Cooking Dinner on Electricity Instead of Smoke

Clean cooking programmes have spent decades on improved biomass stoves, which reduce smoke without removing it. Modern Energy Cooking Services, run from the STEER Centre at Loughborough University with UK Aid funding, takes the harder position that the destination is cooking with electricity, and works on what that actually requires: appliances suited to local dishes, tariffs and financing that make them affordable, and grid and off-grid planning that counts cooking as a load rather than ignoring it. Its research across 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Indo-Pacific found electric pressure cookers cut cooking energy use by up to 60%, operating costs by 30–40% and cooking time by about 35% — the time and money arguments being the ones that persuade households, with the elimination of kitchen smoke following as a consequence rather than a sales pitch.