Culinary Ambassador Jose Andres and the Alliance Join Food and Tech Titans in Silicon Valley
This month, Silicon Valley hosted the first-ever Bite food festival, a unique event that brought together some of the greatest minds in the culinary and tech industries. Included in the lineup of thought leaders was Alliance Culinary Ambassador Jose Andres. With the issue of clean cooking rooted squarely at the intersection of technology and cooking, Bite was a fitting venue to showcase clean cookstove and fuel innovations being used by millions of people across the developing world.
On the opening day of the event, Alliance CEO Radha Muthiah and Chef Jose Andres published an op-ed in the Huffington Post to raise awareness about the scourge of preventable deaths and illnesses caused by cooking over open fires. Although the statistics are dire—according to the World Health Organization toxic pollution from traditional cooking kills 10,000 people a day—solutions already exist to make cooking safer and more efficient. Partnerships with organizations such as Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen are critical to disseminating the technological know-how and behavior change necessary to promote universal adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels.
Speaking to an audience familiar with technology’s potential to solve global problems, Jose Andres used Bite as a platform to talk about incorporating efficient cookstoves and fuels into the future of clean cooking. His team from World Central Kitchen joined Alliance partners BioLite, BURN, GoSun, Project Gaia, and SolSource, to showcase cutting-edge cookstoves. Representatives had the opportunity to speak with event attendees to educate them about clean cooking solutions. One of the high points of Bite Silicon Valley was a cooking demonstration by Jose Andres and his team that allowed the audience to try food cooked on a wide selection of cleaner cookstoves.
Events such as Bite Silicon Valley are important, not only to educate a broader audience about the health issues that result from cooking with solid fuels, but also to demonstrate that viable solutions to this far-reaching problem already exist. With the support of the food and tech industries, along with other industry partners around the world, we can help create a global market for clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels.