014 and we just really haven't gained any traction," but some are really currently making tracks. I mentioned earlier, just to cap this off, Roger Haines, retired federal prosecutor, yet he designed this panel cooker that is amazing. He has been working with NGOs and the Rotaries. He's a rotary member. They've been involved in a lot of the solar cooking promotion overseas, and he has looked into carbon credits. He's stepped back from trying to use them, but he's sending them by the thousands overseas. It is happening, not to the level we'd like to see. Continuing with your little montage here, what about number 10? Number 10, that's the Fusion. Ghost Sun is a company based out of Cincinnati. I interviewed
Patrick Sherwin back in 2021, vacuum tube cooker, but also a hybrid. It's got a tray. If you slide the tray out, you'll notice on the bottom it's got a heating element. If the sun goes down, clouds roll over, you just plug it into a battery, which they also include a little solar panel kit with it so you can keep cooking. Interestingly, it has higher temperatures with the solar than it
does with the heating element for various reasons, the materials they'd have to choose, but it's a 24/7 cooker, a little pricey, maybe marketed a bit more toward the vacationing crowd, the campers, but it's an all-season 24/7 cooker. Okay, so we're at number 11, Luther. What are we looking at?
2024-04-23 18:53
