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| ▲ | dfxm12 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, I've been in many Western homes, but never one without a hood over the stove. Perhaps it is a hasty generalization to assume they don't have hoods. Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable. I hope your analogy doesn't rely on this measure... I also don't think "you cook and the whole house smells" fits the analogy of "cooking in your bedroom". The key feature of the bedroom is that it's where you sleep, get dressed, etc., not the smell. | | |
| ▲ | jerf 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I have a hood over my stove. It has a fan to pull smoke and steam up out of the cooking space. It blows the fan output right in my face, rather than outdoors. This does not contribute anything useful to the cooking process. It's fairly common in America. It's so common it appears it doesn't even cross your mind to consider it as something that might be desirable or useful. (For those who say "well fix it then", I've looked, but unfortunately if you just put a hole in the wall behind the fan you end up in another exterior wall that meets up with the house there. It's not an easy cheap fix.) | |
| ▲ | infecto 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Since you want to argue it, where is your data? I can share some of mine from a recent study. It’s non trivial numbers without hoods and even more using recirculation. Weird hill to defend when you don’t even have data. Maybe you did not like my analogy but it also matters how much you cook and what you are cooking. Hence why it can be more important in a Chinese household, lots of high heat cooking of meats including fish. So I can see the analogy failing in a household that does not cook often or cooks more tame items. If you frequently cook fish, or do any type of high heat, heck if you have done any cooking in a commercial kitchen before you quickly realize how inadequate the venting is even if it does go outside. Hence it can feel like you are cooking in your bedroom in a lot of western houses since they use an open floor plan with the kitchen. But ignore the analogy if you don’t like it! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10234804/?utm_sourc... | | |
| ▲ | dfxm12 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You made the analogy & the claim that cooking in the west feels like cooking in your bedroom. The onus is actually on you to explain it and prove it. I didn't make any claims. Oh, I guess I claimed that the bedroom is where people sleep and get dressed. No, I will not be providing data for this. :) The link you've provided says nothing about hoods generally not being in western homes or make your analogy any more apt. | | |
| ▲ | infecto 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You’re missing the point. I already explained why Western kitchens often feel like “cooking in your bedroom”: open layouts, weak or recirculating hoods, and a lot of households with no real ventilation at all. The data backs this, about 10% with no hood, another 26–36% with recirculating, only, and plenty more with underpowered or poorly designed systems. I never claimed hoods don’t exist, just that they’re often inadequate. And yes it’s wild to me that 10% of homes don’t have a hood and the other 30% or so are recirculating air which is close to the same. Whether the analogy clicks for you or not, it reflects the lived reality of anyone who cooks frequently (especially with high heat or strong flavors). That’s why Chinese-style kitchens, with closed layouts and strong direct venting, are so valued. If your rebuttal boils down to “but bedrooms are for sleeping,” then maybe this discussion is not valuable. Why do people insist on defending the oddest of hills over such a lived experience comment like the one I made. Now for sure if you rarely cook or if cooking is making Mac and cheese then sure this will be hard to understand. | | |
| ▲ | dfxm12 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Your job is not to prove why you prefer Chinese style kitchens. I merely asked you to explain your analogy. I was trying to understand your analogy, because, having cooked in western kitchens and been in bedrooms (often in the same house!), it made no sense to me. It's not like people generally sleep in their kitchens. Your reasoning seems to be that cooking makes your house smell. Even if this is true, I still don't see how this makes your kitchen feel like your bedroom. Then you talked about hoods, with an undefined "adequacy" measure. I correctly suspected here you were going to use this undefined adequacy measure to move away from the analogy about cooking in your bedroom (presumably because it is inexplainable) to start a separate argument and take it wherever you needed to. You found some study (about Canada, but there's a lot of "West") that talks about hoods (being found in 90% of homes). But you see, some of these hoods are not adequate enough... sigh OK, all that is beside the point, because again, what does any of this business about hoods have to do with bedrooms? | | |
| ▲ | infecto 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You’re really overcomplicating this. The analogy isn’t about dragging a bed into the kitchen, it’s about the way smells and particulates permeate living spaces when ventilation is weak or nonexistent. In an open floor plan, cooking odors don’t stay “in the kitchen,” they drift into the same areas where you relax, sleep, or work. That’s the point: the boundaries between spaces collapse, so it feels like you’re cooking in your bedroom. If you can’t grasp that distinction after multiple explanations, then maybe the analogy isn’t the problem. Happy to discuss if you actually have anything constructive to add but please your beating a dead horse for no reason. | | |
| ▲ | dfxm12 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I have nothing to discuss with you if you're the type to resort to personal insults when challenged. | | |
| ▲ | infecto 4 days ago | parent [-] | | What insults and what have I not explained to you? You are arguing with me over a lived experience. You can have a different lived experience than me but I find that open concept kitchens coupled with what is always poor ventilation leads to smelly situations for most types of cooking. I don’t even understand what you are arguing with me about. I gave you data and my own experience. You refute and ignore the data and waffle on the rest. Like I said, maybe the problem is not the analogy here. If that hurts, well then tell me why I am wrong. This is definitely tops as one of the more silly threads I have participated in. |
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| ▲ | buran77 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hoods are a great addition but a closed kitchen is the real deal if you want to keep smells out of the house. Even the best hoods can't keep up with cooking anything remotely smelly. And in many places the hood doesn't extract outside but just filters and blows back in the kitchen. Even less efficient. In modern buildings you get these together: an open kitchen meant to make the living room look more spacious and a hood that and just spins the air around a bit because it can't blow it outside (it's nowhere near an outside wall, or you can't just drill a big vent, or mess with the air circulation). The smell will go to every place that didn't have the door closed. Don't get me wrong, the smell of good food is great, but not when it gets in your dresser full of clothes or when the house gets saturated with a cacophony of smells very difficult to remove. | |
| ▲ | lotsofpulp 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable If the exhaust mechanism is attached to an above the range microwave, it’s not adequate. And that is the vast majority of kitchens I see on Zillow, and I have probably sifted through thousands and thousands of houses. A dedicated exhaust hood is seen in very few home listings, mostly in new higher end homes, or older renovated homes. | | |
| ▲ | mordechai9000 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Why is combining it with a microwave inherently bad? As long as there is an air channel to the exterior, the critical thing should be air volume over time, no? (CFM or m^3/minute or whatever) | | |
| ▲ | lotsofpulp 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I am assuming that effectively all microwaves move less air than dedicated range hood. From cursory Googling, microwaves vent at 300cfm to 400cfm, while dedicated range hoods can move 600cfm to 2,000cfm. | |
| ▲ | infecto 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | As the other person said most microwave vents barely move any air and in addition most are recirculating the air not venting it. |
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| ▲ | infecto 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | And most vented hoods are still inadequate either because there is no makeup air and the fan is restricted or more likely the fan is just junk. | | |
| ▲ | amanaplanacanal 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I suspect most homes are leaky enough that they don't need any kind of "makeup air." | | |
| ▲ | AngryData 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If your house is 35 years old+ then yes. If your house is newer than that I would not count on it unless the person who built it was specifically concerned with the quality of their whole house HVAC system. A lot of 90s+ builders are trying to prevent any and all air leaks, many with the idea of insulation, with the outer vapor barrier system already blocking 90% of what would get through on and older house, on top of the fastest building process being sealing every visible seam and line with caulk instead of trying to cut and match it up perfectly. And any overall airflow problems are quite literally not their problem, that all goes onto the HVAC guys/company or lack thereof, which often these days are the cheapest possible corporate scrapings for employees that only have half a clue what they are doing and only really care about whether the system turns on or not as per the system manual. | |
| ▲ | whatevertrevor 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Even with an open mesh door during the summer to let replacement air in, our range hood feels completely inadequate. After any sort of fried cooking the spices and oil can be smelled everywhere on the level of and above the kitchen. | |
| ▲ | infecto 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Old homes, absolutely but with new builds this is becoming a problem. |
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| ▲ | nucleardog 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable If we can't come up with something a little more scientific I'm happy to send my wife over to do some cooking! The effectiveness of the range hood directly impacts how close you can be to the stove before your eyes start burning and watering and you start coughing a lung out because you've effectively been hit with pepper spray. In the worst case scenario (no range hood or ventilation), you'll probably want to evacuate the house. As the person you replied to says as well, the popularity of "open concept" spaces contributes too. Even with poor ventilation, a kitchen with a door you can close helps limit how far the cooking byproducts reach. |
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| ▲ | wffurr 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Externally vented hoods are now required in my town in Massachusetts. But I have lived in several places like you describe and it’s sub par. | |
| ▲ | stronglikedan 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Having grown up in western homes, and visited innumerable other western homes, I believe you may have not been in very many western homes. | | |
| ▲ | infecto 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Not trying to start a fight here but not sure what kind of hill yall are trying to die on here. I am from the west, have lived all over the US and no there is not great data on the matter but I have historically had an interest on air quality and I cook a lot. There is some nuance to the data. 10% reported not having any hood. 26% of gas households were not vented. 36% of electric were not vented. You can start going down that path and also start seeing that most vented hoods are either inadequate or don’t properly cover the cooking area. So I am not sure what you are trying to argue about? There is a non-trivial amount of homes in the US without proper ventilation. You can pull up Zillow almost anywhere in the country and easily find center island cooktops without hoods or down drafts. Or even more common a microwave recirculating that air. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10234804/?utm_sourc... | | |
| ▲ | panzagl 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I think most people don't know that the fan in their microwave is not vented to the outside and that that is important. Maybe its a height thing- are you tall? I don't think short people realize how gross the top 1-2 feet of a kitchen are. | | |
| ▲ | infecto 3 days ago | parent [-] | | That could be it! I am tall but also obsessed with cooking and at one point during the California fires, air quality. |
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| ▲ | anikom15 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm pretty sure a hood is mandatory in the U.S. | | |
| ▲ | infecto 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s local code and not always true today and especially historically. Even then code can allow for those recirculating fans. | |
| ▲ | panzagl 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not that vents to the outside. |
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| ▲ | nemetroid 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | By "western", do you mean American? |
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