The Dawn of SolarPizza

Harness the sun, but hold the burn!

[The following in an excerpt from Pizza Futures, a forecast of pizza’s future by Nobell Foods. You can download your copy here.]

Pizza-like foods have been around for centuries—at least as long as the means for baking bread have been available. The quintessential Italian pizza as we know it today didn’t emerge until sometime after the early 1500s, when Spanish conquistadors returned from the Americas to Europe with tomato seeds. But an enormous oven for baking round flatbreads that suspiciously resemble pizza has been found in Pompeii—an ancient city near pizza-haven Naples—which was buried by a volcano in 79 CE. Italians, it seems, have been perfecting the recipe from the very start. 

Traditional pizza ovens are wood-fired, and aficionados argue that this remains the best technique. Yet by now, delicious pizzas worldwide are produced by all sorts of appliances, including gas and electric ovens.

However, the future of pizza depends not only on the continued availability of pizza’s bare-necessity ingredients (flour, water, yeast, tomato, cheese) but on the continued availability of the energy needed to transmute these raw ingredients into a crusty, melty, sweet-savory, disc-shaped masterpiece. As the planetary climate changes, so too will the foods we hold dear, and we’ll have to adjust our methods—and our tastes.

What will happen to cooking and baking when wood runs out? Or when gas runs out? Or when the energy needed for converting sand into silicon—the primary material used to build solar panels—is no longer at hand? Even our most renewable energy strategies require energy to manufacture them. On Earth, every resource is finite except for the sun and wind. 

Fear not, pizza lovers: a solar oven can be built by hand from leftover materials. And it’s not a novel design. As is often the case, in order to look to the future, one need only glance at the past. The design for an efficient solar oven has been in existence since at least 1865, when French inventor Augustin Mouchot released his model for a solar-powered engine that could be used to heat water to a boiling point, creating high-pressure steam. The solar steam engine was most obviously applicable in trains and factory machinery, but he also showed how it could be used as an oven to heat food. 

Mouchot’s oven is a conical device with a cylinder protruding from the center—like a flower opening and reaching toward the sun. The “flower” of the cone is a parabolic mirror plated with highly reflective silver, and the “stamen” is a copper cylinder boiler with a glass dome at its top. As a whole, the device couldn’t look more like a space-age laser or retro-futuristic satellite. 

Steampunk, meet solarpunk. Solarpunk is an aesthetic and an attitude that draws on past inventions and art forms to create the new frontier of open-source, renewable, practical, accessible green tech. Solarpunk is inspired by past engineering and its attendant aesthetics to imagine a nature-inspired, sustainable, green, and blossoming future—not only despite the increasing heat of global warming but actually aided by the sun’s rays. The best thing about Mouchot’s engine might have been that, using extremely concentrated solar heat, he was able to produce ice. What could be more (solar)punk than that?

Mouchot had trouble testing his inventions in France or other parts of Western Europe, which were not (yet) sunny enough to power his devices. In 1877 the French ministry gave him a grant to test his inventions in Algeria, then a French colony, where he was thrilled to find out how well they worked given the proper conditions. 

Of course, Mouchot’s expedition was just another facet of the colonial expansionist project, and the goal of the French government was to solar-power train lines that could connect different parts of the empire. 

So the legacy of solar engineering is bound up in the imperial quest for domination, and its repurposing today must keep this legacy in mind and be repurposed for local uses determined by those in places who need it. 

The solarpunk ethos is that the plans for any such technology be shared with everyone who needs it and not held in the hands of those who intend to employ it for the continued concentration of power. While global warming will affect the Earth’s populations unequally, solar power should be shared. 

Mouchot, along with some of his contemporaries like the prominent Swedish-American engineer John Ericsson, were rightly convinced that in the near future fossil fuels would run out and there would be a great need for technology such as theirs. 

Ericsson’s inventions were possibly even more sustainable (and more relevant for baking pizza), given that they relied on heating air rather than water. Yet both men’s ambitions were soon cut off, when the price of coal fell due to increased mining and free trade agreements—and by the time war in Europe broke out, scientific advancement that didn’t immediately benefit the war effort ground to a halt. 

Now, we have little choice but to pick up where they left off. And today, parts of Western Europe may already be hot enough to power a Mouchot engine. 

To continue to experience the joys of traditional and long-beloved foods like pizza, people will begin experimenting with their own retro-futuristic cooking techniques. And like the ovens used to bake them, the ingredients of pizza will begin to morph with the times. Likely, tomatoes will start to taste different, as the terroir in which they are able to grow changes. Small-scale permaculture may take the place of the global grain trade, and as farming practices change and people recognize the need for ethical consumption, in many places cheese will no longer be an animal by-product.

Luckily as long as the cheese melts, it will still be pizza. Or maybe an updated version. Solarpizza.  

Elvia Wilk a writer and editor living in New York. She is the author of the novel Oval (2019) and the essay collection Death by Landscape (2022).