D  e  s  e  r  t   E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e        January 2008

BMS Cooking with Solar Ovens

So what can we, as a community, do to plan for our "hometown security"? Every garden is a good first step. Every greenhouse. Every rain barrel. Every sunroom. And every solar oven gives me hope that our little town will be that much more friendly, more cooperative, more community minded if anything should ever force us to face our vulnerability to simple cold and hunger. Every solar oven provides not only a way to cook food, but an example that can be duplicated easily with salvage materials!

A few years ago, I took my solar oven to Mexico and cooked all our meals on it, easily, on the Seri beach for five days. The Seri chief came to visit and walked a circle around the oven, looking for the heat source, then expressed astonishment that we could cook without wood. The women in his tribe walked miles every day in search of enough wood to cook their meals. In my broken Spanish, I promised to return and bring him a solar oven. Years have gone by, so I'm way overdue for my return with this gift.

When I traveled to Peru last April, I had the opportunity to describe solar ovens to a family who cooked us a beautiful meal on an adobe wood stove. Their eyes lit up with my description (heavy with sign language), and they clearly wanted a solar oven. As in many places on the planet, the forests of Peru have been clear-cut, not only by multinational corporations, but by the people simply gathering cooking fuel. They pollute the air, their homes and their lungs by working in tiny, unvented adobe kitchens. (We, too, pollute the air with our cooking, but we do it far away, with gas wells and electric plants on other parts of the grid, so we can pretend it's not our problem.) I promised the Peruvian family, too, to return with an oven as a gift. If I can't make it soon, I will send one with a friend.

As soon as I had my first solar oven, I wanted to build something to help heat my family's water. So, in 1988, I held my first solar water heater workshop, and we built one that eventually became a pre-heater for the standard water heater in our home. This saved us heating dollars while giving us dependable hot water for a family with teenagers — at any time of day.

That success led me to design a solar home when my children left home and I built my hermitage in the country. My little straw-bale abode was designed with the same elements as an oven, only slightly different: It had huge south-facing windows, plenty of thermal mass in the floor, in the stuccoed window seats, and in the brick fireplace hearth, and wonderful insulation in the R-60 straw walls. And the inspiration began with a simple solar oven. So in 2004, I organized my first solar-oven workshop — always free — and people drove almost 100 miles to attend. It was inspiring.

Solar ovens cook! They save money! The food never burns, and it often tastes better. Solar ovens inspire us to sit quietly for precious moments in the sun — speaking of which, I think I'll go outside now, put something in the oven, and catch a few rays on this lovely, sunny, Southwest wintertime day.

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