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Notes -
The most fun/silly culture war argument in a while: STOVES!
Hey, did you hear the Democrats are coming for your gas stoves? Variations on that were the instigation of a bizarre culture war spat last week. Apparently some government official speculated about banning gas stoves because of health concerns, and that started the now-predictable cycle of "No, you're wrong!" bouncing around social media. I saw various reactions to this in different spaces and they were interesting in the way they were filtered through the various political lenses. In the US gas stoves are mainly a blue-state / higher-end restaurant phenomenon, so I found the conservative media response to be a bit baffling because it's not really their fortress under assault here. On the other hand saw lots of bourgeois PMC foodies declaring that you would only take their gas stoves from charred, dead hands.
I'm a hobbyist cook. I love trying new foods, experimenting with new recipes, and making food for friends and family. I'm the one who gets chained to the stove all through Christmas time (I like it though). So I found this a refreshingly fun (amid the inherent stupidity) culture war. My short opinion, having cooked with both gas and electric (rare to have gas in Canada); average gas stoves are better than average electrics, but among better ranges it depends what you want to do. I have a nice electric stove right now and I reckon I prefer it to gas because it is a lot more powerful which helps for high-temperature cooking (good for meat, Chinese food), and also is more constant at low temperatures (I make a lot of soft-scrambled eggs). But gas generally has much finer temperature control which is very practical for restaurant applications and to a certain extent rewards higher skill in a cook.
Gas does have real health/environmental implications. Yes, good ventilation goes a long way to preventing serious health risks, but it's not nothing. And gas is much less efficient energy-wise; not only does it shed a lot of heat in the energy transfer to the cooking vessel, it's in general less efficient than electric (but often cheaper depending on your locale). How much these considerations weigh against the legitimate reasons people have for preferring gas for cooking depends on the individual. But certainly people resent a top-down government intervention to force them to change their preference, and are skeptical of the reasoning presented.
But you know what this really reminds me of? The hot culture war debate of 20 years ago: incandescent lightbulbs vs. fluorescents. I've mentioned this a few times before here, but it's one of those culture wars that just disappeared, and I think many people would be genuinely forgetful or surprised if you brought it up to them now. It was a big thing at the time: as a kid I would remember reading the op-ed section of the newspaper and see endless letters to the editor about how using incandescent bulbs were our God-given right or you were a heartless rapist of the earth if you didn't immediately switch to fluorescents. The breakdown of that culture war was pretty simply liberal/conservative (should be obvious which side was which), whereas this one doesn't align people so neatly. But what the real comparison to the present is what ended the previous culture war: a new technology came along that made both previous ones (and their partisans) obsolete. LEDs ended up just being simply superior to both in every way. Progress ended the culture war.
Enter: induction cooking. It's electric. No particulate emissions. It's extremely powerful. It has fantastic temperature control. It's getting cheaper. You can have a traditional range, or just a hotplate: it's flexible and scalable. It's much safer, both for risk of burns and for starting fires. The only downside is that some existing cookware isn't compatible with it (you need ferrous metals in your vessel for it to work).
My prediction is that by the end of the decade induction replaces all gas stoves and most electrics. And twenty years later people will be bemused and embarrassed that we had such a silly argument over this.
LEDs aren't strictly superior to good incandescent light sources. At their peak, in the last few years, they are competitive. I don't mean longevity or efficiency or safety, they certainly beat the hell out of previous technologies in these terms. I mean color rendering index, smoothness of the emission spectrum (most importantly the prominence of blue peak) and flicker-free luminance – properties that make for comfortable, natural light. CRI is defined as a fraction of color rendering that an incandescent gives. There's a nice Russian website with a database of those and other measurements, creatively called lamptest.ru. The best LEDs have CRI=99. Cheap ones are more like 93 now, and 80 yesterday.
Incidentally, office-tier fluorescents could go as low as 60-something.
There are alternative measures and some debate, of course, but the gist is this: sometimes you walk into a store or an exhibition or some other venue where electricity cost is an afterthought, or just a bitter clinger old-timer's home, and you notice that it's easy to see things, even though the nominal luminous power is weak and tinged with yellow. That's because there are powerful incandescent and probably halogen lights installed, and your retina is hit with continuous color gradients it had evolved for. It's almost as pleasant as sunlight, and as bittersweet as a scent bringing back childhood memories.
It's like wireless earbuds or earphones. Sure, after trying out a decent pair, you wouldn't want to get back to tangled cables and the microphone effect and the need to lug the audio source around. But every once in a while you plug in your electrostatic planars into an amp, or just 4BA+DD buds into an old laptop –and remember what it was like before convenience outweighed the taste for fidelity one could mistake for snobbish pretense.
Or one could think about our computers, and their embarrassing latency despite undeniable improvement in computing power.
Grandpa might still remember the thing with transistor radios and what they had superseded.
And so it goes all the way to Socrates and his warning against committing knowledge to written medium, that gets in the way of learning by heart – which in his mind was identical with true understanding, and it's frankly pretty compelling once you think about the compromise inherent in retrieval transformers.
I'm not sure if people had voiced the same opposition to speech.
But I digress. In exchange for convenience, we grow used to a slightly inferior experience at the core of the activity, some accidental detail that made it wonderful, and stop noticing it, and begin to find it amusing that some eccentrics still fiddle with the obsolete. The experience of few such transitions may be what makes people so averse to accept the next new thing, even when it is plainly superior across the board.
Where do I find an illegal incandescent bulb dealer?
Don't buy illegal light bulbs, buy 100w heating elements with e27 socket that glow when used.
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I've seen them in Chinese junk shops. The one I bought exploded the glass off the connector (in one piece at least...) pretty quickly though.
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Feed stores.
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Halogens are still widely available. I bought some at Walmart last month.
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Have you tried looking in dark alleys?
Shouldn't one look in a bright one or is that where you find the halogen dealers?
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