When my husband first mentions induction, I misunderstand him.
“Induction?” I ask. He is sautéing onions, the kitchen is steamy with smoke, and I am coughing. But, to be fair, I am also six months pregnant, and the only induction on my mind is how this baby, now heavy on my ribs, is coming out. He points at the smoky room and the sizzling cast-iron pan and I realize he means our stove, a mammoth thing that I clean painstakingly. Most nights, I take off the grates and scrub the burners of stray eggs and oil that have splashed out with his exuberant stirring.
“No way,” I say, “I love this stove. Food tastes better with gas!” And then I tell him that to make chapatis or fry pappadums, staples of my Indian upbringing, you need a flame you can control.
But it’s a losing battle, as I am married to a cookstove scientist.
On our first date, we both described our jobs. Mine was easy. “I teach. I write.”
He went next. “I work in household energy.”
I picked at the falafel I had ordered. He tried again. “I study indoor air pollution.”
I took a sip of water.
“I am a cookstove scientist.” He went on to explain that his work in public health was leading to cleaner ways of cooking and that it was helping to curb climate change. To be honest, I had never once thought about “clean” cooking. Even though I had lived and worked in India and been in many houses with chulas, traditional stoves that use biomass to heat food and leave kitchens thick with smoke. Much of the world uses fire to cook, and inefficient stoves produce a range of climate-warming gases and pollutants.
I went home from our date and looked up cooking as an environmental hazard and learned a few quick facts: Around 2.4 billion people in developing countries rely on firewood or charcoal for their daily cooking. And according to the World Health Organization, household air pollution is responsible for the death of 3.2 million people every year — more deaths than caused by malaria, tuberculosis or HIV— making it one of the most harmful environmental health risks worldwide.
Later that night, I added him to my phone as “Michael Cookstove.”
WHEN I WAS A KID, the grilling season in Wyoming was short. During those precious weeks of summer, my sister and I had noses like bloodhounds. We could sniff out the smell of a briquette burning several backyards away. Our neighbors grew accustomed to us showing up at their barbeques, hot dogs in hand, the unpackaged franks like extra fingers in our small fists.
According to the World Health Organization, household air pollution is responsible for the death of 3.2 million people every year — making it one of the most harmful environmental health risks worldwide.
“Can we cook this?” we’d ask, raiding the fridge for anything we thought you could grill. Our parents were decidedly not the grilling type. My mother, raised in India, was not the meat type either. But living in Wyoming, she bought hot dogs and prepared them by boiling them on our stove. My sister and I quickly realized that we preferred them grilled, and so whenever we saw the smoke or smelled a BBQ, we’d hustle over to our neighbors, asking if we could cook our paltry hot dogs alongside their hulking rib-eyes and sizzling burgers. I loved it when the meat had a grill mark on it. When you could taste the char. I thought fire was the only way to cook good food.
DURING THE PANDEMIC, I had two children: one in 2020, and the other in 2021, and Michael’s fieldwork in countries like India, Kenya, Nepal, Peru and Rwanda was put on pause. As the months wore on, he set up an air-quality monitor in our backyard in Laramie, and in the summer of 2020, when the Mullen and Cameron Peak fires burned nearby, I watched the light in our yard turn orange and the air fill with smoke. I held Juniper, who was only a few months old, in my arms, inside the house, hoping we were safe there. I paced in front of our indoor air filter, hoping her small lungs would be okay. I looked at the air-quality index on my phone, willing it to go down. Praying the fires would go out. As the smoke seeped in through our old windows, for the first time I worried about the air quality inside, my own privilege having allowed me to forget that much of the world lived like this every day.
Over a year later, in the kitchen cooking onions, now pregnant a second time, I began the slow process of changing my thinking. At the time, Michael was working on a project in the Bronx to replace gas stoves with induction stoves in public housing. Earlier that week, preparing to walk his team through how a new piece of equipment worked, he set it up in our kitchen to measure the air quality while we cooked. In theory, I knew that gas stoves burn natural gas, which is mostly made up of methane. And when burned, it emits pollutants, many of which can be harmful at levels the Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization say are unsafe and linked to illness. As this gas burns, it produces a reaction between nitrogen and oxygen, which creates nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, known collectively as NOx. The NOx reading in our kitchen that night was alarming.
“My decision reminded me of something Mother Teresa said: “We can do small things with great love.”
And yet, knowing these facts, and even after looking at the blinking numbers of how much NOx was in our kitchen, I still held on to our stove. I promised to run the fan and open a window, not acknowledging that in the winter in Wyoming, it’s too cold to have the window open.
But soon, I would be induced — twice. The first was on a winter morning when our younger daughter was born; the second was when we moved to Colorado for my new job. It wouldn’t be the facts and numbers that sway me to have an induction stove installed in our new kitchen. It was thinking about how another summer of wildfires had instilled in me a keen awareness of how precious clean air is. As I held the new baby, I thought about how I cannot stop a wildfire, but I can make the air in my home cleaner. My decision reminded me of something Mother Teresa said: “We can do small things with great love.”
In India, you do a puja or ceremony for a new home, and we do ours days after moving in. My mother and father travel from Wyoming, and my mother spends the morning making sure our new house is blessed. We break a coconut at the front door to remove hurdles and put lemons by the exterior doors to absorb negative energy. The last step of the ceremony is to boil milk on the stove, which is said to bring prosperity to the house. My mother instructs us to let the milk boil over, as that means our blessings will overflow.
I watch the milk boil over the pan and drip all over the stove. Later, I clean it up with a few swipes of a cloth. It is so much easier to scrub than our old gas one. Why do we hold on to what is harder? What is not good for us? Last month, we installed solar panels. We have a pollinator garden. We have a smart thermostat and LED bulbs. Small things done with great love, for my girls, and for this Earth we call home. I hope that our blessings will overflow, so that everyone can know a world of clean air.
Nina McConigley is a writer and professor at Colorado State University. She is the author of Cowboys and East Indians. In her “Township and Range” column, she writes about the intersection of race and family in the interior rural West.
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This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline When you marry a cookstove scientist.
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