Cooking With Gas?

A perverse idea of freedom

Photo by KWON JUNHO on Unsplash

This country has a robust and well-funded conservative outrage ecosystem. Reactionary pundits, “news” anchors, politicians, and social media influencers latch onto ridiculous ideas and work themselves into a collective lather—or at least pretend to with contempt for their rube audience. These stories are frequently so inane as to be beyond parody, like children using litter boxes in schools or “woke” M&Ms. These controversies usually fizzle out within days or weeks as they move onto the next one.

The most recent example in these so-called culture wars is gas stoves. It basically started a few days ago when Bloomberg reported that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) was considering a ban on gas stoves because of the robust evidence of the serious health hazards from the pollution produced by these cooking appliances, including lung, heart, and brain damage. The danger is even more pronounced for children: a recent study estimated that around 13% of childhood asthma cases in the US are caused by proximity to gas cooking. This story blew up on Twitter, was taken up in its most hyperbolic form by the aforementioned outrage machine, and suddenly gas stoves became a fetish object of conservative identity politics like guns. You can own the libs by poisoning yourself and your family—although I doubt most of these guys ever cook for themselves.

The backlash was so strong that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre felt the need to clarify that President Biden “does not support banning gas stoves” and that the CPSC “is not banning gas stoves.” This is merely the latest example of how conservatives are treated as the protagonists of politics in the US. Democrats perpetually live in fear of setting off the aforementioned outrage machine, and pundits frequently frame substantial political issues around how conservatives may react to them rather than the meaningful, material stakes at hand.

The reality is that the CPSC could not and would not take anyone’s gas stove away; any regulations they put forth would merely apply to new products. Additionally, only around 38% of households in the US have gas stoves, more than 40% of which are in staunch “blue states” California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey alone. And, whether due to the cost of switching or just being renters, most people do not really have a choice in what type of cooking infrastructure they have in their homes.

While the focus has been on home consumers, this is also a worker safety issue. While restaurants are probably more likely to have ventilation hoods than homes are, this reduces rather than eliminates the threat and many restaurant workers have to be around this indoor air pollution for hours at a time when they are on shift. In the first eight months of the COVID-19 pandemic, line cooks had a higher increase in death risk than any other occupation, and I wonder whether being around gas stoves all the time made their lungs more vulnerable to the virus. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the people who are now demanding the right to poison themselves in their homes overlaps a great deal with the people who were demanding the right to dine in restaurants back then.

Beyond the direct negative health effects of gas stoves, extracting and transporting all that gas has its own dangers. Fracking has been linked to a number of serious health problems and premature deaths in surrounding communities, and gas pipelines have been known to explode. And of course we have to stop using fossil fuels as soon as possible in order to ameliorate the climate crisis, which means that anything that requires gas has to go. This is especially urgent in light of the evidence that methane gas has an enormous leakage problem at every step in its supply chain, from the field to the pipeline to the home.

It is clear that a lot of people in the US, especially the wealthy, cannot fathom or countenance the fact that preserving a habitable biosphere requires massive changes to our society and the way we live (or aspire to live). Many of these changes are framed as huge consumer sacrifices, but I think in many instances they will not be missed or may even make people happier in our day-to-day lives in addition to helping us have cooler ambient temperatures and cleaner air, water, and soil—a benefit that is severely undervalued by our capitalist society. A reduction in personal energy or material usage is not necessarily experienced as deprivation, especially in the long term.

Our consumer desires are not inevitable or natural; they are shaped by the structure of our society; markets are just as politically constructed as regulations. Demand is constantly being produced and induced and, as journalist Rebecca Leber has thoroughly documented, the fossil fuel industry understands this as well as anyone, which is why they have helped pass legislation preempting potential bans on gas infrastructure in many states and why they pay social media influencers to promote gas cooking. Meanwhile, electric coil stoves are fine and induction stoves work just as well if not better than their gas-powered equivalents (even famous chefs think so). 

We really do live in a society and in an ecosystem, and pretending otherwise is deadly to ourselves and the rest of the planet. In order to have anything resembling a just and sustainable society, we have to think about our lives and our interactions with the world far beyond our own immediate gratification—and act accordingly. It might sometimes be fairly frictionless and easy, like cooking at home using a different energy source, and it might sometimes be a little uncomfortable, like working a weekly shift at a robustly provisioned communal kitchen so we do not even need a home stove and the often-gendered necessity of food preparation is treated as an exercise in collective care. Once we can start internalizing our responsibilities to each other, a whole other world becomes not only possible, but necessary.