Sila Sutharat, a roasted chicken street vendor from Phetchaburi, Thailand, has come up with an ingenious way of cooking chicken. Instead of an oven or a charcoal barbecue, he uses 1,000 mobile mirrors that concentrate sunlight into a strong beam. He basically cooks meat with over 300 degrees Celsius of natural sunlight.

Like most other street vendors, Sila used to cook his chicken over a charcoal fire, but that all changed in 1997, when a mundane observation gave him a brilliant idea. One day, he was hit by the sunlight reflected off the window of a passing bus, and he felt its heat. “I could possibly change it into energy,” Sila told himself, and started working on a contraption to capture the sunlight and use it to cook his chicken.

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The people in Villaseca, Chile are some of the most the eco-concious on the Planet, using only sun-powered ovens to cook all their food. With these ovens, which can generate temperatures up to 180 degrees Celsius (356 degrees Fahrenheit), the villagers can prepare all kinds of dishes, including vegetables, meats and even deserts.

At first, cooking with solar energy was a necessity, due to the scarcity of wood in the country, which forced the villagers to spend hours on end every day looking for wood so they could eat. Two decades ago, the poor people of Villaseca were facing a tough wood crisis because of the desertification of the region. Every day, one member of the family had to go looking for wood to burn in their ovens so they could cook and eat warm meals. Thankfully, Rojas, a woman who lives in the Elqui Valley, and four other women were chosen to be guinea pigs in a trial project involving solar energy, conducted by the University of Chile. They were given specially engineered ovens that captured the sun’s rays and allowed any kind of food to be cooked in a heated compartment. The idea was well received, since the arid region is extremely sunny with more than 300 days of sunshine every year. Now, their sustainable ovens are the area’s main attraction and, the people there eat healthier because sun-cooked food lacks the carbon dioxide that emanates from burning wood.

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