# Food Cooked over Dung
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [May 16, 2008, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539 "2008-05-16T12:16:02Z")
**Posts on this page:** 12
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/1 "2008-05-16T12:16:02Z")
I keep running across this, and I find it oddly fascinating.
What brought it up most recently is this passage from Mark Kurlansky’s book **Salt** (pp. 366-7):
> [@](#):
>
> Another specialty of Zigong salt workers was _huobianzi_. The tough thigh of an old salt well ox was cut by hand in a continuous paper-thin slice by slowly turning the leg…The strips were seasoned with soy sauce and salt, then air-dried and grilled over a low heat from burning ox dung. Today, a gas heater is used, but it is said that huobianzi that is cured over ox dung has “a special frangrace.”
I’ll bet it does.
Cooking over animal dung used to be common. Marvin Harris claims, in his books, that cow dung is one of the many products produced by cows that make them worth preserving (and hence “sacred”) in India – the low, cotinuous heat produced by a dung-fueled fire allows Indians to set a pot meal on a dung fire and let it simmer for a long time (a sort of organic crock-pot) while they work outdoors.
Travellers on the trails of the American West often had no other fuel that buffalo chips (or ox chips).
And there’s Ezekiel 4:12, where the prophet is told to bake barley cakes using human dung. This has frequently been interpreted to mean that the bread _contained_ dung, but it’s pretty clear to me that they’ve misinterpreted the passage, and it means “cooked over dung”. This site says otherwise: [http://www.nobeliefs.com/washingtonnews/EzekielBread.htm](http://www.nobeliefs.com/washingtonnews/EzekielBread.htm)
(Be sure to read all the way to the bottom, including the footnote), saying, among other things, that
> [@](#):
>
> not to mention that it would stink to high “heaven” if you did
…but he obviously hasn’t heard about the charm of _huobianzi_.
Seriously, I think that necessity has made folks cook food over burning dung in the past, and that it invariably has affected the flavor. But people got over it, got used to it, and, in a Stockholm Syndrome way, even got to like it. We’re insulated from that, because we can afford to use gas heaters to make our _huobianzi_ if we wish (and can use other, more genteel fuels to flavor our food, like hickory or mesquite charcoal), but our ancestors did what they had to.
Any other cases of this sort of cooking?
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/2 "2008-05-16T12:57:14Z")
Article on the efficiency (and practicality) of dung-fired cooking:
[http://www.bioenergylists.org/stovesdoc/apro/dung/Aprodung.htm](http://www.bioenergylists.org/stovesdoc/apro/dung/Aprodung.htm)
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### Author:  [@MovingTarget](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MovingTarget)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/3 "2008-05-16T13:11:15Z")
I can personally say that I have cooked food over “cow chips” while I was camping before. I was with my uncle and he was doing the cooking and such, but it wasn’t really any different than using wood. It does burn slower and at a lower temp than wood though. He put on a pot of beans in the morning and just kinda left it most of the day, adding a few “fuel chips” throughout the day. But hey, I thought the beans were good. Just my two cents.
SN1P3
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### Author:  [@wolfman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfman)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/4 "2008-05-16T14:43:04Z")
I have done the old wilderness trick of lighting dung(exact species unknown) to maintain flame all day until you come back. I never really noticed much of a smell, but they were very small pieces, and not producing much heat.
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### Author:  [@Revtim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revtim)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/5 "2008-05-16T15:01:20Z")
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
This has frequently been interpreted to mean that the bread _contained_ dung
[/QUOTE]
“I asked for raisin bread but this is corn bread!”
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### Author:  [@lieu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lieu)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/6 "2008-05-16T15:26:02Z")
What, you mean _everyone’s_ dung isn’t reminiscent of mesquite briquettes?
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### Author:  [@Harmonious\_Discord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harmonious_Discord)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/7 "2008-05-16T15:30:17Z")
Something in a pot isn’t going to absorb much of the flavors from smoke.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/8 "2008-05-16T15:48:48Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Something in a pot isn’t going to absorb much of the flavors from smoke.
1.) Not everything’s cooked over a pot. Otherwise, there’d be no point in “mesquite grilling”
2.) In some cases, I’d think it’s be offensive if even _some_ of the flavor from the smoke got into the pot.
3.) Unless the pot is covered, I think it’ll still potentially absorb something.
I see from the Internet that cooking over buffalo chips and, later, cow chips, in the oven in your Kanasa or Oklahoma house was a regular thing until the early 20th century. You tried to get well-dried chips. Surprisingly, this method of feeding your fire produces a LOT of ash.
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### Author:  [@Harmonious\_Discord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harmonious_Discord)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/9 "2008-05-16T16:57:40Z")
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
1.) Not everything’s cooked over a pot. Otherwise, there’d be no point in “mesquite grilling”
2.) In some cases, I’d think it’s be offensive if even _some_ of the flavor from the smoke got into the pot.
3.) Unless the pot is covered, I think it’ll still potentially absorb something.
I see from the Internet that cooking over buffalo chips and, later, cow chips, in the oven in your Kanasa or Oklahoma house was a regular thing until the early 20th century. You tried to get well-dried chips. Surprisingly, this method of feeding your fire produces a LOT of ash.
[/QUOTE]
Fly ash. 😃
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### Author:  [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/10 "2008-05-16T17:47:44Z")
Cruise the lesser cable channels during late-night hours. I’ll bet someone out there has an infomercial on cooking with dung. They’ll probably be hawking something like a Toilet Stove, that facilitates cooking with one’s own dung:
_It’s a toilet – and it’s a stove!
Lunch goes away – and dinner’s ready!_
Note to self: Trademark “Commodious Cookery”.
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### Author:  [@Ca3799](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ca3799)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2008, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/11 "2008-05-16T21:11:47Z")
I just read _Caravans_ by Michener and he had a description of the Kochi’s cooking over dung in the book.
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### Author:  [@China\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/China_Guy)
#### Post date: [May 19, 2008, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/food-cooked-over-dung/449539/12 "2008-05-19T03:42:35Z")
Places like Tibet, where there are vast areas with no firewood, use Yak “chips” for fuel. It burns hot and clean, and when dried out has no noticeable odor.
I’ve spent many a meal around a yak dung fueled dinner. Most of that happened out in the nomad lands near the earthquake epicenter (about 200 km away).