Posting this here because I figure it’s relevant to cooking and the decisions we make about our food and our health. I was kind of hoping for a gas stove in my new apartment (I’d only ever had gas stoves) despite being a huge environmentalist because I’d always been told you can’t get “those good sears” on electric - now that I have an electric stove, I’m here to say that’s bullshit, with the right pots and pans, it can do anything a gas stove can, without the risks.
Reading about this study really opened my eyes to how lucky I am to not be stuck with another gas stove. If anyone here has the means to switch to electric but has been on the fence about it, I hope this can help with that decision.
Some highlights from the article:
“A new Stanford-led analysis finds that a single gas cooktop burner on high or a gas oven set to 350 degrees Fahrenheit can raise indoor levels of the carcinogen benzene above those in secondhand tobacco smoke. Benzene also drifts throughout a home and lingers for hours in home air, according to the paper published June 15 in Environmental Science & Technology.”
“Previous studies focused on leaks from stoves when they are off, and did not directly measure resulting benzene concentrations. The researchers found gas and propane burners and ovens emitted 10 to 50 times more benzene than electric stoves. Induction cooktops emitted no detectable benzene whatsoever.”
“A previous Stanford-led study showed that gas-burning stoves inside U.S. homes leak methane with a climate impact comparable to the carbon dioxide emissions from about 500,000 gasoline-powered cars. They also expose users to pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, which can trigger respiratory diseases. A 2013 meta-analysis concluded that children who live in homes with gas stoves had a 42% greater risk of asthma than children living in homes without gas stoves, and a 2022 analysis calculated that 12.7% of childhood asthma in the U.S. is attributable to gas stoves.”
My current hope is to have an induction/gas mix one day. Boiling and simmering and so on are just so much more efficient with induction, but I need to move and slide around my saute pans a lot. This creates two problems.
First is needing to learn a new cooking style since most induction cooktops either can’t transmit heat very fast vertically, or turn themselves off if they detect the pan isn’t in sufficient contact with the cooktop.
Second is worries I have about the durability of induction cooktops, again with regards to the same sliding and slamming (not too hard, but still) around that happens. Scratches, or even worse, cracks, depending on the exact surface of the induction top would be a huge pain.
An unrelated problem that someone has already pointed out is woks. I have a ridiculous outdoor wok burner already though, that at least solves the indoor air quality problem, at the cost of me hating the summer a little.