There is a vast difference in eastern and western cooking. Food is generally cooked and served hot in most eastern kitchens. Only a few items, either vegetable or animal origin, are eaten raw, and these in small quantities.
In the past, dry twigs gathered from neighbouring forests served as fuel for cooking. In India, where draught animals, such as bullocks and buffaloes, and milch cattle, usually cows and she-buffaloes, were reared, it was a practice to collect the dung, mix it with rice or other agricultural fibrous waste, make it into cakes, paste the wet cakes over walls to allow them to dry, and use such dry dung cakes as fuel. These cakes have a long shelf life, and when stored dry, are one of the best fuels that do not give out much smoke and leave only a reasonable ash content. Their calorific value is high and they give out steady heat.
Due to mechanisation, use of animal power for agricultural operations is slowly but surely dwindling and only milch animals are surviving in villages. Converting animal dung by a wet process to biogas is catching up. Of course, biogas can be used for cooking, but petroleum gas has an edge because of its availability in cylinders.
