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Cooking Practices and Prospects for Improved Stoves in the Maldives by Pete Young
The Maldives have not been faced with an energy crisis mainly because there are few energy intensive industries on which domestic growth depends. There are however, signs that domestic energy consumption will increase rapidly population growth is 3.3% pa. overall and up to 13% on some islands. Energy has always been provided from fuelwood, but the over-crowding and lack of space on some islands such as Male, together with increases in fuelwood prices has resulted in the richer homes switching to aviation fuel and LPG for cooking. For most other islands there is little hope of switching fuels due to the high cost of transporting imported fuels and equipment over hundreds of km by boat. Dhoni (boat) owners have developed an extensive trade in shipping fuelwood from uninhabited islands to islands where fuel has long been exhausted. Traditional fireplaces are not only used for cooking the principle dishes but used for processing smoked fish, sugar, coconut oil, fish paste and sweets for generating supplementary incomes. The increases in fuelwood prices are not the only burden facing women who do the cooking. The exceptionally high levels of smoke in kitchens when smoking fish are probably the worst women have to endure in any part of the world. The absence of raw materials such as clay, metal and mud makes choosing the design of stoves and materials for construction difficult. The locally available coral sand and lime is not suitable as a construction material and cracks when subjected to heat. The prospects for importing ceramic inserts from South India and Sri Lanka look encouraging and it is hoped that a number of locally available stoves can be field tested in the Maldives. [top] [end]Contents: Boiling Point 16: Muds, Clays and Metals for Stove Making
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Page created:
27 August 2008; Last edited:
28 August 2008; Version: 0 | |||||||||
Pagename: BP16:CookingPracticesInTheMaldives @HEDON: XENA | |||||||||
