The LPG crunch and the importance of diversifying fuel sources

One origin story of spaghetti alla carbonara traces it to charcoal makers, ‘carbonari ’, who toiled in the forests around Rome, cutting and heating wood in covered, oxygen-excluding piles, to create the high-energy fuel. Hard work left them with little time for cooking, so they simply cooked pasta and pork and mixed them with cheese and eggs, which cooked in residual heat to give a delicious, creamy sauce.

However, Luca Cesari, in his Brief History of Pasta, is dubious. Pasta was relatively expensive, he points out, writing, “It is very difficult to imagine nineteenth-century charcoal burners consuming anything but a monotonous diet of bread and polenta.”

Cesari says the origins of the dish are more recent and linked to the Italian diaspora in the US — it’s the chicken tikka masala of pastas. But he has no clear explanation for the name.

Perhaps one benefit is that it leaves spaghetti alla carbonara as the rare dish which pays tribute to the people who produced the means to make it. Our current fuel crisis has forced attention on the various combustible materials we use for cooking. As this column argued last week, the LPG crunch reminds us of the dangers of depending on just one source.

The answer isn’t just switching to another source, but rediscovering the diversity we used in the past.

But for this to happen, we should recognise, and fairly compensate, the labour that goes into giving us these fuels. Charcoal making is dirty work, but gives us the hot flames and glowing embers ideal for grilling.

One community that made it in India are the Dhogris, a tribe from Kangra taken by the British to the Chamba valley to make charcoal. As the journalist Devyani Nighoskar has documented, the Dhogris are today caught between protected forests, where their rights to make charcoal are being circumscribed, and the hills outside, where they are being marginalised by development.

LPG cylinders are now being hoarded, but there’s little acknowledgement of the labour of delivery men who cycle cylinders up driveways, haul them up staircases and wrestle them into our kitchens.

A study in the Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, by Dr Shivani Chowdhury, Jinal Boricha and Sujata Yardi, painfully chronicles the toll this takes on their bodies: “The results show the workers work in awkward postures, i.e., with back bent and twisted, the arms above the shoulder level, standing or squatting on both legs with knees bent, and load > 20 kgs.”

All this for marginally paid work and customers who rarely tip.

Wood cutting and gathering is a major source of fuel in rural areas, mostly done by women. But deforestation and declining access to forests are making this harder.

In an essay on gender and environmentalism, Bina Agarwal notes the increased time wood collection takes now, cutting into all other parts of their lives: “In some villages in Gujarat, even a 4-to-5 hour search yields little apart from shrubs, weeds and tree roots which do not provide adequate heat .”Policy makers have promoted LPG as the solution to this toil, but even before the current turmoil, the difficulty of delivering cylinders in rural areas limited its use.

In Norwegian Wood, Lars Mytting’s ode to wood burning, he refutes the argument that it is inefficient and environmentally destructive. Careful management of stocks was always a part of wood culture, with specific periods set aside for collecting, rather than year-round extraction.

Modern stove designs have increased the efficiency of wood burning, while reducing particulate emission. Chainsaws have eased labour, though their healthy outdoor exercise aura remains. Norway’s use of wood has actually increased, but Mytting points out that the champion user of wood is Bhutan, with over 900 kg per capita annually.

If the fuel crisis worsens, we might need to look to all such sources, for knowledge to help us keep our kitchen fires burning .