excerpt from "A Cooking Revolution: How Clean Energy
and Cookstoves Are Saving Lives" by Chef José Andrés,
June 7, 2016
Cooking: it's a simple act that has brought families around the
world together for thousands and thousands of years.
As a chef, I can think of few things more beautiful than that
However, I also know how deadly such a simple act can be, nol
only to our health, but to our environment.
Think about it: For Americans, turning on the stove means
simply turning a knob or switch. For people living in developing
countries, particularly women and children, it means hours of
collecting fuels like firewood, dung, or coal to burn in a
rudimentary, smoky cookstove or over an open fire. The result is
a constant source of toxic smoke that families breathe in daily,
causing diseases like child pneumonia, heart disease, and lung
cancer, not to mention taking a child away from her education.
In fact, diseases caused by smoke from open fires and stoves
claim 4.3 million lives every year. That's more than AIDS,
malaria, and tuberculosis combined.
And the environment suffers, too. When people collect wood
every day from their local forests to create charcoal or fuel for
wood-burning stoves, it creates an unsustainable pace of
deforestation that leads to mudslides, loss of watershed, and
other environmental consequences. These stoves also
contribute up to 25 percent of black carbon emissions, a
pollutant that contributes directly to climate change.
You see, from what we cook to how we cook, our food connects
with our lives on so many levels. That's why having access to
better technology and clean energy for cooking is as equally
important as the ingredients in the food being prepared.
It's also why I'm proud to support an effort to bring clean
cookstoves and fuels to millions of people in developing
countries
Together with the United Nations, the US government and
partners around the world, the Global Alliance for Clean
Cookstoves focuses on working with local communities and
organizations to develop a market for cookstoves and fuels that
significantly reduce emissions, cook more efficiently, and fit with
local customs and culture.
The Obama administration's investment goes a long way toward
achieving our goal of bringing access to clean cookstoves and
fuels to 100 million households in places like China, Guatemala,
Kenya, and India by 2020.
What is the author's main purpose for writing about problems
and solutions in this passage?
°
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to further understanding about the negative impact of
smoke on health
to describe issues related to cooking in many
developing countries
to compare what various countries are doing about
issues related to cooking
to explain why countries are unable to address the
problems caused by cooking