Welcome back to another edition of The Broiler Room and this week we’re diving into what apparently is a hot button issue for lots of folks. Isn’t it nice to exist in the present day looking back at our ancestors and thinking “Pfft, morons”? We take for granted the cost of our collective knowledge.
It was once widely accepted that Earth was the center of the universe. It might be hilarious to us today but to deny the geocentric model back then? You’d be seen as a crazy person or worse, punished for questioning it. Hell, up until the early 1900s everybody thought bloodletting with leeches was a legitimate and beneficial medical practice. We invented machines to “shake the fat away” that we look back now with disbelief and ridicule. But we’re currently living through the era of Shake Weights and Ab Stimulators; not too much has changed. Point is that our evolution as a species is just a long series of ideas, successes, failures, and corrections. Rinse and repeat. What we consider normal and modern today will always look primitive and archaic to the future.
We’re a population of entitled idiots sitting atop the shoulders of giants. Do you know how many people were poisoned before we figured out what plants we could and couldn’t eat? Or even what PART of the same plants are tasty or poisonous?! Most of us can’t even prepare our own taxes. DO YOU EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW YOUR CAR WORKS?! We’re all morons and it’s time to stop pretending like we’re not. The good news is that we’re always improving, even if incrementally.
Enter: the gas vs electric stove fight.
Once again the internet tore itself apart last week, this time debating the safety of gas stoves. Yet another inanimate object launched into the coliseum of culture wars for pundits to foment over. This started with a recently published study revealing that gas stove pollution in households might account for childhood asthma. Whether anyone actually read the data is irrelevant, outrage is a popular currency online.
And because irony is alive and well, areas of the country where people are clamoring to defend their gas stoves and resisting electric ranges are already mostly electric. Gas stove usage really seems like a coastal elitist thing.
Both of us grew up in the 90s when electric stoves were kind of everywhere and although induction technology existed, it wouldn’t be popular until the early 2000s. Electric ranges were considered cheap, ugly, and inferior as far as cooking. So for most of our lives gas has reigned as the superior product. But that was almost forty fuckin years ago, surely we know better today right?
In fact, we DO KNOW BETTER and research suggests gas in our homes is more harmful not just to our health but the environment. In the US alone there are over 4,000 homes burned by gas leaks and about 40 deaths per year. Not a lot but it’s not nothing either. The gas in your home comes, obviously, from a pipeline that can leak anywhere between where it comes out of the ground to where you use it. Yup, that means it could be leaking in your own kitchen or anywhere in between. Researchers found three-quarters of home methane leaks happened even though THE STOVE WAS TURNED OFF. Yikes.
And sure, electricity also uses natural gas and oil but those hazards are contained offsite at power plants, far from our homes. But what happens if the power fails and that electric stovetop is useless? I know this first hand, when Hurricane Ike hit my family home in Houston, we lived without electricity for 3 weeks. Our gas stove sure as shit worked though and we were able to fed ourselves.
Should we completely phase out gas stoves? Maybe, over time and with energy incentives, especially as more data presents gas’s impact on our environment and health. If major car manufacturers can agree to completely phasing out combustion engines, shouldn’t we allow for incremental changes elsewhere? We should also consider what electric dependent cooking looks like in a future especially where something as precious as power (lookin at you, Texas grid) is intermittent during extreme weather conditions. But cooking directly in our homes with a fossil fuel product is the kind of behavior that is hassening climate collapse and extreme weather events in the first place.
What does a better tomorrow look like and what does it cost us? Despite being surrounded by modern technology, medicine and luxuries our ancestors couldn’t even fathom, we have to consider the way we live today will be eventually be considered primitive. Including gas stoves. Clinging to our primeval habits in the face of progress is idiotic.
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Matt
Feed, not fed
Hastening, not hassening
I live in a dry cabin in the woods of Alaska. My stove uses propane. Our electricity is not that reliable. Without propane we could freeze. I grew up in NYC. Those old apartments all had gas stoves plus my dad smoked three packs of Lucky Strikes IN THE HOUSE! None of us kids got asthma. I just turned 70.