Food Without Fire: Nutritional and Environmental Impacts from a Solar Stove Field Experiment

Population pressure is speeding the rate of deforestation in Sub-Saharan Africa, increasing the cost of biomass cooking fuel, which over 80 percent of the population relies upon. Higher energy input costs for meal preparation command a larger portion of household spending which in turn induces families to focus their diet on quick cooking staples. We use a field experiment in Zambia to investigate the impact of solar cook stoves on meal preparation choices and expenditures on biomass fuel. Participants kept a detailed food diary recording every ingredient and fuel source used in preparing every dish at every meal for every day during the six weeks of the experiment. This produces a data set of 93,606 ingredients used in the preparation of 30,314 dishes. While treated households used the solar stoves to prepare around 40 percent of their dishes, the solar stove treatment did not significantly increase measures of nutritional diversity nor did treated households increase the number of dishes per meal or reduce the number of meals they skipped. However, treated households significantly reduced the amount of time and money spent on obtaining fuel for cooking. These results suggest that solar stoves, while not changing a household's dietary composition, does relax cooking fuel constraints, allowing households to prepare more meals by reducing the share of household expenditure that goes to meal preparation.