My City My Responsibility - Rethinking Cooking Styles!!!

 Dear All,

Solar cooked food

Its been a long time since we interacted, lockdown and the whole Work from Home (WFH) mode has made our lives much more busier than the Precovid19 times. Nevertheless, now is THE time for all resetting and reforming of our lifestyles for better from the perspective of quality of life.   

Food is an essential component of our lives since ages, during the pandemic we witnessed that its our home cooked food that literally kept us going when all the restaurants and fast food joints were locked. I believe that the way we COOK our food matters a lot from health and nutrition perspective, I would like to share a recent experience where I had food that was cooked on renewable sources like solar  and biochar briquettes. 

Vishakha Chandhere an entrepreneur and owner of OrjaBox has been experimenting with various cooking methods using different solar cooking devices for promoting Sustainable cooking. I was invited by her to experience slow cooked food prepared on various different solar devices and biochar briquettes. The menu for the day was vegetable pulao, muffins, veg sandwich and tomato soup. All this was cooked using solar energy, everything was flavorful, cooked well and for preparing all this it took not more than an hour, if we leave the preliminary prep time. This is one of the major benefits of solar cooking, once the preliminary arrangements are done, then we simply can do whatever we want while the food gets cooked on its own, unlike cooking on LPG or PNG where we tend to wait and watch over the food being cooked.  

I used to often feel that preparing food on solar cooking devices is time consuming. However this is not true anymore, effectively it takes almost the same time to cook food on the LPG or PNG burner if we consider the preparation time as well. There are several other benefits too of using renewable energy for cooking. 

So, slow cooked food is not only flavorful but also nutritious. In this fast paced life, where we were busy looking at fast food alternatives that are quick and easy to grab, the pandemic taught us to pause a bit, look back and reflect. I think this also applies to our food preparing habits. Health has been the top priority now, having nutritious food is the key to a good health. Additional benefit of using such alternate cooking device is, that its carbon neutral. It means if you are cooking your entire food using renewable energy like solar or biomass or biogas, then you are NOT contributing to the carbon emissions happening due to cooking. Thus effectively contributing to reduction in global carbon emissions.   

Vishakha Chandhere has organized a face to face interactive session titled Taste the Sun on this Sunday from 11 am to 2.30 pm. Here you will be able to see all the solar cooking devices that she has been using, enjoy solar cooked nutritious food along with interesting games and discussions.  

To experience a glimpse of this lifestyle, register here: https://forms.gle/QiSKdjFqL5m2D3wR9

 

Poster of the event

 Pournima Agarkar.

www.samuchit.com