Gas stoves may soon come with a tobacco-style health warning label in California | Hacker News Reader

Gas stoves may soon come with a tobacco-style health warning label in California

npr.org

18 pointsrntn24 comments

While this is just a label, municipalities in California have been banning use of gas appliances in homes for new construction and significant renovations. It was recently overturned by a court decision, so the proponents do want this to be coercive.

I am not remotely convinced there is any need to do this. Code updates for improved ventilation in kitchens, okay, but you're going to have a hard time convincing my that my grilled cheese destroyed the environment significantly more with gas than electric.

I suspect these petty heavy-handed bureaucratic moves will make enemies out of regular people (try cooking with a round bottomed wok on electric) for no real gain. I'm increasingly feeling resentful of these sorts of things.

> try cooking with a round bottomed wok on electric

If you don't mind dropping £3k on an induction wok ring it's entirely possible!

https://www.miele.co.uk/product/11323040/smartline-element-c...

Actually I just checked and there's plenty of counter top ones available too but they're not half as elegant.

Gas induction hybrids are the Prius of stoves.

What gas?

that's pretty slick!

> try cooking with a round bottomed wok on electric

It's not an unsolved problem, I recommend the recent Technology Connections video titled "Induction cooking - but what about woks?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzJKxUCKOBg

The induction wok shown seemed inadequate and the host unknowledgeable about the requirements for wok cooking.

He also states doing zero research on the product space and just bought one, presumably the cheapest, easiest one to procure for the video. So while much better versions may exist, he was only showing they do and not making a statement on that make & model in particular, nor attempting to make any claims regarding all induction wok appliances.

I’m not familiar with the regulations but I always thought the benefit of not using gas stoves was less about the environment and more to reduce the CO2 produced in a home. It seems like there are correlation with in house stove usage in poorly ventilated homes and adverse health conditions. I definitely see a huge spike in my CO2 monitor each time we cook with our gas stove. Better ventilation probably addresses this but I honestly don’t know which approach is easier to implement.

Ventilation is good even with electric, just to deal with pollutants being put off by the food being cooked. As I understand it, these are often worse than the combustion byproducts, but I'm not well informed on the composition of each kind of pollution.

So I think in either case, kitchens should have good ventilation. Fortunately, it's just an ingress and egress hole in the house with a fan. If trying to retain the moisture and temperature of indoor air, it's more complicated because heat may have to be exchanged and air dehumidified (though kitchen air is often hotter and wetter than general air conditioned air).

However, this is also true of ventilation needed to prevent well insulated houses from getting damp and moldy and removing other indoor pollutants, such as from off-gassing of new home goods, etc. In summary, we need ventilation period. It should be a part of building codes and it should be done in a way that is appropriate to the local climate.

I'll be buying a house in the next few years and if I'm allowed to get gas, I'm not actually sure if I will or not. Customarily it's what I've used and it works well for my needs, but induction has advantages. I'm open to it. If I had my pick, I'd probably have a mix of induction and gas ranges, but maybe I'd look into induction and be sold. I just don't want this forced on me on with such thing rationale.

I'm confused by this.

Most forms of cooking produce really alarming levels of particulate polution, regardless of the energy source.

If you have adequate ventilation to address the pollution from the cooking itself, then that is more than enough to address the combustion products.

From a policy perspective, cooking is a major energy sink that significantly occurs during peak hours (and outside of solar production)-- moving 100% of that load to the electrical grid seems far from desirable.

Particularly when the issue could (and should) be addressed with improved ventilation requirements for cooking areas, esp in California where the outside weather is usually mild enough that better ventilation isn't a big deal.

Most residential homes do not have proper ventilation.

Indeed, though they could-- outside of dense multi-tenant facilities-- and it would improve the indoor air quality with almost certain health benefits.

AFAICT demonizing gas will not have a significant improvement to indoor air quality, as it doesn't address the root cause of poor ventilation.

It may cause health harm by making people falsely believe the issue is addressed by not using gas. At least with gas it is relatively obvious that ventilation is an issue.

Sure but "not cooking" isn't really a viable way of cooking food, whereas "using an induction hob instead of gas" absolutely is.

My point was that using induction instead of gas still leaves you with terrible indoor air pollution. The solution to that is ventilation, but any ventilation sufficient to eliminate the polution from the cooking food also addresses the combustion gasses (which are an order of magnitude hotter, less massive, and less numerous-- so easier to eliminate with ventilation).

What are you talking about? Induction is very clean, no particulates at all. Same with covered infra coils. Naked coils might have negligible levels of particulates.

Not from the coils, from the food itself. You can kind of fix it by cooking in a very conservative way, but good luck safely cooking chicken without oil and a high temperature (and the particles that generates).

I cook chicken and turkey and any other kind of meat (after removing all bones) in a closed glass vessel, in a microwave oven, without adding anything to the raw meat (i.e. no oil), except salt and spices.

This produces very tasty meat, which is very similar to roasted meat, except for no or minimal browning.

This method produces no particulate pollution and it does not require any kind of ventilation in the kitchen.

Pardon my skepticism if “I microwave raw chicken and it’s delicious” isn’t the most convincing argument I’ve heard for why gas stoves should be banned.

I did not say that gas stoves should be banned, despite the fact that I no longer use my gas stove since I have discovered that using a microwave oven gives much better results, many years ago.

I was replying to the poster who believed that there is no way to cook chicken without particulate emission, which is a false belief, as proven by my experience.

For many, many years I had been using a microwave oven only for reheating the food that I had cooked using a gas stove and oven. Then I discovered that actually it is much better to cook with the microwave oven than with the traditional methods (even for things like baking bread), so I stopped using the gas stove and oven, even if I am still paying for gas, because I live in a condo where the gas is metered only for the entire building.

I’m genuinely curious. Could you elaborate on your methods to help me try to replicate this? Do you not have problems with unevenly cooked meat?

It’s also one of the the most American-sounding statements I’ve ever heard.

FWIW, cooking in my microwave spikes the particulate sensor-- and I'd be willing to bet it does in yours too. Though I agree this could be fixed with a particular filter on the microwave.

Certainly there are ways of cooking that produce little to no particulate pollution, presumably sous vide or indeed microwaving with a microwave that has a particulate filter.

But the conclusion there is that you should have ventilation or cooking techniques that don't need ventilation. Gas or not is incidental.

And conveniently the low pollution modalities I can think of are already electric by default, except for boiling in a closed pot. (Which I happily agree is best done with induction, even if just for speed alone).

Yeah but particulates are a lesser worry either way. I would be way more concerned about the harmful byproducts of propane/lpg combustion. It gives off large amounts of benzene and toluene which I think is a much bigger concern.

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