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Comment by cc438 | Hacker News Reader

These populations aren't mentally incompetent, they use chimneys. The issue is that chimney's aren't 100% efficient and only remove the pollution from the home, not the surrounding environment. The pollution becomes pervasive when an entire city of 100,000+ people is cooking with biomass fuel. Your chimney's exhaust is just another person's air when it's as concentrated as you'd find in places like those described in the article.

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* Your chimney's exhaust is just another person's air when it's as concentrated as you'd find in places like those described in the article.*

This is true but does not change anything as even now the exhaust would get out of the building, just more inefficiently. It is staying likely closer to the ground for longer too.

Of course for long term solution a concentrated and well filtered power plant with an accessible grid would be a best solution. But even then an exhaust hood above the cooking place is needed.

Went camping at a popular local park on 4th of July weekend. As it turns out, a hundred or so charcoal cooking fires will blanket a whole region with a thick haze even if they are all outside to begin with =/

Yes, this will happen and I am not arguing that it would not happen.

Chimney has two effects mainly: exhaust to the outside and above the buildings such that the wind can dilute it enough.

Look at the woman in the article picture: she's not using a chimney, and she has to squat to cook. German women were cooking standing up (building fires on raised stone platforms), with chimneys to vent away smoke, in the 17th century. (See Fernand Braudel, _The Structures of Everyday Life_.) Draw your own conclusions: pathological loyalty to tradition or lack of imagination; or severe lack of capital and calories; or what?

This comment made me think of the Japanese kamado or the traditional Russian stove, but see this discussion of the Lorena adobe stove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook_stove#Lorena_adobe_stove

One problem is that ceramic stoves with a large thermal mass may take a lot more fuel to fire. In colder northern regions with plentiful fuel, the high thermal mass is an advantage because it can help keep the house warm. But in a tropical setting, open indoor fires may be more efficient at quickly heating food, especially when deforestation is a problem.

What Braudel discussed was an assembly with an oven underneath, and a raised hearth on top. You didn't have to heat the stove -- just build a fire on the top surface (with a chimney and smoke hood directly above), and cook with that.

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