Charcoal is a historic fuel source deeply entangled with the story of humanity. It’s used both by choice (such as recreational grilling or camping) and by ne-cessity. Countries with limited energy infrastructures and untenably high costs turn to charcoal rather than more centrally distributed fuel types such as oil and natural gas. The use of charcoal in such contexts, however, is associated with negative health effects and extensive environmental impacts. These are impacts that attract cynical interest as well as well-meaning if often ineffectual concern.
Charcoal is the solid residue that is left after wood is carbonised at high temperatures under controlled conditions with minimal oxygen. The resulting material performs better than burning wood in an openfire. It generates more heat and water than wood when it burns, and more carbon dioxide. This makes charcoal efficient to use and efficient to transport, though also results in more toxic by-products. It has been an essential aspect of everyday life for so long that it has also become an essential part of what it is to be human. As far back as the palaeolithic era, human society was or-ganised around a circle of stones arranged to form a hearth. In our contemporary use of charcoal, we unknowingly carry with us its historical context. Indeed, the Latin word ‘focus’ translates to ‘domestic hearth’ (the fireplace or stove) and suggests the symbolic importance of the heatsource around which we organise our lives.
There is a remarkable continuity in the evolution of the design of the tools that we use to cook with charcoal. Simple to construct three stone fires for example, a bed of coals within a triangle formed by three stones, on which a cooking pot, or fireproof surface can sit, are still widely used in remote settings or where resources are limited. The drawback is that they are inefficient and quickly lose heat.
Ancient Greek and Roman stoves and braziers usually with two levels or a single elevated level above the ground, to heat the cooking surface above a bed of coals, have a lot in common with modern equipment. Multiple vessels could be nested within the structure for simultaneous simmering of stews or legumes, or a flat top or grill would be used depending on what was being cooked. The ancient brazier was used to cook food or keep food warm in dining rooms, with the upper part of the apparatus often made from bronze or clay. Similar forms can be found in contemporary DIY and camping stoves, but also in newer non-charcoal-based solutions like solar power, in locations with limited access to centralised gas or electricity.
It was charcoal that helped humans to develop and evolve. Around 30,000 BC it was used not just to warm a cave, but also to draw on its walls. The use of bronze was made possible by the high burning temperature of charcoal. The global seatrade was facilitated by the use of barrels treated with charcoal, and sugar purified by passing through it. Charcoal became deeply linked with industry and technology until the industrial revolution’s insatiable demand for fuel caused a switch to coal. While industry moved to coal, fossil fuels and electricity, global domestic cooking practices remained tied to charcoal.
Traditionally, charcoal is produced by firing wood or other biomass in either pits or mounds. Both of which can be used on a small or large scale, though charcoal produced in a kiln burns the best and retains the most energy compared with charcoal made by more traditional methods. Historically, those doing the charcoal burning were almost always marginalised or impoverished. Wealth was manifested in the ability to pay for charcoal to be made and transported. In classical times the least fortunate would have worked as charcoal makers and huddled around the communal stoves at the local bath house rather than a private (charcoal-heated) hearth. Charcoal also represented, as it does today, a complex and tangled web of relationships between the rich and the poor, producers and consumers, and urban and rural.
Charcoal briquettes came into being alongside the development of the automobile. In 1919 Henry Ford invited Michigan real estate agent Edward G Kingsford on a trip to identify possible sites to acquire hardwood for the new Model T. Kingsford helped Ford to purchase land and build out a sawmill and parts plant. Both generated a great deal of wood waste and Ford financed a solution for using the waste products: a compressed lump of sawdust, wood scrap, tar and cornstarch, which would be named the briquette. The briquette remains common as it is relatively inexpensive to produce due to the filler and binding materials. Wood charcoal is to briquettes what cheese is to the processed variety.
Charcoal, and the design of stoves that use it, is an indicator of economic and infrastructural development, or lack of it. It is the cheapest and least regulated fuel source. It is widely available, and there is a deeply rooted understanding of how to cook with it. The preparation and sale of charcoal is a common income source for individuals and households in areas with limited employment opportunities, women in particular. This production is in response to the overwhelming need described by Melaku Bekele and Zenebe Girmay in their Reading through the Charcoal Industry in Ethiopia: Production, Marketing, Consumption and Impact, published by the Forum for Social Studies: “Dependency on charcoal is rather increasing as a result of rapid growth in urban population, and rise in price of modern sources of energy like electricity, LPG and kerosene.” Charcoal production has been shown to increase incomes of those who make and sell it and is a welcome buffer and solution for families experiencing extreme finan-cial hardship or unexpected financial shocks. It mediates a certain kind of vulnerability that in many cases can be dangerous or even fatal. The overwhelming majority of Bangladeshi women surveyed knew cooking smoke posed a serious health hazard but most preferred to spend their money on “doctors, schools, electricity, clean water, latrines, seeds for planting and structures to protect their land from flooding,” rather than cleaner stoves. The World Future Council estimates that 80 per cent of Africans rely on biomass (mainly wood and charcoal) for their energy. Areas where the industry of producing charcoal for cooking dominates see rates of deforestation that vastly exceed rates of tree planting. In short, Africa is losing forest at a faster rate than other continents, a phenomenon tied to charcoal use.
The dominance of charcoal is more or less uncontested without centralised access to electricity, gas or oil. In contexts where transitioning to an alternative fuel is infrastructurally impossible, cleaner-burning charcoal or charcoal made from invasive species are being explored to address broader effects of deforestation and desertification. Prosopis juliflora, or mesquite, is a fast-growing tree native to Peru, Central America and the Caribbean. Planted in parts of Africa as an attempt to add vegetation to deforested areas and to provide fuel to communities, it has since become highly invasive and even disrupts transhumance pastoral practices in the area, making it difficult to graze livestock in an already fragile ecosystem. Authors Bekele and Girmay describe the use of alternate charcoal materials such as bamboo, Prosopis juliflora, cotton stalk, coconut shells and coffee husks as viable alternatives to wood charcoal. A study in Ecological Economics more thoroughly analyses the specific use-case of P. juliflora, accounting for the actual potential for charcoal production to decrease the negative impact of the invasive plant in relation to its potential economic impacts. It finds that “charcoal production is arguably an effective way of managing Prosopis from a welfare point of view given that it is one profitable livelihood option for farmers”. Though from an environmental point of view, it alone would not fully reverse the proliferation of the plant, the study proposes its continued use as fuel due to its observable positive effects on the welfare and economic realities of households in the region while still mitigating some effects of the invasive plant.
As with the invention of the charcoal briquette, use of waste products rather than wood cut for charcoal production can minimise deforestation while solving a waste problem. One proposed solution is a briquette produced from waste coconut shells. This preserves markets for charcoal which allows those involved in the processing and distribution to go on making a living. It also allows for the continuation of traditional cooking methods. The impulse to apply free market charitable approaches to solve the symptom (charcoal use) of a problem (lack of resources or lack of equitable distribution of resources) is fundamentally flawed. We can clearly see the relative effects of investment in isolated solutions to problems (such as the unsuccessful One Laptop Per Child project unveiled in Rwanda) versus investing in changing the conditions that perpetuate the use of charcoal in the first place.
There are cleaner-burning stoves or ones with more considered exhaust systems that minimise the health effects of the burning. Rocket stoves, for instance, are cheap and efficient burners of wood or charcoal. By design they maximise the heat being produced proportional to the amount of fuel and integrate chimneys to direct smoke or by-products of burning away from the cook. The Chinese National Improved Stove Programme beginning in the 1980s is a seldom-discussed example of a successful campaign to increase access to higher quality and less polluting cookstoves. It focused on the distribution of stoves to rural communities, particularly stoves with chimneys and with better fuel efficiency to reduce smoke exposure. It remains one of very few examples of a successful mass move from older cooking technologies and is credited with introducing nearly 200 million improved stoves by the late-1990s. The initiative has been updated to meet with current research on the impacts of burning biomass and China has continued the project with the implementation of new and cleaner stove technologies.
Electric and gas are intuitive and common replacements for charcoal but come with a health and environmental cost. For wealthier individuals and nations, gas and electricity have minimal locally visible health and environmental impacts as those effects are effectively exported to the Global South or poorer neighbours who live near sites where that energy is extracted and processed. Other alternatives to charcoal or biomass stoves include solar-powered devices available for purchase or makeable through an active DIY community. These technologies are relatively nascent and remain ergonomically alien to the average cook but may offer the kind of independence and low cost that has great potential in developing areas.
Another format, not often raised in conversations around movement away from charcoal, is the communal oven or communal kitchen model. It’s an example of the consolidation of resources (in this case energy and infrastructure) away from the individual household. Historic and contemporary examples include communal ovens in Palestine, cooperative olive presses and grain mills in Italy, Soviet shared kitchens or even the school cafeteria or worker’s canteen. There is a broader conversation to be had around the distribution of resources and labour with a critical gaze directed at short-sighted for-profit projects that encourage a move away from collective or shared resources and labour, preferencing the conversion of poorer communities into richer ones solely to engage in global commerce and exponentially growing levels of consumption.
Charcoal as a heat source has shaped the way in which we use heat and consume food. It is inextricable from cooking traditions the world over. It is essential to place charcoal in that context and understand it as an intuitive and historic heat source. As Caren Irr writes in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, “After all, cooking with charcoal is just as aesthetically enjoyable in Kenya as it is in Kansas.” We can easily identify the ways in which charcoal use can signpost regions or communities that are in the midst of a certain kind of development. And rather than seeking to prescribe individual house-hold solutions, we can contribute meaningful investment in equitable development of infrastructure and resources to allow for healthier and economically viable alternatives. There is an artificial choice, as with the environmental impact of producing and burning char-coal, between solving for a broader environmental problem and a more localised economic one. In actuality, the two are interrelated and solved by improvements to infrastructure and political attention in the equitable distribution of resources alongside thoughtful regulation of exploitative industries in a given region. Data for per capita carbon emissions is conclusive: the global north is disproportionately responsible for the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, and to feign concern over the carbon emissions of nations with burgeoning infrastructures and without a realistic alternative allows for further penalisation of those regions. In this negotiation, there is something to be interrogated in how we might carryover traditional use and design (of systems, tools and spaces) into non-charcoal cooking so as to maintain continuity with traditional cooking practices without sentimentalising and thus decontextualising them.
This feature appeared in Issue 2 of Anima, head here to purchase a copy or subscribe