5 ways to cook without electricity
Earth Hour
One iconic switch for one hour - Every year, on the last Saturday of March, non-essential (if not all) lights are switched off during Earth Hour from 20h30-21h30 as a symbolic act to commit to our planet. Initiated by the World Wildlife Fund, this global event aims to shed a spotlight on biodiversity loss and climate change. It also hopes to encourage a concerted effort to ensure a better future for the people and planet. Earth Hour is a reminder to everyone about the urgency to protect our home - no matter how big or small our actions are, we hope this empowers you to contribute in your own ways.
Cooking without electricity and the significance of fire
In light of Earth Hour this weekend and the aim to go “off-grid” for an hour, we thought it would be relevant to bring you in today's blog a guidance on cooking without electricity and some recipes. It is inevitable to not have an impact on the environment when cooking, whether it’s burning firewood or using electric stoves. However, there are certainly ways to cook that are much less polluting. Since cooking is essentially transforming your foods with heat, it’s been argued that using fire for cooking has created a remarkable change in our evolution, as Homo sapiens.
Some scientists argue that such evolutionary leap not only meant more delicious and diverse meals, but it also contributed hugely to our brain development with the added nutrition and energy surplus. In fact, Richard Wrangham, a renowned primatologist, even go as far as stating that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key to human evolution (view his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human).
Alright, enough about fire and evolution for now…
We share with you ways of cooking that are not electricity dependent and have a lesser impact on the environment:
Have a barbecue/braai/open fire: using coal or wood to grill your favourite vegetables or meat. Plus who doesn’t love to eat and sit around a fire?
Hibachi, meaning “fire bowl” in Japanese, is a grill that sits on top of a ceramic or wooden bowl filled with burning charcoal, creating a smokiness flavour in your foods.
Gas stove: this one is probably the most commonly accessible method of cooking without electricity in our apartments. All you need is to manually ignite your stove.
Rocket stove: simply a portable (usually) stove that is highly fuel efficient because it uses small amounts of wood to cook large pots of food.
Raw cooking: no electricity? No problem. You can still create delicious meals without having to cook. There is SUCH a diversity of recipes that are more than salads in raw cooking (view more raw recipes here: link).
5 recipes that require no electricity and/or take us back to our primal ways:
