"A push by blue states to warn consumers that gas stoves release toxic fumes is the latest offensive in America’s culture war over cooktops"
A warning label for health risks is in no way a culture war.
Who are the belligerents here?
On one side, stove manufacturers and non-renewable fuel companies.
On the other side, health officials and regulators charged with keeping people safe.
That's not a culture war, that's basic social responsibility being fought against by corporations.
That's not a culture war, that's basic social responsibility being fought against by corporations.
The right: like you said, culture war stuff!
Ha, yes, and i think that's pretty specific to the American right.
If you look at the European, slavic, asian right, a lot of them are echoing "Make blank great again".
Many, but not all of the extra-us maga share the racist prejudice that expelling ethnic minorities will benefit their country . After agreeing on how, the differences of why are fundamental.
The how - expel minorities.
The why:
what the non-US magas mean by make so and so great again is social responsibility: available housing, more opportunity, higher pay and equivalent justice for the remaining majority.
What proponents of the US maga advocate for is simply to not be held accountable for their actions regardless of the consequences to society, which they apparently have forgotten they belong to.
On one side, stove manufacturers and non-renewable fuel companies.
induction cook top manufacturers are usually the same people selling/making the gas stoves. For example, General Electric makes both.
Shoutout to the climate deniers playbook podcast. Anything remotely anti fossil fuels can and probably has been politicized.
This has been known since the 60's. This is neither shocking, nor unexpected.
If you put a label on the tailpipe of every truck sold in the US that says "Breathing heavily from this exhaust while the engine is running will kill you", every MAGA fool will go to the mat to call it a political move. It's a known fucking fact.
And might encourage them to do it out of spite? 🤔
Ok, but they put warning on cigarettes and now almost no one smokes. Warning labels work.
You might be missing the point
I'm someone who loves cooking. In terms of cooking performance, gas stoves are unbeatable. They can output so much more heat than electric stoves and the way it is emitted means that it can travel up the sides of pans, which is important to me because I am Chinese and like cooking with a wok. You just can't get the same thing with an electric stove. In addition to that, they get hot as soon as you turn the dial and can cool back down just as quickly.
I understand that induction and electric are better for the environment and the morally correct choice, but they really do deliver an inferior cooking experience for me.
I will say, I had the opportunity to switch to induction and I'll never look back. You can boil water faster than in a microwave. Not even kidding.
The trick is that it turns your entire pan into the burner. Similarly to how gas flames can surround the pan.
One of the most important things I do with my gas stoves is when adjusting the temperature I look at the flame. The knob is numbered from 1 to 10 but it seems there are near infinite settings between each number. I would estimate that I actually set it to hundredths of a digit, though it's the flame height that I'm adjusting. I paid about $400 for the stove new about 20 years ago, it has 5 burners and an oven.
A relative has a electric stove, it has a similar set of numbers on each knob, but it's manufactured so that the knob clicks into place on each number. There's no ability to set it to 5.5, or 5.45, it's either 5 or 6. It has 4 burners and no oven. I don't know how much it cost, but I know I would not enjoy learning to use it. The heat is delayed, you set the knob and wait for several minutes for the burner to heat up.
Not long ago online someone online recommended a Breville "control freak" induction stove. It looks like it might actually be able to replace the controlability of the gas stove's flame height with an intelligent electronic control. One burner costs roughly $1500. If I wanted 4 burners then I'd be looking at $6,000.
I'd love to have an electric induction stove, but I just can't afford that upscale price. Alternatively, an electric stove like my relative has would never be a product I would choose to use.
We recently did the change to induction here, and the only thing I miss from my gas burner is my non stick pan that was aluminum. I did need to buy a few other replacements, but I haven't found a non stick 12" in a store that I can make chili cheesy Mac in. (The tomato base eats the carbon steel seasoning, and I don't want to spend a bunch on a pan that is delicate)
Some day though.
What you’re describing is likely more about your familiarity with finessing temperatures through gas heating where you can move the pan around and temper with some learned skill. Induction cooking is the most efficient and fastest by a significant margin, due to the lack of losses. In a side by side comparison, gas cooktops are the slowest to boil water, despite being able to reach the same temps as you state. Even flat top electric stoves are faster and more efficient. This is of course all about choosing the right method for you and not the speed / efficiency in a vacuum, as long as people are informed with the most up to date information.
I didn't say anything about cooking speed. I said it gets hot fast and cools down fast. As in you can quickly shut off the heat when a sauce is about to burn without having to move it to another burner.
Speed isn't the only thing that cooking entails. Sometimes I want to simmer something for a couple hours, and the control mechanism for resistive stoves is pretty shit at doing that because it pulses 100% power instead of running at a lower output level.
I've never done this on a proper induction cooktop, but the induction hot plate I have will 100% burn anything I put on it to simmer because it's cheap and bad.
That's a lot of myths that are pretty easily debunked with only a minimal amount of research and effort. https://youtu.be/eUywI8YGy0Y?si=7wM-om8J6HGUg24O
I have an induction hot plate and it's very good at three things: Boiling water, getting a cast iron pan rocket hot, and burning anything I want cooked on low heat.
This is because it's a cheap hot plate with a terrible control mechanism, but there must be some out there that can simmer rice without doing 100% power for one second followed by nine seconds of doing nothing. It's not a good look for induction, and I don't want to end up buying a stove that consistently burns my delicious marinara. Especially because I also need to do significant electrical work in my house just to have one.*
Resistance electric stoves are not just terrible but also inefficient. But I still don't trust induction cooktops and when I ask the guy at Home Depot to try to cook a meal on one he looks at me weird.
* Unless I get one of those neat battery-backed induction cooktops that use a 110V hookup.
ETA: Instead of downvoting maybe you could convince me that not all induction stoves will burn my marianara due to shitty control systems
The problem is that most electric stove tops duty cycles this way. It's terrible for low temperature applications in something that doesn't have the mass to retain heat. And something that does have the mass takes a long time to hit those low temps unless you start with longer time on duty cycles. They also suck for precise heat control.
You can't use a resister anywhere else in the circuit because it would be wildly inefficient that way. The only option might be regulating voltage. But that's easier said than done.
I don't think electric is necessarily bad. But it's choosing the right tool for the job and both should probably be in a range instead of having it be one or the other.
The other problem is that duty cycles are such a nerdy thing to be concerned about nobody has any answers about them. The specifications don't have them, the sales guys know nothing, and short of disassembling the stove and looking up the model number of the regulator I can't make an informed decisions. Which sucks when you're dropping a thousand bucks on a stove and a few hundred to get electric run to my kitchen.
Which is why I would love to be able to test drive a stove. Even if it's just with a pot of water I could get an idea of how frequent the duty cycles are on various settings. But there's no appliance store that will let me do that.
