Cooking with Cash – a rough analysis

[Rex Sanders]

See next post, please.

[Rex Sanders]

This is the next installment in my occasional series on cooking in the backcountry with unusual energy sources. First was electricity.

Next: Cash. Specifically, US $1 bills.

Why dollar bills?

– They’re readily available in the US where I live and backpack.

– They’re cheaper than other US currency. If you are surprised to learn that cooking with $100 bills is about 100 times more expensive, you might be interested in buying some multi-use tungsten dice!

Before burning a pile of money in real-world tests (which is illegal but rarely prosecuted), I’ll do the Internet thing – Google a bunch of “facts”, make a lot of assumptions, crunch some numbers, and present the results.

Internet “Facts”

1 gram – Weight of a $1 bill and all modern US currency

75% cotton, 25% linen – Bulk composition of US currency, excluding ink and other additives

2.6 kilocalories/gram – Heat of combustion for cellulose. Cotton and linen are mostly cellulose.

7.4 kilocalories/gram – Heat of combustion for Esbit, widely considered one of the most expensive backpacking fuels

14 grams – Weight of a standard Esbit tablet, which will reliably boil two cups of water in most stoves under most conditions

$0.66 – Cost of one Esbit tablet, in 12-packs from REI

Analysis

Let’s hypothetically boil two cups of water using dollar bills versus an Esbit tablet, assuming the fuels and stove are similar in efficiency.

104 – Kcals in one Esbit tablet

40 – grams of dollar bills to generate 104 Kcals

$40 – Cost to boil two cups of water using dollar bills

Discussion

Compared to Esbit tablets, dollar bills are almost three times as heavy and 60 times more expensive for cooking in the backcountry.

You might be able to save some weight (and money) by carefully feeding dollar bills into the fire until the water is just hot enough for your meal.

This is all theoretical and based on several assumptions.

Someone should test these ideas, burning piles of currency in a variety of stoves and settings, also testing different denominations for consistency.

You go first.

— Rex

PS – Potential Kickstarter project: design and build an ultralight backpacking stove optimized for burning cash (see Tesla for pointers on burning cash rapidly). You’ll need to raise a lot of money for testing! Possible accessory: overpriced waterproof cuben fiber DCF sacks to keep your cash dry.

PPS – $5, $10, and $20 bills are easier to get from ATMs for thru-hikers. Scale your cooking costs appropriately.

[Daryl and Daryl]

Rex,

Thanks for completing this long overdue important analysis.

Time and money well spent.

 

[Rex Sanders]

New to backpacking? Not sure you’ll like it?

You might be tempted to buy a stove like the $140 MSR WhisperLite:

Instead, you could buy a $12 Esbit pocket stove

throw away the Esbit, and burn dollar bills instead.

If you decide you don’t like backpacking during your first three nights, you’ll come out ahead financially!

— Rex

[David Thomas]

Thank you for this seminal work in cooking economics.

The big spread between the heat of combustions caught my eye.  My Google searches find heat of combustion of cellulose as about 8,000 BTU/pound or 4.4 kCal/gram.

2.6 kilocalories/gram looks more like unseasoned firewood.

So dollar bills may be *slightly* more economical to cook with.

A parallel article on “Cooking with Doritos” might give Esbit a run for its money.

[David Thomas]

This would be a bit more viable in China.  The 1 Yaun notes I have are about 2/3s the height and width of US currency so about 50% of the area, probably around 0.5 grams each.

And the exchange rate is 7:1 so you’d get 3.5 grams of cellulose per Imperialist Dog Dollar.

Then there was Zimbabwe at the height of it’s monetary crisis.

in which a 2009 $100,000,000,000,000 note (I have a few) equated to 10^27 pre-2006 Zim dollars (I got some when I was there in 1998) and yet even that $100 trillion note was effectively worthless by late Spring 2009.  Let’s be generous call it worth a US cent.   So by 2009, the exchange rate was more than 10^29 old Zim dollars per US dollar = 10^26 kg cellulose per US dollar = 10^23 tons per US dollar = 100 billion years of US coal consumption.  For US$1.

[Gary Dunckel]

Rex, you are truly a creative (and funky?) guy. This would certainly be a worthwhile experiment, and I might be the guy to try it out. You see, when I lived in the Middle East for 6 years in the late ’80s, I would collect fresh, brand-new currency in nearly every country I spent time in. I guess I thought it would make for an ‘interesting’ scrapbook for a coffee table. Well, last winter I took it all to the bank to see if it was worth something. It turned out that only the British currency was worth anything at all, and maybe also the Swiss francs. All of the others had ‘expired’, which I now understand that they most all  do. Some of them are actually rather pretty, with detailed artwork and nice colors. I can see comparing the burns of all these disparate countries’ paper notes. Does the Tanzanian shilling burn hotter than the Zaire paper or that of Vietnam or Burma or Thailand or Senegal? Inquiring minds must know, right?

[Ralph Burgess]

Shave your hair for tinder, obviously.   Which leads to a proposal for your next study:  amputation of nonessential body parts for UL backpacking.

[Rex Sanders]

A parallel article on “Cooking with Doritos” might give Esbit a run for its money.

Several years ago I tried using a big pile of Fritos to boil water using an Esbit Pocket Stove.

Barely heated the water, left a large pile of carbonized Fritos covered in salt.

I doubt the added flavorings in Doritos would help. But you never know until you try. Science!

— Rex

 

[Rex Sanders]

The big spread between the heat of combustions caught my eye.  My Google searches find heat of combustion of cellulose as about 8,000 BTU/pound or 4.4 kCal/gram.

Maybe different sources for cellulose heat of combustion, or I’m misinterpreting this 1950 NBS publication?

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/44/jresv44n4p387_A1b.pdf

which claims 10700 Joules per gram based on CO2 production from a bomb calorimeter burning cotton cellulose. The conversion from Joules to calories is a bit tricky, but not that far off.

In either case, burning dollars to cook food is way heavier and way, way more expensive than Esbit.

If it’s even feasible. Maybe Gary will try and let us know. Might turn out like my Fritos experiment – an expensive pile of ashes under lukewarm water.

— Rex

[Rex Sanders]

One advantage of cooking with US Dollars in the USA versus other currencies: you can spend the dollars in town if you need to.

OTOH, you might end up in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_burning#United_States

Burning foreign currency in the USA, especially ‘expired’ currency, isn’t against US law.

— Rex

[Matthew / BPL]

This gets my nomination for Best Thread of 2018.

[Gary Dunckel]

Rex, I had a change of heart last night while watching football games – instead of doing a currency/fuel burn test, and of course publishing the results in an esteemed scientific journal, I’ve decided to give the bills to my friends at places like REI at Christmas to use as unique bookmarks. I had tried to give some to my favorite foreign currency teller at Wells Fargo when she told be that they were worthless, but she said that would be against company policy.

Still, I might do a simple test with some of the many duplicates to, you know, see how the boil goes. Or, use them as firestarter for my beloved chiminea on a cold, dark December night. I may or may not post the results here on BPL, depending on how nice all you people are in the months ahead. As for the small bag of Doritos in my pantry, I’ll just eat them, because I’ve already tested that as firestarter material and I know how they work (quite well actually).

I agree with Matthew, this IS a fun thread. Even if it really belongs in Chaff…

[Greg F]

I suggest the bolivar.

On black market exchanges you apparently can get 100,000 Bolivar per dollar with 500 Bolivar notes still Common would be 2000 notes per dollar.

So while higher weight Bolivar cooking would be cheaper than Esbit.

 

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