Cooking food is part of the fun of camping, but it’s not as simple as just setting up your new gear inside your tent and firing up the burner. Unless you have a cotton canvas tent you are ill advised to cook inside it. Most tents these days are polyester, this is the lightweight, easy care material that we feel as a thin plasticy skin. Polyester simply doesn’t breathe because there are no tiny gaps for air to pass in and out of the material. It is for this reason that cooking inside a polyester tent and even most poly-cotton tents is a bad idea. 

Carbon monoxide is released from any gas, petrol, coal burner or lamp and will remain inside the tent unless you have a breathable cotton canvas. Heat damage can also easily occur within polyester tents as the manmade fibres are prone to melting and some are not even flame retardant. The worst case scenario here is not a bad holiday but death. 

Those determined to ignore this warning, which from my experience are numerous must at least keep cooking equipment right at a large opening in the tent and away from the material. This is however by no means proven to prevent CO buildup in polyester tents and some deaths have occurred with such ventilation in place.