OK, so the kettle, the tin opener and the toaster have proved their worth. But the most aspirational kitchen appliances aren’t about making breakfast. They’re about the dream. When you buy a new pasta machine or milk frother you believe at that moment that you will become a more successful, desirable, significant human being. But, within weeks, the frother starts to mock your attempts to better yourself through kitchenware. The frother plunges you into a cycle of self-hate and shame. Of course you don’t even make coffee anymore, let alone fresh pasta. What about a juicer next time? It’s how Western capitalism convinces us to consume.
But can this kitchen gadget change not just your life, but the world? It’s a bold claim, even for kitchenware. And especially for this saggy bean bag, into which I am asked to lower a boiling pan of food. It doesn’t feel right. Could this bundle of cloth improve my life? Could this thing, bean bag, whatever it is, make us all into better human beings?
These are grand claims, so it’s lucky that I have invited into my kitchen Sarah Collins, inventor of the Wonderbag, to demonstrate. She arrives with a couple of them. They look a bit ridiculous. Later I get my kids to guess what it is for: a cat’s bed! A hat! A cushion! No kids, this is what Professor Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environment Agency, fell for at the United Nations climate change conference in December, ignoring all the talk of protocols, renewables and emissions targets to declare the bag “much the most exciting development I have come across during the entire conference”. This is a product that Unilever became so convinced is the start of a radical shift that the company has just ordered five million more for South Africa. It has generated 7,000 jobs there in the past year. Microsoft in the United States and JP Morgan in London have got behind the cause of getting 100 million into homes by 2015. The Wonderbag saves so much carbon that it has even been accredited to earn carbon credits on the stringent system set up by the Kyoto treaty. And it’s not a government or a big industry project. It’s just a bag lined with pockets of the same polystyrene balls that you find in bean bags, dreamt up by Collins and stitched by her friend. And I haven’t even told you what it’s for.
“It’s a non-electric slow cooker,” says Collins in her broad South African drawl. She then bursts into laughter when she sees my underwhelmed face. “You know, Helen, it is that simple. I am always amazed no-one has thought of it before. But I will not stop until I get one into every kitchen in the world. Once you start to think about what it can do, you can’t stop.”
My face realigns. This is the last moment that I will underestimate Collins’s passion, or the potential of the bag. She gets chopping. She is in my kitchen prepping a lamb curry. She will spend a few minutes getting this really hot on my gas stove, and then put the whole pot, with a lid, into the Wonderbag. There it will continue to cook — using no extra energy (it’s kind of magic) — until I sit down to eat, hours later.
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And, as Collins chops, she tells her story. Now 42, she had spent most of her career trying to drum up businesses that would help families in rural South Africa, but nothing was making much impact. Then South Africa suffered a series of power cuts. Collins got frustrated with her half-cooked dinners, and remembered how her grandma had surrounded her pans with cushions to keep them cooking after she turned off the stove. Collins tried it, it worked.
This idea is so low-tech it’s pre-tech: some of the earliest civilisations have cooked in holes in the ground, insulating the food with earth. Mrs Beeton mentions the haybox (boxes lined with hay) as a form of slow cooking. Second World War soldiers remember their Army-issue hayboxes as a way of keeping rations warm. But these were fiddly contraptions to make and bulky to use indoors. So the West continued to use lots of electricity for cooking, while the developing world typically burns a lot of kerosene or wood. These fires aren’t just polluting, they make whole homes too smoky to breathe in, cause house fires, burn children, swallow wage packets, and are, in general, a terrible idea, but they what millions of people are stuck with.
“From that night on I knew this was it,” says Collins. “I became obsessed.”
A friend of Collins’s, Moshy Mathe, sewed up the prototype. Amazingly, when tested in labs, food that was heated to boiling point for just a few minutes on the stove, then transferred to the bag, kept cooking hot for 12 hours. This means that you never need to waste energy and money cooking your food for more than a few minutes. You boil it, bag it, stand it, serve it. The two women were in business. “Saving the world,” goes their motto, “one stew at a time.”
One cook at a time, too. Collins grabs my rice packet. “One cup of rice,” she says, “two of water. All you need to know. Boil it, bag it.” And, ever since, it is the only way I do rice. “Boil it, bag it,” I say to myself, sounding more like a cop at a crime scene than a chef. Crime scene, though, used to be appropriate to my cooking, once my neglected hob starts burning and the smoke alarm starts wailing. No more.
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What’s interesting about the Wonderbag is that it manages to be so modest and so ambitious at the same time. Most climate change ideas seem to be happening somewhere else, around a multilateral negotiating table, not your dining table. Scientists have ratified — for the sake of the UN accreditation to earn carbon credits — that each bag used instead of a kerosene fire prevents the emission of half a ton of carbon dioxide a year, even if it is used only three times a week. That will typically save a breadline family a tenth of their income, and make better use of the time they spend fetching fuel. Since the water doesn’t evaporate, it saves that, too.
But what has this got to do with my, by contrast, pampered life in London? Collins chops with renewed vigour.
Just as she was determined that the bag be a self-sustaining business not reliant on patchy grants and aid, so she is determined that the rich love the Wonderbag just as much as the poor. So, after South Africa, she did not choose to launch in another developing country; she chose Britain.
“You know, I used to say that an African camp fire was the best leveller in the world,” says Collins. “It didn’t matter if you were the CEO of a company or a bushman, you could sit and share that same fire. Now I’ve changed my mind. I think the Wonderbag is the greatest equaliser. It addresses so many challenges. It gets the same response from a working mum in the African bush to a working mum in this London suburb.”
Brits, she says, aspire to Aga-style slow cooking, but they don’t have the “Aga-slow lifestyle”. Before Christmas, Collins arrived at Heathrow with a huge bundle of the bags to test. Her first taker was her taxi driver, now, she says, “London taxi drivers LOVE them! Keeps their lunch hot sitting on the passenger seat beside them all day.” It is fair to note that Collins is a crazy as it is necessary to be if you are going to change the world.
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One British tester said that she achieved “Zen-like calm” at her Christmas lunch with the help of three Wonderbags, letting her Christmas pudding steam and her ham braise in the bags all day without a backward glance at the kitchen. Another working mother liked it better than her slow cooker because she hadn’t liked the thought of leaving the electricity on all day while she was out, but could use it for all her slow-cooker recipes. If you put a hot-water bottle inside, they’re great places to rise bread. It’s also ideal for incubating home-made yoghurt, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Each bag bought in the UK — at £30 a pop — will provide one free to a family in Africa who can’t afford one. What Collins would really like is for the UK Wonderbags to be made here, generating local jobs, in the same model that she would like to use all over the world. “Everyone, but everyone I meet says that to reach the British kitchen I have to do two things. First, I have to get it in the Lakeland catalogue. Second, I have to swap the South African print for Cath Kidston.”
I add to her list: she has to get the attention of the Prince of Wales and she has to sell at Glastonbury. Then the Wonderbag really would capture the spirit and stomachs of the British.
Collins has to leave now; she is busy. “Asia is next,” she says, laughing but quite serious.
About six hours later, I unwrap my bag, feeling as if I’m unwrapping a present. There is my curry, delicious and piping hot. I later try porridge with apples, heated and bagged before bedtime, ready for breakfast. On a cold Sunday morning I throw the ingredients for soup into a pot, heat it for a couple of minutes, and bundle it up in its cosy Wonderbag coat, just as we too get our coats on. Then I dump the Wonderbag in the car boot, and drive off for a walk. A few hours later we get back to the car. The soup has cooked itself for us. Under a snowy sky, it warms our hearts.
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See the Wonderbag in action thetimes.co.uk/food
To buy one visit: nb-wonderbag.com