10 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 32.4 ms ] thread
Creating a plasma in one's kitchen has all sorts of effects - some useful, some less so. Cooking food using pretty much any method also creates all sorts of effects, gustatory and otherwise. If there's insufficient airflow when cooking with gas, carbon monoxide can be created as with charcoal. Very bad, that stuff.

A workaround would be to cook where there is good, possibly augmented, airflow such that the food is warm but the surrounding air is exchanged as often as possible. And don't worry about aromatics from cooking as they're sloshing around in all those ICE vehicles in far, far greater quantity. Along with other nasties produced in bulk in city centres.

Or. An exhaust hood. Like every kitchen I’ve ever had.
The data linked notes that a typical kitchen vent hoods only somewhat reduce benzene levels. I expect that’s because it’s cheap and noisy and ineffective, as any rental apartment’s over-eager smoke detectors are happy confirm.

Modern homes with little or no fresh air exchange are incompatible with open fire cooking, and vent hoods are not enough. Benzene levels after gas cooking are just another, somewhat more cancerous, reiteration of that point.

The hood has to exhaust outside. A surprising number don't.
Correction: "The hood does not have to exhaust outside" and many don't, they recirculate internally with filters, such as over the range microwaves with built in hoods that are found in most American homes.
(comment deleted)
Generally speaking the sort of flames we encounter in daily life, including from a gas stove, are not hot enough to form a plasma.
I would think it has to be an atypical flame to build up molecules vs burn them to co2 and water. Unless there’s polycyclic aromatics being broken up. LP gas has to do some interesting chemistry to make benzene from raw carbon and hydrogen. So perhaps some ionization is needed to catalyze or enable these reactions.
[flagged]
This has been discussed a bunch before:

How bad is my gas stove? (carbonswitch.co) - 369 points, Jan 15, 2022, 524 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29935939

I measured the pollution from my gas stove (distilled.earth) - 174 points, 5 months ago, comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34316613

If you are considering switching to an induction hob, they are brilliant, I love ours. Just make sure you have good ferrous pans, I guarantee that all bad reviews you hear are due to people having the wrong type of pans.