Word on the street is that Enviro-minded people protest against Pizzaria’s with wood-burning ovens, because burning wood causes more carcinogens than cigarettes.
Is there any protest movement against wood-burning pizza & calzone ovens?
Are these ovens dangerous – for either the patrons, if not at least the cooks? Are such cozy restaurants filled with horrible particulates?
And how is wood-burning so dangerous? Is it all wood, or just those fireplace logs that are chemically treated?
IS PIZZA KILLING US OR NOT? (besides the cholesterol-laden mozzarella, of course)
Here’s a tangentially-related column from Cecil about barbecuing and cancer:
It’s not the same issue, of course, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if no one really knows how bad barbecuing is, then no one knows how bad pizza ovens are either.
Well, the thing is that grilling meat is “dangerous” because the carcinogens are released as fat drips and hits the coals. In a pizza oven, that doesn’t happen. The OP is being misled with his “burning wood causes carcinogens” posit.
Either way, I think the whole premise is flawed, because I don’t for a second believe his first sentence - “Word on the street is that Enviro-minded people protest against Pizzaria’s with wood-burning ovens”. I’ve heard no such word of any such protests, and his post should at least provide a citation backing that up.
Burning wood does release nasty chemicals, and it’s unrelated to interactions with the food. Soot/Particulates, PAH’s, lots of other stuff. More info here, not specifically related to wood-fired pizza ovens. An oven powered by natural gas burners won’t release appreciable amounts of particulate or any of that other stuff: just water, CO2, and NOx, mostly.
That said, I’ve never heard of wood-fired restaurant ovens being a widespread cause of concern for tree huggers.
Why? Read the second sentence in the OP. It asks if protests are indeed happening. The OP is asking if it is happening, not asserting that it is happening.
I did a quick google search and wasn’t able to find anything about protests in the first couple of pages of hits, so I seriously doubt that there is any large, organized movement against wood burning pizzeria ovens. If there is, they are doing a very poor job of getting their word out.
The EPA does have restrictions and particulate emissions, so I’d expect any restaurant to be safe. If a restaurant was releasing high enough levels of particulates to violate EPA rules, the customers would be coughing and complaining about the air quality anyway.
Read the first sentence again. He’s saying there are protests, and wants to know if there is a larger movement organizing those protests. Your research backs up that his initial premise is false.
Cecil says: “Grilling meat produces at least two types of potentially dangerous chemicals: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heterocyclic amines (HCAs). PAHs are products of imperfect combustion found in smoke and burned matter. In large enough quantities they will definitely cause cancer in humans–to cite one famous example, scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps.” Emphasis mine. So it’s clear that smoky pizza and/or burnt pizza can have a known carcinogen. But how much and how dangerous is unknown, I bet.
On the other hand, we’ve been around wood-burning fires for tens of thousands of years, much longer than we have been deliberately inhaling copious amounts of a specific type of smoke. Which isn’t to say that wood burning does not release carcinogenic particulates, but that if it was as dangerous as smoking, tens of thousands of years is plenty long enough to have selected out those who are especially susceptible to it, since cigarette smoking is one of the few things that are dangerous enough to severely limit your lifespan in a way that you won’t be able to reproduce or help your offspring survive.
Normally I roll my eyes when someone trots out an evolutionary argument as applied to humans, but I think it’d be pretty wacky to think that eating fire-cooked meat was more dangerous than cigarette smoking in light of the fact we’ve been doing it for so long, and what’s more, no one’s provided epidemiology on such a widespread practise. (I find the linked facts shaky in that they come from a site with an apparent agenda.)
You’re kidding, right? Most smokers easily survive to the age of reproduction, and even raise their kids to adulthood; they just die in their 60’s instead of their 80’s. Likewise, eating food cooked on a wood fire won’t orphan your kids before they reach adulthood either.
As to whether wood-burning pizza ovens are “worse than cigarettes,” I agree with you, probably not. The vast majority of the smoke goes up the stack, so operators and restaurant patrons aren’t directly exposed to much in the way of airborne hazards; it’s just going to be whatever nasties settled on the pizza while it was cooking. And it’s doubtful that eating wood-fired pizza a couple of times a month is worse for you than a pack-a-day cigarette habit.
Wider environmental pollution may be an issue of concern, especially in smog-prone locales like Los Angeles. At that point you’re down to a policy decision: wood smoke is definitely bad, but is it bad enough that the city or state needs to regulate the operation of those ovens?
If we go down that road, this thread will belong in GD.
Even if you are beyond child bearing years you can still help your society and thus indirectly your genes, or more efficiently, your grandchildren. Cutting short each and every caveman’s lifespan who happened to make it past childhood by an average 12-15 years due to smoke from firewood is the kind of evolutionary pressure most armchair evolutionary theorists would kill for, several orders of magnitude greater than most questions we get around here from time to time about Quaternary natural selection. Of course that assumes that it is possible to select for resistance to cancer from the medium amount of wood particulates one would get from cooking, it very well may be the case that we can’t or it hasn’t happened yet.
But at least we both agree that wood-burning pizza ovens aren’t worse than cigarettes
I disagree. “Word on the street is…” means “I heard a rumor that…” The second sentence leads me to believe he does not believe the rumors. Any type of protest for this sort of thing is going to have to be organized. Otherwise, it’d be more of a boycott.
Do you think they cooked their meat well done or let it sit in a smoky closet for weeks? The carcinogens that cause lung cancer from smoking are the same as the carcinogens from grilling, BBQ and overall burning anything. Smoking is worse because addicts directly inhale those compounds into a pretty sensitive area.
Seriously though, how often are people eating this kind of pizza? It sounds a bit ridiculous to worry about.
Pizza from wood-fired ovens is way better than cigarettes, and I wish I could get it a lot more often. I have actually considered building a clay oven, though I’d put it outside, so I guess the lethal vapors will have a chance to disperse.
Lots of great foods are technically carcinogens. Like basil. Is pesto worse than cigarettes??
Just as an aside I don’t think I’ve ever had pizza from a wood oven. I’ve had it from a coal oven and from gas ovens though. Does the wood fire impart flavor to the pie? How is it compared to coal fired oven?
(I know it sounds wierd but I don’t eat pizza that often)
The main reason cigarettes are bad is because they burn at a very high temperature (above 1000°F). This is what creates most of the carcinogenic elements. Wood-fired ovens don’t get that hot.
