| A Wonderbag in South Africa and more Industry is something of a dirty word these days. But there are other connotations to the word beyond earth-throttling factories or polluting conglomerates. Industry can just mean work, the quiet act of putting food on the table, or the labors of creating a good product by hand. That is also industry, and a South African company called Wonderbag combines some of the best forms of these good labors in its mission.
In their feature about WonderBag published on Roads & Kingdoms, writer Ryan Lenora Brown and photographer Lauren Mulligan looked at the simplicity and utility of the concept: "It's a cloth bag stuffed with squishy insulation made from recycled insulation from cars and houses," writes Brown, "but from afar, it looks like something a giant might use to play hacky sack. Inside this contraption, each morning, Usai places a hot, half-cooked meal she has been preparing for the children at her daycare—a bean stew, a pot of rice, a fish curry. Then she pulls the bag shut and walks away. A few hours later, when she returns the food is ready, having finished cooking in the bag's insulated padding."
This low-tech slow cooker—which according to the company can slow-cook food for up to eight hours—is called a Wonderbag, and the one Usai uses was bankrolled by a carbon credit—a mechanism by which people and companies can 'offset' their own contributions to climate change by paying into projects that help reduce carbon emissions elsewhere."
Small wonder that these carbon-saving bean bags are among the ten finalists for the 2022 Curt Bergfors Food Planet Prize. The final winners of the multimillion-dollar prize will be announced soon, but for now, you can visit our entire series on Roads & Kingdoms to bask in the good-news stories of the best kind of industry in the food world. | 
