The cost of cooking a meal. The case of Nyeri County, Kenya

Energy for cooking is considered essential in achieving modern energy access. Despite this, almost three billion people worldwide still use solid fuels to meet their cooking needs. To better support practitioners and policy-makers, this paper presents a new model for comparing cooking solutions and its key output metric: the 'levelized cost of cooking a meal' (LCCM). The model is applied to compare several cooking solutions in the case study area of Nyeri County in Kenya. The cooking access targets are connected to the International Workshop Agreement and Global Tracking Framework's tiers of cooking energy access. Results show how an increased energy access with improved firewood and charcoal cookstoves could reduce both household's LCCMs and the total costs compared to traditional firewood cooking over the modelling period. On the other hand, switching to cleaner cooking solutions, such as LPG- and electricity, would result in higher costs for the end-user highlighting that this transition is not straightforward. The paper also contextualizes the results into the wider socio-economic context. It finds that a tradeoff is present between minimizing costs for households and meeting household priorities, thus maximizing the potential benefits of clean cooking without dismissing the use of biomass altogether

‘Blindness to the obvious’?: Treatment experiences and feminist approaches to eating disorders

Eating disorders (EDs) are now often approached as biopsychosocial problems, but the social or cultural aspects of the equation are often marginalised in treatment - relegated to mere contributory or facilitating factors. In contrast, feminist and socio-cultural approaches are primarily concerned with the relationship between EDs and the social/ cultural construction of gender. Yet although such approaches emerged directly from the work of feminist therapists, the feminist scholarship has increasingly observed, critiqued and challenged the biomedical model from a scholarly distance. As such, this article draws upon data from 15 semi-structured interviews with women in the UK context who have experience of anorexia and/or bulimia in order to explore a series of interlocking themes concerning the relationship between gender identity and treatment. In engaging the women in debate about the feminist approaches (something which has been absent from previous feminist work), the article explores how gender featured in their own understandings of their problem, and the ways in which it was - or rather wasn’t - addressed in treatment. The article also explores the women’s evaluations of the feminist discourse, and their discussions of how it might be implemented within therapeutic and clinical contexts

“The fact she has anorexia fits in perfectly”: Beverley Allitt, self-starvation and media narratives of criminal femininity

This article examines the press construction in the early 1990s of Beverley Allitt, the nurse known as one of the Britain’s most prolific women serial killers, focusing on Allitt’s diagnosis of anorexia at the time of her trial and how it shaped understandings of her mental state, her character, and her perceived culpability. It is the relationship between Allitt, gender, and everyday constructions of anorexia that is of interest here, particularly in terms of how her image contributed to media discourses on self-starvation and femininity. The analysis suggests that Allitt’s anorexia was primarily understood in terms of manipulation, inauthenticity, and performance—discourses which consolidated perniciously gendered conceptions of self-starvation, as well as the problematic clinical practices through which anorexia was “treated.” As these treatment practices continue to have a legacy today, it is crucial to examine how they have been normalized and legitimized through popular media discourse

The Experience of Counselling for Female Clients with Anorexia Nervosa : A Person Centred Perspective

Original article can be found at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713734893 Copyright Informa / Taylor and Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080/14733140212331384897 [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]Peer reviewe