One reason to start with stuff like gas stoves is that, frankly, the disruption isn't that big. You'd get used to a new stove pretty quickly.
For the rest of us, it would be an enormous disruption. If we were forced to get rid of gas stoves, the individual and aggregate economic cost would be huge.
And while you might get used to an induction stove, nobody gets used to an electric one - those things really are rubbish.
> unless you're entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water
If your entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water, just get a damn microwave and stop ruining things for everyone else.
0: Quoted in full because it disappeared while I was writing my answer.
Good for you? The most Chinese thing I make on a regular basis is frozen orange chicken (from <checks freezer> Foster Farms, apparently), so I don't really care.
In any case, I've yet to encounter a electric stove that's fit-for-purpose for anything more sophisticated than boiling water. That's not to say they don't exist, but someone else, somewhere else having one is rather irrelevant to me.
> induction stoves are far more common in China than the US, which one would expect not to be the case if they couldn't be used to make Chinese food.
FWIW, I'm pretty sure most uses of "Chinese food" on eg HN refer to American-adaptations-of-Chinese-food, similar to how "pizza" generally bears little resemblance to the traditional Italian dish, so this doesn't mean much either way.
> Of course most people trot this argument out as a talking point
I appreciate the implication that I'm not most people, I guess?
I have no idea what those people know, care about, or want, and I don't see how my comment has anything to do with them; it certainly doesn't make your point. My point is that electric stoves are not suitable for (almost) any kind of cooking, presumably but not specifically including Chinese.
I never said that.
0 > If your entire cooking knowledge is boiling a pan of water, just get a damn microwave and stop ruining things for everyone else.
1 > 0: Quoted in full because it disappeared while I was writing my answer.
2 > Good for you? The most Chinese thing I make on a regular basis is frozen orange chicken (from <checks freezer> Foster Farms, apparently), so I don't really care.
3 > In any case, I've yet to encounter a electric stove that's fit-for-purpose for anything more sophisticated than boiling water. That's not to say they don't exist, but someone else, somewhere else having one is rather irrelevant to me.
4 > FWIW, I'm pretty sure most uses of "Chinese food" on eg HN refer to American-adaptations-of-Chinese-food, similar to how "pizza" generally bears little resemblance to the traditional Italian dish, so this doesn't mean much either way.
5 > I appreciate the implication that I'm not most people, I guess?
Which of those reads like "electric stoves are even worse at cooking chinese food (in particular) than they are at cooking most types of food" to you?
It was this sentence that I was replying to.
Aside from anything else, this whole exercise smacks of making people believe they're helping the planet so they continue to consume, consume, consume with wild abandon - all the while providing a huge cash injection for companies selling stoves. Some quick maths, just for fun: there are 122,800,00 households in the USA, and around 35% of them have gas stoves (42,980,000). I don't know about the US, but here in the UK the cheapest (and therefore not great) induction stoves are around £300/$411, and for anyone mad enough, electric stove tops are around £100/$140. Let's assume average replacement unit cost is around $300, with fitting around $100. Cost to replace all gas stoves is around $17,192,000,000 - and that's assuming everyone buys the cheapest stove tops available.
If we really wanted to do something that would actually make a difference, how about banning bunker oil?
Again, I have a gas stove for the first time with my home now. I don't find it that much better and I don't really like the hazards associated with it. I cook frequently. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd learned to cook on gas and then went to electric, rather than the other way around, because the issue people have seems mostly to be not accounting for the temperature not being easy to change on the fly.
My point was why don't we fix the very obvious and low hanging fruit like cargo ships that run on sludge, fix that first before you tell me and millions of others that "we don't know how to use electric stoves"