Despite technological advancements since the Industrial Revolution, cooking remains a spectacularly inefficient process. This holds true for poor and rich countries alike. While modern gas and electric cooking stoves might be more practical and produce less indoor pollution than the open fires and crude stoves used in developing countries, they are equally energy inefficient.
In fact, an electric cooking stove is only half as efficient as a well-tended open fire, while a gas hob is only half as effective as a biomass rocket stove. And even though indoor air pollution is less of an issue with modern cooking stoves, research indicates that pollution levels in western kitchens can be surprisingly high.
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