The Food Issue - New Food Ideas - NYTimes.com
The Food Issue - New Food Ideas - NYTimes.com
An initiative in Chad and Darfur is taking the low-tech concept of solar cooking to a higher level. Run by Jewish World Watch, a coalition of Los Angeles-area synagogues founded in 2004 to address modern genocide, the Solar Cooker Project provides refugee-camp residents with the materials — aluminum foil, cardboard and glue — to build cookers.Thirty dollars covers the cost of two cookers, cloth potholders — and training. Harnessing the sun's energy doesn't just mean fewer girls searching for firewood (often putting them at risk of being raped along the way) and fewer people suffering from the injuries associated with live-fire cooking; it also provides relief for the denuded Chadian and Sudanese countryside. The nearly-three-year-old project has supplied and trained more than 10,000 women and girls in the Iridimi and Touloum camps and recently began work with 28,000 residents of the Oure Cassoni camp. In Iridimi, trips to collect firewood have decreased by 86 percent. The program director, Rachel Andres, who was recently awarded the Charles Bronfman Prize for her work, says it's been successful “because it's so simple,” she said. “You realize that, yes, all the other pieces of fighting this genocide are important — it's important to write letters to the head of the U.N. and to President Bush and to members of Congress and to anyone who will listen — but this is one area in which you can do something concrete.” — JOCELYN CRAUGH ZUCKERMAN
An initiative in Chad and Darfur is taking the low-tech concept of solar cooking to a higher level. Run by Jewish World Watch, a coalition of Los Angeles-area synagogues founded in 2004 to address modern genocide, the Solar Cooker Project provides refugee-camp residents with the materials — aluminum foil, cardboard and glue — to build cookers.Thirty dollars covers the cost of two cookers, cloth potholders — and training. Harnessing the sun's energy doesn't just mean fewer girls searching for firewood (often putting them at risk of being raped along the way) and fewer people suffering from the injuries associated with live-fire cooking; it also provides relief for the denuded Chadian and Sudanese countryside. The nearly-three-year-old project has supplied and trained more than 10,000 women and girls in the Iridimi and Touloum camps and recently began work with 28,000 residents of the Oure Cassoni camp. In Iridimi, trips to collect firewood have decreased by 86 percent. The program director, Rachel Andres, who was recently awarded the Charles Bronfman Prize for her work, says it's been successful “because it's so simple,” she said. “You realize that, yes, all the other pieces of fighting this genocide are important — it's important to write letters to the head of the U.N. and to President Bush and to members of Congress and to anyone who will listen — but this is one area in which you can do something concrete.” — JOCELYN CRAUGH ZUCKERMAN
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