This lady cooked for the whole eye camp team on this chulha, in the kitchen of the school hostel where we were staying. November 1983.
The food was excellent.
It’s cleaner than you realize. At least, the insides of the pots and pans are pretty clean. As for the rest, it’s important to keep a distinction between “dirty dirt” and “clean dirt” – between mud and shit and raw meat on the one hand, and soot and ashes on the other. Soot and ashes are pretty inevitable when you’re cooking over wood fires. They’re sterile and (apart from a certain degree of carcinogenicity in the soot) pretty harmless. The carcinogenicity of the tiny quantity of soot that ends up in the food is no worse than that of toast or smoked fish.
People cooking in such conditions generally understand the real issues of hygiene much better than most Europeans or Americans – they have to, they wouldn’t survive if they didn’t. They may not know the scientific basis – indeed they generally don’t (although this lady probably does, being a mission hospital employee) – but the traditions are sound by evolution if by no other process.
I’ve never picked up any kind of food poisoning eating things cooked in those kinds of conditions (and I’ve eaten such food thousands of times), whereas I don’t generally much trust restaurants in Delhi, or anywhere else for that matter.
©Clive K Semmens 1983