Now You're Cooking With Cow Patties!

Cooking with gas used to be a good thing.

Starting in the 1930s, the phrase "Now you're cooking with gas!" was all the rage. 

Advertisers ran campaigns to get people to switch from wood or coal stoves to newer, cleaner, gas alternatives.

The marketing campaign worked, and millions of indoor natural gas appliances were sold.

Over time the phrase "now you're cooking with gas" was being used as an idiom meaning "doing something very well", or "making excellent progress".

How things have changed. 

Today, not even one hundred years later, governments, including my own here in Canada, are trying to ban gas cook stoves. 

That is right. They aren't banning military activity and war (one of the biggest contributors of green house gases and death globally), they are banning something that accounts for .06 percent of Canada's total emissions.

I am therefore thinking about coining a new phrase more appropriate for our new world order.

Here are a few I am trying out depending how far back we need to go as we replace our centuries long obsession with progress for our new obsession with regress.

"Now you're cooking with electricity!"

"Now you're cooking with coal!"

"Now you're cooking with wood!"

And my personal favourite,

"Now you're cooking with dung!"

Drying cow dung to be used as
cooking fuel in India.

What "modern" people may not realize, is that many people around the world have always used wood and other biomass as their primary fuel source for cooking. 

Half of humanity today still cooks over biomass fires, from China to Kenya, and Guatemala to India. 

Many of those burn dung as in many places it is the only fuel available. 

No bull. It's true.

The burning of dung is a smoky and inefficient process, but it gets the job done.

In our more simple future, those of us used to a gas or electric range in the kitchen, may benefit from having knowledge of alternative forms of cooking.

Otherwise, after the grid goes down, we risk the danger of not being able to cook anything.

Let us today recognize the dung burners. 

We know not what they live with every day.

And that lack of knowledge might become very detrimental in the dung days to come.

Get ready for it.

"Now you're cooking with cow patties!"

Note: new job opportunity - dung delivery dude.