Solar Box Cookers International
Beverly Blum, Executive Director
1724 Eleventh Street
Sacramento, Calif. 95814
(916) 444-6616
(916) 447-8689 fax

It looks like nothing any fancier than a cardboard grocery box covered with aluminum foil and a black pot inside, but these simple elements represent a dream that advocates say can help feed the world.

By taking advantage of natural processes -- using the black pot to convert solar energy into heat and the reflective, insulated box to retain the heat while food in the pot cooks gently but surely -- the solar box makes it possible for people to cook their food without fuel and with only a minimal investment in materials and construction, Blum explained. Using the heat of the sun alone, year-round in tropical climates and during the summer in temperate regions, the solar box generates heat from 200 to 270 degrees F, more than sufficient to cook food thoroughly and to kill germs.

Although humans have been using the sun's heat to cook for centuries, modern technologies began to develop in China and India during the 1960s when deforestation prompted government initiatives to look for fuel-free alternatives for cooking.

Barbara Kerr, an Arizona nurse and social worker, became interested in the subject, and in 1976, she assembled various types of solar cooker and perfected the model that Solar Box Cookers now promotes around the world. Working with Dr. Robert Metcalf, a microbiologist at Sacramento State College, and other volunteers, they established SBCI as a non-profit and demonstrated the cookers in Bolivia, Sierra Leone, and about 15 other countries.

The key to this model is that people can build their own from simple materials such as cardboard boxes, window material and aluminum foil. Wood, baskets, banana leaves, and a hole-in-the-ground have also been used. "It's a grass-roots, people-to-people thing," Blum said, noting that SBCI does not manufacture or sell the cookers, except as training samples, but provides support services to community-based groups that are promoting solar cooking around the world and nation, hoping that the people they teach will, in turn, act as "multipliers" and spread the word to others.

Solar box cooking isn't intended to replace traditional cooking methods but to supplement them, she said. This is not trivial. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that one-fourth of all humanity currently suffers shortages of cooking fuel, usually wood, and that one-third of humans, some 2.4 billion people, will be affected by fuel shortages by 2000.

This figure provides SBCI a simple goal: "By 2000, we want 2.4 billion people to KNOW about solar cookers," Blum said, "and 1 percent of them will have to be USING solar cookers."

Although the primary thrust of SBCI's efforts to this point have been in Third World countries where fuel shortages are at or near crisis levels, and most of its support in the United States is from environmentalists and people interested in appropriate technology, Blum said there's no reason that solar box cookery can't be turned to the benefit of America's poor and homeless as well.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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