Letter on cooking in iron pots, by Rita Bhatia

Pots and Pans

Dear Field Exchange

When recently thinking about a proposal on micro- nutrient initiatives for refligee women, I was reminded of a special after-dinner treat we sometimes eat in India. It is 'jaggery' which are the molasses formed when refining sugar. When cooked for a long time in iron woks it solidifies into cakes. This process improves shelf life. Grandma's reasoning was that "Jaggery is very rich and healthy and gives strength and blood". When I think of it now it makes sense, Jaggery is rich in IRON because of long continuous cooking in a crude iron wok.
UNHCR currently provides aluminium cooking pots and pans. So I was wondering whether providing iron pots and pans may help to combat anaemia. This made me remember grandma as well - who is no longer with us.

I discussed some of my thoughts on this, with a colleague at WEP who requested confirmation through the literature or experience that the use of iron pots in cooking could have a siguificant effect on haemoglobin levels of women and children. Through further networking we discovered that UNICEF have been involved in a study in Ethiopia which found that cooking with iron pots resulted in an equivalent improvement in iron status to that achieved with iron supplementation. We have asked around among our colleagues and found that there is not much published information on this phenomenon.

A number of us feel that it would be a good idea to run a pilot study to see whether cooking in iron pots and pans does actually affect the iron status of a test group. Of course we need to carefully think through the methodology before we can formalise such a trial. However, if we can reduce anaemia prevalence by replacing the aluminium pots currently supplied, with iron pots --- well maybe I'll start to take other things Grandma said a little more seriously.

Yours, etc,
Rita Bhatia, UNHCR

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