You’re throwing out entire continents worth of cuisine. You’re essentially saying “do not sauté or stir fry anything.”
But here’s the sad reality: you could live your whole life eating nothing but bland, boiled food and still get lung cancer from VOCs and PM2.5 particles in the air due to the pollution of city life.
Not true. No matter what stove you cook with, cooking can produce large amounts of oil fumes (vaporized oil particles), smoke, and other VOCs from your food. All of this stuff is bad for your lungs.
Unless all you cook is boiled pasta, rice, veggies, gently simmered sauces, and sous vide (but not seared) proteins, you’re going to need a good quality range hood that (ideally) vents cooking emissions outside.
Hey I’m not blaming students for any of this. I’ve been in the trenches with them this whole time. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and mobile games. It robs them of their ability to focus. Then when they’ve procrastinated long enough they get exasperated from stress and fire up ChatGPT for a way out.
I’ve tried to help a teacher who can’t even get her own son to study. No avail.
I can’t really blame our political leaders for this. They don’t know what they’re doing either. They had no more ability to anticipate the effects of all this stuff than the rest of us.
The only ones who truly anticipated these issues are the folks working in social media. They saw what was happening first hand, through their metrics. They began unplugging their families from technology before anyone else.
I also don’t blame our teachers nor the folks in charge of setting curriculum (also teachers for the most part). I have friends who have worked in education research. They simply do not have the resources to compete with social media psychology researchers (working for big tech) who run A/B tests around the clock on millions of people in order to learn to maximize engagement. What hope does a teacher have when facing a class of 30+ bored, tired, social-addicted, and disillusioned teenagers? Very little.
I think we’re not too far from a huge social media and technology backlash. But before that we’re going to see a lost generation of squandered human capital.
I have been tutoring high school students as a volunteer for nearly a decade. Most of these in early high school (9-10) can’t even write a simple paragraph. How are they going to express critical thinking when they can’t even write very simple things?
I mean we’re talking about kids who are functionally illiterate. The system has failed to teach them this basic skill. Critical thinking about complex and nuanced topics is way beyond that! And the problem is they’re not going to learn the basic skills if they use AI to prevent themselves from doing any work.
By analogy, imagine trying to train people to be Olympians. Before they can perform in their sport they need to train their bodies to build muscle and endurance. Yet they insist on bringing a forklift to the gym because they think what it really want them to do is move weights around, not lift them.
How do you teach a kid to write in this day and age? Do we still want people to express themselves in writing? Or are we cool with them using AI slop to do it?
As a Canadian I feel bad for this. A lot of Americans in these tourist towns love Canadians and didn’t even vote for Trump!
“For some reason”
You seem like a curious person. You should do some more research into cooking and why the Maillard and caramelization reactions produce such delicious food. It isn’t the carcinogenic byproducts that taste good (those tend to be quite bitter), it’s all the other complicated compounds produced from those reactions of proteins and sugars. By the way, these reactions can be achieved without burning the food at all, just not with most traditional cooking techniques.
Even still, you can get cancer from cooking without burning food at all. Heat up a bunch of oil to its smoke point and throw some water in there. In addition to creating a huge oily mess, you’ll fill the air with countless tiny droplets of oil and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are a known carcinogen. However, you can reduce the risks by not reheating used cooking oil, instead using only fresh oil every time.
You can also greatly reduce the risks by not heating the oil to its smoke point. It’s actually not necessary to heat oils to their smoke point in order to achieve the desirable browning flavour reactions.
As for life time of only eating bland boiled food: I would trade away a couple extra years of lifespan for avoiding that. Keep in mind that many of the most delicious soups and stews feature lots of seared, roasted, or fried ingredients anyway. Plus as I said, you can still get cancer even if you never eat or drink anything unhealthy. The air, the soil, and the water are all polluted with carcinogens. Even switching to electric cars will not help: the road, brake, and tire damage creates loads of PM2.5 particles which will destroy your lungs. This damage increases with the 4th power of vehicle mass, which means electric vehicles (that are far heavier) are actually far worse at producing this pollution!