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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

Go deep into any topic that excites or interests you, and you will find the worst of people's behaviors on display. Very often there will be a vocal, toxic minority whose opinions sit firmly in the realm of gatekeeping and polarization, and a silent majority will stay silent as it's simpler to avoid confrontation, or not think about the implications of such. Author's unfortunate disability made them realize this, though you can see this pretty much everywhere.

At the same time, a lot of people put too much stock (ha...) in what other people think is right and 'proper'. It's entirely possible to love cooking and use prepared ingredients, do what works for you. It's entirely possible to enjoy pineapple on a pizza, and a well done steak, with a cocktail, eat what you like and for yourself, don't eat for others.

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Those people are a cancer and make up a significant portion of the population. Internet forums are breeding grounds. I've developed some strategies for dealing with them. Before I engage or do something I ask three questions:

1. Is someone telling me how to behave?

2. Am I doing this to be better than myself or better than someone else?

3. Does this change really add value to my life or labour and cost?

As for garlic, it's amazing stuff out of a jar. I use it on and in everything. I'm not disabled, I'm just lazy and fine with it. The stuff is called Very Lazy Garlic here. And fuck the snobs and elitists.

#2 really nails the root of the issue. #3 is big too, you can save a lot of money and time and still get basically the same value by recognizing the diminishing returns in any domain.

I've encountered it in work-related discussions, where people would confidently label something as "professional" or "unprofessional". When in fact, it would be a completely arbitrary standard.

I'll have to give it a try. All of the jarred garlic I've tried tastes too much of the preservative, usually ascorbic acid. I don't have any objection to the preservative; it's just a flavor I wasn't expecting and didn't want.

Thanks for the tip.

One of the biggest problems with jarred garlic is the fact that it is often wet, and in a preservative with a flavor that imparts to the food. Because it is not fresh, it will not have the same health benefits either.

This means in order to prepare it, you need to rinse it, dry it, before it is ready to go. Doing these things will mute the flavor even more for what is an already mute flavor compared to fresh garlic.

Given these issues, I would vastly prefer using the garlic tubes more commonly found in Europe, than I would a wet can or wet jarred garlic. Garlic tubes are fresh, preserve well, and in many cases have that pungent ajoene and allicin still present that give it a zing!

To add to this, I would prefer using a dried garlic spice over a can of jarred garlic if forced into deciding between the worst of most garlic options.

The kind I’ve seen is in olive oil. There’s no rinsing and drying. You just scoop it into the pan.

That's the stuff I buy. Always good.

prepend says >The kind I’ve seen is in olive oil. There’s no rinsing and drying. You just scoop it into the pan.<

Sounds really good. But FWIW there have been incidents where people ate garlic stored in oil for too long and died of botulinium poisoning.

https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Can-you-get-botulism-from-gar...

FTFA:

>Research performed by the University of Georgia confirmed that mixtures of garlic in oil stored at room temperature are at risk for the development of botulism. Garlic in oil should be made fresh and stored in the refrigerator at 40 °F or lower for no more than 7 days. It may be frozen for several months. Package in glass freezer jars or plastic freezer boxes, leaving ½-inch headspace. Label, date, and freeze.<

Search on Bing for "botulism poisoning from garlic in oil":

https://www.bing.com/search?q=botulism+poisoning+from+garlic...

At the time I had some chopped garlic cloves in oil in the fridge but tossed the lot out since it had been > 1 week since preparation, precisely the scenario where one death had occurred.

Possibly commercial preparations of garlic pastes use preservatives to prevent such an occurrence. It would definitely hurt sales were a customer to croak b/c of botulinium in a product.

BTW I love garlic salt - it improves most anything and is so easy to use.

if you make it yourself without getting to spore-killing temperatures in a cane, yeah. Which brings up the next point - the stuff in a jar is cooked.

>As for garlic, it's amazing stuff out of a jar. I use it on and in everything. I'm not disabled, I'm just lazy and fine with it. The stuff is called Very Lazy Garlic here. And fuck the snobs and elitists.

First they started pushing the canned garlic, then they came for proper knife technique, and ultimately, they outlawed a good chiffonade as far too "ableist"

I think automatically saying that the strong recommendation of a preferred cooking approach is snobbery or elitist is incorrect. The same thing could be said about gentle-rewarming of a steak, vice blasting it in a microwave producing a dry husk.

Some of us are sensitive to certain flavors, and choose not to use preservatives to the extent possible. There is an adjective even used to describe things of quality "hand-made".

There's a fine line between preferring fresh garlic, and turning your nose up at garlic in a jar, and your preferences can be a lower priority. It's very situational.

If I'm making it myself? Fresh. If I'm at a restaurant and paying top dollar? Fresh. Fast food? Lol. At a friends' house being treated to meal? I'm not saying a word whatever they use.

Microwaves particularly are popular targets for snobbish malignment. They're great at doing a lot of things, but many people refuse to use them for anything for the silliest reasons (muh radiation). Of course they're not good for everything, but nothing is good for everything.

I had that argument with someone once and she cooked me a full roast dinner in a wok to prove me wrong.

Woks are very versatile, but even woks aren't the best tool for every job. You could probably bake a pie in a wok, but I think a pie tin would work better.

No tool being the best tool for every job is one of my core truths (and is perhaps its own sole exception.) I think it's true for any class of tool you can think of; kitchen tools, construction or manufacturing tools, software, even ideologies (which are tools for making sense of the world.) Some tools are more versatile than others, and some are basically worthless even for their intended use. But even a tool that could be used for virtually anything (in that tool's natural domain) will never be the best tool for all of those things. I could bake a pie in a wok or make mashed potatoes with a knife; those are very versatile tools. But there are better tools for both, like pie tins and potato mashers.

Agreed.

I hold oscilloscopes and santoku knives with the same regard :)

Get this, I had a foods teacher in high school whose whole lesson plan (And decorations in the class) were a time machine back into the 1980s. She taught us how to cook an entire beef roast in the microwave.

For what it's worth, this is actually pretty popular in Japan where they've got much more limited kitchen space and often the only cooking appliance available to people is a microwave.

It requires a lot more basting and probably a larger amount of electricity compared to what you'd be doing in a conventional oven (especially if you've got a gas oven in terms of energy costs). It's like 40 mins to do though and it turns out... not bad, though I would absolutely prefer a proper convection oven to better results at around the same amount of time.

The microwaves Starbucks used are really good. The average home microwave is great at steaming things in a closed or mostly closed container and mediocre at best at other tasks

I find inverter microwaves are much better at reheating - you can set it to say 30% power which lets the heat conduct through the food better whereas older microwaves would blast at full power 30% of the time resulting in the usual inconsistent heating where one part is overcooked and the other part cold.

Of course lower power means it takes longer, but its still much more convenient to put something in a microwave vs getting a pot out.

I've been playing dnD 5e for several years, and when I was more active, had a nearly didactic memory of the rules, or where to find the specifics of a rule.

I'm currently playing with a new group at a game shop, and have to actively hold myself back from saying too much at once. There's a certain level of "enough has been said" to give enough detail to let things continue, without making people feel like they made suboptimal character choices.

They say for atheists the worst moment is the Dark Night of the Soul, where, having accepted that nobody is keeping score, now you have to decide if anything means anything or if everything is completely pointless.

Having experienced that first hand, twice, that's definitely true. For the person it happens to. But for the people who have to deal with that person? The worst is when that person sublimates their need for belief into a bunch of 'secular religions' that they cling to like a... I don't know what word to use here, but let's say ninja is to mall ninja as crusader is to <clever word for atheist zealot>.

As for the steak, I often order medium well even though I want well done. Unless you're at a very high end steak house, which most of us aren't, they are always bloodier than you ask for and you rarely get a decent crust below medium well. At one point I had perfected the well done steak at home, but it's been so long that it would probably take me a couple hundred dollars in steaks to dial it back in.

Its interesting you use "The Dark Night of the Soul" in reference to atheism cause the first place I heard it was with regard to meditative practice (and Buddhism) while its original use was in Catholicism, coming from a poem of that faith. The term has certainly got around!

From what I understand it got adapted by the existentialists as well, which is where most people would hear of it. No idea how they got it from the Catholics.

Lately there have been a lot of historians working backward looking for cases of 'history is written by the victor' situations and rewriting the histories. There's a great video out there, based on someone's PhD thesis, that places David Hume in a town in Southern France where a certain Jesuit priest had recently returned from a monastery in Siam and written a book about what he learned about eastern philosophy.

So they can't prove that Buddhism caused the Enlightenment, but we know for sure that one of those guys in those coffee shops had the opportunity to spend time in another coffee shop interviewing an academic who lived with Buddhists.

Edit: it was Siam, not eastern India, and definitely Hume

> They say for atheists the worst moment is the Dark Night of the Soul, where, having accepted that nobody is keeping score, now you have to decide if anything means anything or if everything is completely pointless.

They're often wrong in my observation. That's the best moment of your life: it's the bright, shining point of true intellectual freedom and real free will in action (as opposed to being caged by dogma, the fantasy opinions of others, and or outright dread of a psychotic omnipotent god looking to torture you for fun).

It's the point where you get to decide what the meaning of life is for you and what matters most to you. As opposed to allowing someone else to set the board for you (parents, teachers, evangelists, preachers, assholes) and tell you what's supposed to be important to you and how you're supposed to live. It's spectacularly wonderful, and about as far away from the worst moment as you can get.

> It's entirely possible to enjoy pineapple on a pizza

I was with you up until this point. You go too far.

You can pry my jalapeno-pineapple pizza from my cold dead hands.

no, really you can keep it, no one else would want that abomination.

(note jalapeno are a valid topping)

If it's all the same to you, I think we'll just put a hazmat bag around you and the pizza and bury you as is. I'm not touching that pizza.

My partner orders pineapple pizza then takes the pineapple off. It's there to cover the pizza in pineapple juice and that's it. She also likes teriyaki sauce to a fault so I probably shouldn't be surprised.

Gladly. (so I can then eat it)

Pineapple for the sweet and sour taste, jalapeno for spicy, green olives for salty umami and sausage for meaty fatty.

add a little bit of bacon and it's an amazing combination. 3 very different aromatic ingredients combining wonderfully.

(lots of other aromatic things work great too)

My partner and I have loved pineapple, jalapeño, and pepperoni pizza for years now.

Add ricotta cheese and pepperoni. Delicious.

I raise you a salad pizza. It's basically a plain margherita with a mixed green salad, cooked eggs, sliced tomato, fine ham slices and joghurt dressing added after baking. Offered by one "okay, would order again" delivery service around here, it's surprisingly viable.

On any topics, learn from the extremists but do not trust them.

also almost all chefs out there used preprepped and canned and jarred ingredients in restaurants.

no matter how high end of a restaurant, if it is at all asian related/themed food you will still see Huy Fong Foods Sriracha sauce everywhere. And it's delicious.

I actually don’t mind rude belligerent people if their opinion is novel. But I can’t stand them if their opinion is typical.

Nothing inherently wrong with gatekeeping.

Nothing inherently right with gatekeeping.

Many harmful effects, though. Alienating valuable members comes to mind.

So if it's not inherently wrong OR right, then it must be inherently neutral. Which means it can be used for both positive or negative purposes. You gave a negative purpose. I would argue that health and safety can often be seen as a form of positive gatekeeping. In context of the original post, using a knife "properly".

Sure, but that's not what we usually mean by gatekeeping.

Controlling who can and cannot join the community based on some arbitrary, subjective critera is what we usually mean by gatekeeping.

E.g.: FDA does not gatekeep - they enforce safety criteria to products; metal music fans often gatekeep - they enforce their own opinion of other metal music bands/fans and are trying to police the metal music scene.

I didn't realise there was a delay in replying and I edited my post. I didn't mean regulation based safety. I've noticed people get quite defensive if you tell them sharp knives are safer and their blunt knife is dangerous. I can see having to buy sharpeners and honing rods and being told what you're doing is wrong could be considered gatekeeping.

LOL nonsense, blunt knives aren't dangerous. That's just more of the same toxic attitude.

They very much are. You are prone to mishandle a blunt blade to try and get it to cut.

You have to put a lot more force into a blunt blade. When it finally gets through (or jumps from) what you're hacking at, it's going somewhere, fast.

The blade will do much more damage to your skin, tearing it instead of slicing, takes longer to heal from a blunt blade, infection more likely.

It's much safer to have a sharp knife that you can handle with finesse. Not a dull one you have to hack with.

I wouldn't really call this gatekeeping either, it's pretty much knife safety 101. Right up there with curling your fingers and pushing not pulling the blade.

This. You don't need 600 dollar hand forged, single bevel damast knifes so to have a sharp tool. Butchers are definitely not usong those, despite having a daily, professionally in the sense of earning their living, need for sharp knifes.

And even the 600 dollar knife gets blunt ultimately.

Sharp knife = good advice

Expensive luxury tool = gate keeping

It depends. I used the cheap knives for a long time before I was more successful in my career. It was a chore to keep them sharp as they tended to dull very quickly.

Once I had more money to spend, I bought a knife with more desirable steel properties which came at a much higher price. The upside is that I have to spend far less time keeping the knife sharp and safe.

As for all tools, for most use cases, some decent middle ground tools do the trick. Pro grade tools have some properties that benefit pros (and can be hard to get by non-pros). Above that tools are an object of d!sire. Ehich os totally fine, if you want that 12k pro grade telephoto lense, by all means, go and get it. Shoot great photos with it and enjoy it everytime you use it. Or everytime you use that fancy knife to prepare a meal. Just don't make it a prerequisite for what you do, because you don't have to justufy the purchase. The simple joy you get of using it ia reason enough, and someone doing the same thing with less expensive gear is by no means diminishing the value you get from your expensive purchase.

Agreed, it's not gatekeeping to recommend someone buy a $5 sharpening stone so they don't get injured

It's hard to see something as not gatekeeping when you think that it's the right thing to do. That's my whole point. It's going to be difficult to give examples of positive gatekeeping that people aren't going to dismiss as "That's not gatekeeping thats".... "just good advice", "just the right way to do it", "knife safety 101". Encouraging someone to do something the right way is pretty close to discouraging them to do it the wrong way. Gatekeeping is a spectrum and the gates move. Everything on one side feels like it's the correct way and on the other the wrong way. Imagine you posted a cooking video to a cooking community. You did everything right but you had a blunt knife and were slipping with the knife and crushing the vegetables some times. You would feel like it's a gatekeeping unfriendly community if the majority of the replies you got were "OMG YOURE GONNA STAB YOURSELF" and "you should stop using that knife till you buy a sharper one" and "go and get yourself a knife sharpener and a honing steel and throw that glass chopping board in the bin and buy a proper wooden one". And yet this is common. It may be "knife safety 101" but I learnt about it working in a kitchen. My parents didn't tell me how to use a knife. They didn't sharpen knives. I know people who use glass chopping boards. People are likely to have grown up all their lives using a knife without ever thinking about looking up on YouTube "how to use a knife properly and safely". I.e. unknown unknowns.

I believe that it's important to do things safely and "properly" to get the most flavour/value. Turns out many activities are like that unless you're going to discover everything yourself from first principles. Gatekeeping is seen as something bad because the internet has made communities really discoverable and people entering new communities are finding that there are some mistakes that don't need to be made, they need to learn first, and the people of those communities tell them that. Some of those people are arseholes, and give advise in a very rude way. Since negativity has such a big effect, "Gatekeeping" comes up as a big negative term.

Complete nonsense, blasting something out of proportion to fulfill some elitism.

If you have handled blunt knives for years, you are accustomed to handling them and have muscle memory. You know how to use them, and the blades of most blunt knives develop a saw-like edge that helps in cutting.

Might not be as cool or impressive as a $200 damascene hand-forged pseudo-japanese knife, but they just work. What's dangerous is going from blunt to sharp or the other way round.

Sad to read that the same gatekeeping attitude from the article seeps in here as well.

Uhm no? If you want to saw something use a saw, don't misuse a tool.

-edit-

You specifically said a blade would get so dull it would become a saw.

You weren't talking about serrated knives as you said "and the blades of most blunt knives develop a saw-like edge"

Using serration on a knife to saw is not misuse, using a dull blade to saw is misuse and dangerous.

Basic knife safety is not gatekeeping. Sharpen your blade, or at least use the knife alone so you only hurt yourself if you're that insistent on using knives improperly.

More gatekeeping, huh?

Why don't you tell this to the producers of serrated knives? I guess they would want to know that they are doing this completely wrong.

Serrated knives are for sawing, not slicing. They don't really need to be particularly sharp. Chopping knives are similar; a dull chopping knife will waste your time, but isn't particularly dangerous. But a dull paring knife, or a dull wood carving chisel? Beware.

Anyway, per the rest of this discussion, definition of 'gatekeeping' is clearly contextual. Paraphrasing the exchange above: "What about safety?", "Sure, but that's not what we usually mean by gatekeeping."

Telling somebody they shouldn't weld without goggles isn't gatekeeping, it's safety advice. Telling somebody they aren't a real welder because they're using a cheap but functional brand of welder is gatekeeping, because there's no good reason to malign a welder for having an unfashionable brand of equipment.

Gatekeeping is only 'true' gatekeeping if there isn't a good reason for keeping that gate; safety advice in particular is generally exempted. Since gatekeeping is only true gatekeeping in contexts where there isn't a good reason for it, claiming that something is gatekeeping without explaining why is basically worthless. Such accusations are assertions without supporting arguments. It often boils down to circular reasoning: You're gatekeeping which is bad, and it's bad because it's gatekeeping.

You equivocated from “sharp” to “expensive” which means you’re the one that’s introducing gatekeeping not who you’re responding to.

Inexpensive knives can be sharp. America’s Test Kitchen recommends a $35 knife as their best chef’s knife.

> You have to put a lot more force into a blunt blade. When it finally gets through (or jumps from) what you're hacking at, it's going somewhere, fast.

Exactly right. I've wound up in the emergency room twice because of exactly this effect.

Blunt knives are for spreading, or maybe sawing. Using blunt knives for slicing is just plain stupid. And let me tell you, learning this the hard way hurts a lot more than somebody 'gatekeeping' you with a warning, no matter how rudely phrased.

The parent means blunt in the sense of "sharp enough to cut things, but not sharp enough to cut things easily". This can lead to slips and need for excessive force, increasing the likelihood of injury.

> I can see having to buy sharpeners and honing rods and being told what you're doing is wrong could be considered gatekeeping

It depends on the context, of course. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and standards of what they consider right and wrong.

I that that the essential factor of "gatekeeping" is demoting others unless they don't fit your standards, e.g. "you are not a real cook if you use blunt knifes". Simply telling someone that using sharp knifes is safer than using blunt knifes wouldn't count as "gatekeeping" in my book, unless someone tried to keep you out of the gate because of it.

Even knife sharpening has Gatekeeping.

On many forums some people think that ceramic pull sharpeners will ruin your blades and you should use stones and oil.

I've been using ceramic pull sharpener for 30 years on the same $100 chef knife.

It's still in better shape than 95% of the knifes I've used in other people's homes.

I used everything from pull sharperners over stones to polishing the hand forged, multilayer tanto I made for my dad's birthday using sand paper and a stone-water paste.

The pull sharpener works wonders if the knife has to be sharpened quickly. If you do it long enough, the edge is ruined (I talk actually years of daily use of the knife here, and even then a decent knife will be rather sharp). Stones are good to get nice edges, I prefer to run newly made, or abused, blades over a belt grinder first (I'm a lazy and impatient person sometimes).

And the full blown 160 - 3000 grid followed by stone-water paste polishing is something I'll only ever do for special occassions. Everything after 1000 grid, stone or paper, is for optics only. And even bread crust will cause scratches at that level.

Is all of that necessary? Course not, I do it because it is fun (sometimes), and well cutting knifes are a pleasure to work with.

Do those knifes improve the quality of the meals we cook? No, they just make the preparation easier to an extent. And in tje end the meal counts, not the tools you used to cook it.

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