A photo on the front page of the actual St Petersburg Times riveted me this morning. It showed three Japanese people in Ishinomaki, one with a child on her back, squatting over a makeshift cooking fire, preparing food. The caption indicated they were in front of their " damaged house."
Camping! There we are with our stove teetering on a well-worn picnic bench set in a meadow, a rushing stream at one side, tall pines in the near distance, chipmunks frolicking over downed logs...but camping is what one does to experience the joys of non-civilization. Camping is a recreational choice, whereas across the region impacted by earthquakes and the tsunami, survivors are coping, in a return to the hunter-gatherer camping-style of yore. The resilient, inventive, and healthy will get by.
What are they eating? Foodie peers into their pans and sees fish, traces of greenery, and in a steamer basket, rice. Was this provender scrounged from their ruined home? Dug out of a defunct freezer? Caught from the receding sea?
Maybe it's time to take a deeper look at solar cooking, even though people with ample modernity/electricity/gas never give it a thought. ( I know, it may be snowing in the Japanese zone right now.) There's a Japanese Solar Cooking Association, affiliated with Solar Cookers World Network. The possibilities of using what is at hand, including the sun, are myriad and fascinating. Take a look here. India leads the list as a country whose most resource-poor people could benefit from solar cookery.
Meanwhile, this via the bbc: "The Japanese government is ready to release rice stockpiles wherever needed, the country's farm minister is quoted as saying by the Kyodo news agency."
( Tks to Solar Cookers International for photo.)
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