Perhaps, United Nation should start Men’s Cooking Day

In Tanzania’s setting, one of the criteria that make a woman regarded as a ‘good woman’ or ‘wife material’ is the ability to cook food. Thus cooking for girls from a young age to adulthood becomes part of life. In the African traditions, a woman who could not cook well was referred to as a non “wife material.” To make a husband happy, girls and women were taught to be great cooks.

In many tribes in Africa, after marriage, if a woman could not be able to cook well, she would be returned to her parents to learn how to cook. A man would divorce or disown a wife who would not be able to cook to meet the standards of their husband. In some tribes, it was taboo for boys to go to the kitchen. And where men were allowed to cook, it was in cases of slaughtering animals on occasions or rituals.

In Tanzania today, before marriage, we have kitchen parties where the soon-to-be-married bride usually is told that cooking is an art, and she must learn and be well.

“Success or failure of your marriage will depend on how you cook for your husband,” girls are being told during the event. Little do women know that in the journey to be good cooks, while using inefficient cooking energy, they are exposing themselves to poor health and gender inequality as other detrimental.

In considering good health, cooking is one of the crucial factors that often do not easily come to the minds of people. In our homes, cooking is considered a responsibility of a woman. Apart from fruits and a few crops that human beings eat while raw, most of the foods consumed are cooked.

Throughout the world, firewood and charcoal have been the most available energy for cooking. In most of Africa, women are the predominant cooks at home, who suffer the most adverse effects of firewood and charcoal while they strive to feed their families. The detrimental effects are a result of the inefficient cooking energy they use. One of the adverse effects of firewood and charcoal used as cooking fuel is indoor air pollution which can lead to respiratory problems. In some cases, carbon monoxide poisoning occurs when people use charcoal for cooking or heating in an enclosed area.

A past World Bank report indicated that, in Tanzania, most household members in urban areas mostly rely on charcoal for cooking. What does all of the above portend? We need to talk about clean cooking. We should have more and more households using cleaner fuels and energy like efficient modern stoves and modern energy cooking services.

Otherwise, cooking by using traditional biomass or polluting fuels needs to stop. But being seen as a women’s problem (the cook) may not get a quick solution.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 7 seeks the adoption of clean-burning stoves instead of unclean fuels-(wood, biomass, coal, charcoal, agricultural residues, and kerosene).

According to the World Bank, “The use of such polluting fuels and technologies results in household air pollution, causing respiratory illnesses, heart problems, and even death.” Do I need to say more? By the way, men should start cooking for their families. Yes, my take is that every healthy adult human should be able to cook. And if we want clean energy for cooking to be adopted quickly, perhaps the United Nations should adopt a men-cooking day or week.

That means across the world, men should be encouraged to cook on that day while women rest from cooking. If it were men who suffered from the pains of using unclean cooking energy as they produce dirty smoke, they would start advocating and making it possible to have universal clean cooking energy policies.