As grill geeks may know, charcoal is made by heating wood (or wood chips) to about 1000° F in an airless environment. If you want to press them into briquettes, you can add sand, lime, and a bit of cornstarch as a binder, but all you really need, aside from the wood, is enough fuel to generate all that heat. Grain alcohol or petroleum works nicely if you can get it.
Or, take sugar cane fibers (left over after the valuable cane juice is extracted), seal them inside a 55-gallon drum, leave them there until they carbonize from lack of oxygen -- who knew? -- and bind them with a bit of cassava-root porridge. The resulting charcoal may be not quite the equal of your brand-name briquette, but if you live in Haiti, where both trees and rocket fuel are in short supply, this approach has some distinct advantages.
This method, developed by mechanical engineer Amy Smith at MIT, helped win her a $500,000 MacArthur fellowship for her work finding low-tech solutions to community problems using whatever materials are available.
Now that's what I call cooking with local ingredients.
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