[Three Stone Fire at Losæter 2015.]

During the Full Moon Celebration arranged by Flatbread Society in Losæter / Slow Space Bjørvika in Oslo artist and researcher Erik Sjödin built and tended three so called “three-stone fires”. One for cooking soup, one for baking bread, and one for cooking potatoes.

A three-stone fire is one of the most simple arrangements for cooking food over fire. Unfortunately three-stone fires are very inefficient. As little as 10 percent of the heat a three-stone fire produces is transferred to the cooking pot. In this case the three-stone fires worked well for warming soup and baking flatbread but it took a very long time to cook a large pot of potatoes.

It is estimated that three billion people worldwide still cook over open fire, such as three-stone fires, or using rudimentary cookstoves. Inefficient biomass burning stoves used for cooking are major contributors to global warming, pollution, and deforestation. Every year millions of people die prematurely and fall sick from having breathed in smoke while cooking. Inefficient cookstoves are also a source of inequality since it is mainly women who gather fuel and cook, at the expense of studying or pursuing income generating work.

Because of the wind conditions at the site where we had originally planned to have the fires we decided to move everything to a more sheltered location. However, what we didn’t notice was that the ground on the new spot that we settled for was very peat rich soil. Peat, which is traditionally used by Norwegians as fuel for heating and cooking, is flammable and was and temperatures under a camp fire can get as high as 700C. After some time the fire spread under the earth and smoke started to come up through the soil everywhere around the fires. Fortunately, we could counter the earth fire by creating a row of watering cans to extinguish the fires and keep the soil soaked throughout the evening.

[Full Moon Celebration with Flatbread Society at Losæter 2015.]

Another surprise was the discovery that the potatoes we cooked came from Israel. The potatoes were bought in a supermarket known for having one of the better selections of ecological food in Oslo. It was labelled as ecological early potatoes and packaged in brown paper bags with the stores own brand for environmentally sound products. However, as we later discovered, printed on a tiny sticker underneath the bag it said that the potatoes origin was Israel. This came as great surprise since this was a good potato year and close by, in Sweden, early potatoes were already in stores everywhere and almost given away for free. One wonders how potatoes can be imported from Israel to Norway, when there is an abundance of potatoes close by and people are suffering from food insecurity in the region where the potatoes come from. The potatoes tasted good but were large and not comparable to the small early potatoes that Swedish people traditionally enjoy cooked with dill. Because of their large size and the poor performance of the three-stone fire the potatoes cooked slowly, but they were ready to eat by the time the full moon had risen.