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Comment by numbsafari | Hacker News Reader

How does it compare to a wet rag with tongs?

One of the main issues they raise is that the bristles on common brushes can be left behind and are difficult to pick out of food, so the wet rag probably exceeds expectations in that way.

Grill brush bristles in your food are the "they went on a vacation and brought back flesh eating bacteria" of the culinary world. The fear-mongering greatly exceeds the danger.

Edit: There are approximately 130 ER visits per year[1] on account of grill brushes. Mowing your lawn (something else people do on about the same frequency in the summer) is far more likely get you, as are god knows how many other things.

[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/ama...

Even the plastic ones leave bristles behind and aren’t much fun to chew on.

Risk / reward tradeoff. There are other options that are as good, as cheap, as easy.

Why pick one with a significant, unpredictable, often unknown flaw. Where if it happens you end up needing major surgery?

It may be rare, but it happened to a friend of mine while we were eating at a restaurant.

That’s definitely enough numbers to change to a different bristle. Basically no effort to change a bristle. If you had to free climb a mountain to get a new bristle, then I would understand.

And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.

>That’s definitely enough numbers to change to a different bristle.

Ah, yes, magical plastic molecules. Exactly what I want between fire and my food.

I'm just about the last person to give a crap about microplastics but cooking temperatures and long weird hydrocarbon molecules are where I draw the line.

>And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.

This is true for just about everything.

There are other options than plastics I’m sure..who uses that any more.

Lawn mowing seems like one of the more dangerous things that a typical person does. It's the snow shoveling of the summer.

It's several orders of magnitude more likely to land you in the ER. I chose it because like grilling, it's done "about weekly" in the summer and most people don't think much of it.

Given how simple it is to avoid that issue, I will. I can reduce my chance of ingesting a bristle from “minuscule” to “zero” with no downsides. So why not?

Why take the risk when grill stones exist?

Since I read about bristles in food after cleaning the grill, I've always been checking for remnants after brushing. I never found any. And I wonder: how are those remnants supposed to get into your food? They are metal, so don't they just fall down into the grill, if any break off? Maybe glued into old fat and other gunk? But you want that gone, too, right? Also, don't you use a rag to clean off other dirt, and wouldn't that make sure that bristles are gone?

Is this a myth or actually a problem? Some commenters do call it fear-mongering here, so what is it?

I also think I never read anything about this except in US media, so does this not happen in other countries? Different brushes? Different cleaning habits?

A bristle can get stuck to some gunk that isn't successfully removed and be in parallel to a bar roughly underneath it. There's no real reason to take risks of excessive hygiene given that hospital admissions occur and simple tools are going to give you a functionally equivalent meal.

Good discussion from 2016, I think it was Canadian surgeons that made the recommendation and there's at least a couple of comments where people have talked about real-world experiences with bristles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409425

Or scrunched up tin foil at ~$2 / 100 ft.

Look, I love Destin, watch all his stuff recommend it all the time.

But I'm never going to buy this product, it's just too expensive for what it does compared to the alternatives.

And I know he knows that. He's clearly at least 'not stupid'.

So something isn't squaring with this.

> So something isn't squaring with this.

Lots of smart people get hooked onto extremely specific solutions that aren't even improvements.

I saw it in software development with many things (VIPER and SwiftUI both reduce development velocity compared to MVC and old-school Interface Builder); I've seen it with Musk trying to do tunnels even when roads would be cheaper and safer; there's also (infamously) Juicero; and in the UK in the 80s there was the Sinclair C5.

That said, is this really an example of that?

Myself, I barely use my electric barbecue, so I don't know the best way to clean things (it's not yet become dirty enough to bother cleaning). But I have seen the brushes he's complaining about, and I have not previously considered using tinfoil, so it's not a completely crazy idea that people might want a better brush.

I use an oven cleaner, spray it on, leave it for half an hour or overnight, and stuff just comes off when you wave a cleaning cloth at it. Highly noxious though, probably responsible for insect collapse etc.

Some people care about how reasonable a price seems even if they can easily afford something, because it's important to them to feel like they're getting a good deal or at least not getting taken advantage of. They're happy to accept some level of inconvenience or discomfort if the savings are big enough, even if they don't particularly need the money

Some people care more about getting exactly the right thing, even if the value proposition is weaker. They'll pay significantly more for apparently trivial differences, because they don't want to buy something they're not happy with; they're spending money anyway and why put up with something they don't want if they can afford something they do want?

Neither of these people are strictly unreasonable.

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