THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 25
1
B R AV E NEWWORLD
COOKOUT
L
ate one recent morning, Alan Bige-
low set up seven solar-thermal cook-
ing devices in the front yard of his house
in Nyack, New York. Sunshine was pour-
ing down like slot-machine jackpots.
One of the seven cookers cost essentially
nothing, and consisted of linked card-
board panels covered with aluminum foil
which reflected the sunlight to a central
point, on which sat a pot of jasmine rice.
Another was a metal box with silvery
surfaces that unfolded upward, to catch
the sun and aim it at a pot of chicken-
and-tomato stew. A high-end solar
cooker (about five hundred dollars, re-
tail), which involved a large parabolic
dish and a cooking surface like a burner
on an electric stove, had already become
hot enough to get a pan of stir-fry shrimp
in turmeric sauce sizzling.
Bigelow is the science director of Solar
Cookers International (S.C.I.), a non-
profit that promotes solar cooking around
the world. He talks with a slight Texas
drawl, because that’s where his family is
from and where he got his Ph.D. (phys-
ics), but he grew up all over. His father
was in the foreign service. Bigelow raises
his eyebrows when he smiles, as if he
has a wonderful present waiting for you
in the next room. Four months ago, he
demonstrated solar cookers at a refugee
camp in northern Kenya. More recently,
he talked to delegates at the U.N. Mary
Frank, the artist, is his friend and fellow
solar-cooking proselyte. She has been a
volunteer at S.C.I. for more than two
decades. Frank had come down from
her studio in Woodstock and brought
the chicken and the shrimp. They were
making the solar lunch for themselves
and a man from New Jersey.
makes it on an astrological timetable.
It’s an amplifier, a manifestation aid.”
“I think I manifested Ringo with the
Come to Me Oil,” Lewis said. “I wore
it with romantic intentions, but those
got crossed with the Ringo intentions.”
—Nick Paumgarten
“About three billion people around
the world cook on open fires,” Bigelow
said, giving the parabolic cooker a nudge,
to keep it aligned with the sun. Frank
said, “And all that smoke is bad for the
planet, of course, but the fires are also
terrible for the women and girls who
have to tend them, breathing in the
smoke, getting burns and lung ailments,
risking being raped or even killed on
their increasingly long journeys to find
biomass to burn—wood and dung,
mainly.” She started taking the shrimp
out of the pan, and the man from New
Jersey quickly ate one. Chicken and to-
mato with rice followed, done perfectly.
Cicadas in the trees did their imperson-
ations of various electrical appliances,
hydrangea bushes in the yard burst into
even more elaborate bloom, and the in-
coming sunlight, at a rate of a thousand
watts per square metre, transformed into
culinary heat, seemed to hum.
Bigelow opened a map on the patio
table. It showed the average yearly sun-
light around the globe, with the less
sunny places (northern Russia, Seattle)
in limp pastel shades of yellow and blue,
and the sunniest places a vigorous sun-
burn red. Those included most of sub-
Saharan Africa and a lot of India. “Bil-
lions of people live in these parts of the
world, and many of them are considered
‘last mile’—beyond the last mile of road,”
he said, sweeping his finger across the
red. “For them, solar cooking can reducedeforestation and soil erosion, and they
can also use the cookers to pasteurize
water where there’s a problem finding a
potable supply.” One of the seven cook-
ers had been baking a cake, whose cozy
winter aroma filled the gold-green sum-
mer day. Frank served slices with a so-
lar-simmered fruit compote.
The scene now shifts to the Bronx.
Bigelow is about to give a talk to solar-
cooking fans in an S.C.I. board mem-
ber’s home. Rose Bazile, originally from
Haiti, who started the world’s first col-
lege-level solar-cooking class there, says
to the New Jersey man, “In Haiti, I even
use my solar cooker on the roof of my
car! I have a Toyota RAV4, and I put
sweet potatoes, squash, plantain, ham-
burger—nothing that requires water, be-
cause the bumps will splash it out—into
my cooker, and I tie it to the roof. Then
I set out from Port-au-Prince to Côtes-
de-Fer, a three-hour drive, and by the
time I’m about halfway the food is done.
I stop at a picnic table, take the cooker
from the roof, and eat my lunch under a
tree. Solar cooking is perfect for Haiti,
because fuel can be hard to find, and many
of our hillsides are completely stripped
of trees. But we have sun in abundance.”
“There are at least fourteen thousand
solar cookers already in Haiti, and we
hope that number will grow by thou-
sands and thousands more,” Bigelow put
in, eyebrows raised, beaming.
—Ian Frazier