Case Study In Making Science Propaganda: Cooking Becomes Pollution

Major Headline! “That mouth-watering aroma of fresh food cooking? It may be degrading air quality”.

Story opens thus:

It’s been known for years that cooking indoors can taint the air in a home and cause health problems, especially when cooking without proper ventilation.

But a new study found that emissions from cooking may degrade the air quality outdoors as well.

“If you can smell it, there’s a good chance it’s impacting air quality,” researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory recently wrote about a new study looking at the “unrecognized and underappreciated sources of urban air pollution.”

Now let’s put ourselves into the mind of the typical NPC as he reads that.

Oh no! Cooking is killing us! It’s been known for years!

But we have to eat. Where to get food? Wait. I know. We can order from corporate-food factories. It’s safe and clean. That seed oil they’ll use can’t be as bad as white supremacists claim. And bug meat is still meat. That’s why they have meat in the name. Anyway, it can’t be as bad as air pollution caused by cooking. Especially cooking with gas! Then I’m sucking in fumes. Even outside! How have we even survived this long? Thank God Experts are here to save us all. Cooking needs to be regulated! I need to go to the doctor and have my lungs scanned.

If you think that’s bad, imagine what goes through the mind of somebody hearing that story on NPR. One shivers.

Smelling good cooking, once praised and savored, and even looked forward to, is now supposed to fill you with horror and angst. And make you want to be comforted by the soothing solutions of government Experts.

And they’re needed because, as the newspaper continues, “The researchers found that ‘on average, 21% of the total mass of human-caused VOCs [volatile organic compounds] present in Las Vegas’ outdoor air were from cooking activities,’ according to the NOAA report.”

Nearly everybody will stop there, seeing nothing but the propaganda. There curiosity will have been sated by hearing Experts are on the case. Maybe—and only maybe—one in a thousand will click over to the press release the newspaper uses as its source.

The NOAA press release was entitled “Those delicious smells may be impacting air quality”. Incidentally, by impacting they meant influencing or affecting. Anyway, it opens:

Stroll along the downtown streets of any major city around dinner time and you’re bound to encounter mouth-watering aromas enticing hungry patrons to nearby restaurants like moths to a flame.

If there’s one thing the researchers at NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL) have learned in their multi-year deep dive investigation into the unrecognized and underappreciated sources of urban air pollution, it’s this: If you can smell it, there’s a good chance it’s impacting air quality.

Yes. “Impacts” in a good way. Cooking smells good. Do they want it to smell bad? How in the unholy hell do they let themselves write something so abominably stupid? Is the author a charter member of the Cult of Safety First!?

The press release points to a “study”, which we’ll come to in a moment, and which has as one its authors one Coggon. This Coggon gurgitated this quote, “We kept seeing a specific class of compound in the urban measurements, what we call long-chain aldehydes, that we couldn’t explain from these other sources.” Cooking was the source.

Long-chain aldehydes, eh. Better than them short-chain ones, amirite? Well ain’t that something. That’s some kind of science, boy. Look at all those science words! We never learn what a long-chain aldehydes is, though.

Side Note: A big problem (we’ve discussed this before) comes with the blessing in ability to measure. The more things we can measure, it’s true there is a greater chance we can identify the causes of how things work. But there is also greater angst when things start deviating from “norms”. Because of reductionist attitudes, we focus on single things (think CO2). Like long-chain aldehydes, which previously were never a problem. Now that we can measure them, they are.

Of the rare birds that got as far as the press release, maybe again only one in a thousand of them will have sufficient curiosity to find the real source, the paper on which the press release relies.

The paper is “Volatile chemical products emerging as largest petrochemical source of urban organic emissions“, in Science, by Coggon and a slew of others.

Before that, we all grant that studying VOCs has been useful, such as in reducing LA’s smog. Good stuff. But success can lead to excess. It did here. An employed VOC scientist can only discover new VOCs.

In the paper—are you ready for this?—cooking is only mentioned three times, each time in an off-hand manner. A long paragraph on nasty chemicals in the air ends with this: “One possible source of aldehydes is cooking emissions.” That’s the only positive mentions.

Another references is to secondary organic aerosols (don’t ask), to which they say “Note that nonfossil contributions to SOA, such as from wood burning, cooking, and biogenic sources, are not considered here.” No, huh. Then we get to carbonaceous aerosols, “which does not include nonfossil components from cooking or biogenic sources.” I see.

That’s it. They even say “Indoor emissions of aromatic compounds have decreased by ~7% per year between 1981 and 2001”.

The whole paper is like this. Read it yourself. The message is Not Much Is Happening, But It Might Be Kinda Important.

From that thin reed an entire edifice of propaganda on how cooking stinks up the air was built. To which the authors of the paper itself even contributed. Hey, who doesn’t love publicity?

Many such cases, my friends. Many. Indeed, every time you see a “Research shows” you should first suspect something like this has happened.

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