Cooking Lessons
A solar oven project in Senegal gives students a taste of hands-on engineering.
During Cyprienne Crowley’s three months in Senegal, tropical downpours, power outages, herds of white bulls roaming the streets, and temperatures reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit became routine. But she loved the whole experience: living with a Senegalese family, riding in the bumpy jagen-jaye (the Senegalese equivalent to a public city bus), going on safari and seeing giraffes, and most of all, just sitting on the floor sharing meals such as chicken yassa with her host family. “Just chicken, rice, and onion sauce—it’s really simple but the food is so fresh. I’ve never tasted chicken like this in America,” she said, talking via cell phone from Senegal in July.
Why is an engineer so interested in food? Crowley, who will graduate in May 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, spent the summer designing and building the prototype of a solar oven. Renewable energy technology, she explained, is much needed for developing countries. In Africa, cooking with wood has led to deforestation, air pollution, and lung and vision problems. Family cooks, traditionally women, need an economical, safe, and quick way to prepare meals each day for large families. The solar oven, which cooks food using only the heat of the sun, is a drawing-board–perfect solution.
Crowley’s trip to Senegal was sponsored by Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW), an organization based at Cornell University, and by CRESP Senegal, an independent non-governmental organization affiliated with Cornell University’s Center for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy. ESW, with more than 3,000 student and professional members nationwide, runs an annual summer internship program that provided support for Crowley’s work.
Crowley joined an on-going project to bring solar oven technology to Senegal. She and Janelle Kolisch, a mechanical engineering student from Ohio State, refined the design; Crowley focused on window and reflector orientation to improve the oven’s efficiency. The two then built a prototype of an oven at the University of Dakar machine shop. For mass production, the Senegalese company Transtech will manufacture the base; workers employed by CRESP Senegal will assemble and market the appliance.
The oven is insulated with raw cotton, a material easily grown in Senegal, and has two reflectors covered in heavy-duty aluminum foil and a glass top. It can reach 302 degrees Fahrenheit on average and cooks a full meal for a family of ten in about two and a half hours.
The oven’s casing is roto-molded recycled plastic, a move meant to help encourage recycling. “There’s this huge sanitation problem here,” Crowley explained. Bottles and plastic cartons litter the village.
“Another concern in this engineering process is to keep the price low,” Crowley said, “so it can be available to as many people as possible.” The oven will retail for 25,000 CFA, equivalent to about 46 -American dollars.
There was one key factor that the engineering team hadn’t anticipated: grease. The Senegalese diet is fish-based and usually fried. The solar oven bakes the food, and it just doesn’t taste the same.
“It’s a completely different type of engineering than what I’ve learned at Cornell,” Crowley said. “I have to completely adapt my prior knowledge to the situation that’s here. The solar oven is such a different way of cooking than they’re used to. Everything here is so based on tradition that it just isn’t easy to make this popular.”
Even so, she’s optimistic that solar cooking will catch on. “I think the main way that it can spread is by peer influence,” said Crowley. “If some of the more important, influential women of the village are using this oven, everyone else will want to. It’s just a matter of changing their taste buds a little bit.” Crowley was particularly pleased to travel to the small village of Mehke, where she observed Canadian nutritionists working with Senegalese women to develop new recipes for the solar oven.
After spending three months working on the solar oven, Crowley hopes to one day return to Senegal to see it in use by the villagers.
“I have always had this altruistic bone in me,” she said. “It’s a great feeling to devote time to something that’s really important to other people.”
—Bridget Meeds
