A couple of decades ago, I had a good reason to ponder the health hazards of cooking meals in poor countries. Back then I lived as an anthropologist in the mountains just north of Afghanistan, a place where it was common practice for villagers to cook bread on the walls of wood-fuelled clay ovens.

If you were deft, and could slap the lumps of dough on the stove and flick them off correctly, the bread tasted delicious. If not, both the bread and your fingers could end up badly burnt.

In my case, after a winter spent cooking with the village women, my hands were marked with tiny burns. Cooking over traditional wood fires or ovens, I concluded, might look glamorously exotic if you are a tourist (or doing a western barbecue) but it isn’t when you have to do it every day in a small smoky house, least of all in a village engulfed in snow.