Location:
Indonesia, Cambodia

The role of cooking and meal provision in institutional settings often contributes to wider institutional goals, developmental mandates, and business and operating processes. These include the improved nutrition, attendance, and attainment aims of school feeding programs, food as part of cultural and religious rituals, community meal provision as part of the early stages of humanitarian responses, and providing accessible and
affordable meals for workers.

Institutional cooking often falls in a gap between global agendas promoting electricity access and feeding programmes. As a niche between these two large efforts, institutional cooking has arguably been overlooked, with little policy or research focus, thus continuing dependence on existing biomass cooking for meal delivery. Reliance on biomass for institutional presents potential health, environmental and sustainability issues. In some countries, the use of firewood for institutional cooking has been flagged as having a potential impact on landscape degradation and deforestation, though this is hard to quantify accurately.

Designing a clean cooking alternative for institutional cooking practices requires a contextual approach as the current formulation varies by institution and context, with the sourcing of food, financing, fuel, and cooking technologies dependent on a range of external and internal factors.

Research providing a baseline understanding of IC within specific contexts is currently lacking, an issue which this research aims to address. This is important in understanding how modern fuels might be adopted and practices might evolve to support or inhibit modern energy cooking.

These projects collected data and evidence on how institutional cooking currently functions, in order to inform transitions pathways towards modern energy cooking. The result is hoped to inform future work with MECS in designing, testing and implementing modern energy cooking appliances and services in institutional kitchens and in supporting the development of sustainable delivery systems, financing mechanisms and
supporting policy and practitioner ecosystems.

The core research question informing the data collection is “What do cooking practices in institutional settings (such as in schools, hospitals, prisons, canteens, religious/community centres etc.) currently look like?” To gain a thorough answer to the research question, 7 meta-categories obtained from the preliminary literature study are formulated to cover the variation of the concept, whether in terms of similarities or differences between the study locations. The 8 categories are as defined; (1) institutional structure; (2) cooking practices; (3) institutional resources; (4) institutional cooking space and appliances; (5) institutional cooking fuel; (6) health impact of current cooking practices; (7) perception on shifting to modern cooking energy.

Data collection implemented a combined method of qualitative and quantitative approach through semi-structured interviews and the development of vignettes. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted to 61 institutions mainly in Sumba Island, Phnom Penh City, and Kampong Thom City. The data were analyzed in a comparative analysis according to Fachelli et al. (2021).