An Examination of Stove Tops

After over two years with a gas stove I found myself using an electric stove and the first thing I did was burn a piece of chicken. We understand fire. It lashes out of its hearth violently with vivid colors saying to everything around it, “Don’t touch me, I’m bad.” But electric stoves are, like many things powered by lines and towers, harder to read. They wait, but also radiate heat and refuse to turn off.

Part of what is odd about this is that, in many cases, that electric stove is itself powered by natural gas. Electricity is not magic. It is not conjured out of the air but comes from movement. A magnet must move, turning electrons in the surrounding wires, creating a flow of energy, which is itself expressed as heat.

But to move a magnet, we often turn to the oldest of discoveries, fire. In the country I live in we largely burn coal and natural gas, the heat boils water, the water creates steam, the steam turns a turbine, and so a magnet turns and, after a great many steps, my stove heats. And so heat becomes movement, movement becomes electricity, electricity moves and then becomes movement, which finally becomes heat.

I thought about all of this as my chicken burned. To be fair, it was probably not the stove’s fault that my chicken turned out charred; electric stoves require far more patience than gas stoves that are, on the whole, quite eager to please. But it still seemed to me that this was a lot of intermediary steps to further remove me from a gas fire.

But then, even the gas stove has more steps than are immediately visible. I have cooked on an open flame. It is far more work than turning a knob: wood must be gathered, a fire started and then stoked to the point where it is hot enough to do its job, the coals then moved to get a desired heat. But to turn that knob the natural gas must be extracted from the earth: first the bedrock fractured, then those fractures held open as the gas is collected. The collected gas then transported to the gas company who then pipes it into our homes via gas lines. But even this can be further examined, given that burning gas is really burning ancient sunlight, which is itself a product of a massive fusion reactor that was, itself, born of gas.

None of this, of course, much mattered. The chicken was still charred. The knob was still too high and the stove top too hot. I had still been too impatient.