Cooked Out

Cooking is causing pollution, or something:

a new study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is adding a new bit of data to the starvation push. Cooking is causing air pollution. "What we're looking at from cooking are primarily oxygenated VOCs, or volatile organic compounds," said Matt Coggon, a research chemist at CSL and lead author of the study. "These are quite reactive in the air, so we expect they'll be important for air quality." VOCs in the air react with nitrogen oxides and light to form tropospheric ozone. Some VOCs are considered greenhouse gases. So, cooking our food is cooking our planet. The study was performed in Las Vegas and found that, on average, 21% of the total mass of human-caused VOCs present in Las Vegas' outdoor air were from cooking activities. However, sounding the climate alarm about cooking based on this study is ridiculous when you think about it. Las Vegas is hardly representative of normal urban environments. The city is the most food obsessed city on the planet with 666 restaurants per 100,000 residents. (And yes, that number seems oddly appropriate for Sin City).

They must have been betting it all on green...