Making furnaces work from any distance

From what I understand, the furnaces don't work if the chunk they're in is too far away from you and not loaded. What if the game detected whenever an item was being actively cooked or melted, and in those cases, it loaded only the exact block the furnace is on, so it could still work while you're far away, without compromising perfomance, since you're only loading one block, and not the whole area around it.