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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.
This needs an asterisk after it. My gas stove doesn't measurably raise PM2.5 levels ... until we make something like fajitas, and then the smoky sizzle which gets past filters sends PM2.5 through the roof.
It would be funny if this was a confounder to any studies: people who really want to sear meat get gas stoves, searing puts a ton of PM in the air, and yet they'd be breathing the same PM after a switch to high-powered electric.
Before we look for subtle confounders, though, I'd first like to see some reassurance that we aren't really ignoring obvious confounders too.
Do we really want people cooking in their own homes at all? Even aside from the emissions and particulates, food cooked too much is carcinogenic and food cooked too little can cause food borne illness. Both of these are large scale health care problems. People also tend to use too much salt and not enough vegetables when cooking for themselves. And of course the kitchen is one of the most likely places for potentially lethal residential fires to take place, and the countless food prep accidents involving lacerations from knives and appliances. Ordinary stove tops can get hot enough to melt copper! This is incredibly dangerous as burns from hot oil or sugar can cause severe tissue damage and disfigurement.
It might be okay for a properly trained, licensed chef to cook their own foods, and I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to make a peanut butter sandwich or cheese and crackers, but the average person really is very likely to end up harming themselves in some way from long term diseases to death and dismemberment. Wouldn't it be a much safer, more efficient society if we left cooking to the experts and eliminated home kitchens?
A modest proposal.
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And don't get me started on the chef knifes - they are long and sharp and let me tell you - if you can cut a meat with them, you will also be able to cut a human. Think what a maniac will be able to do if they get their hands on one.
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