I'm surprised this doesn't mention gas stoves and ovens. Gas is the "high end" option, yet creates totally unnecessary PM2.5 pollution in your home. Children growing up with gas stoves have higher rates of asthma.
Where I live, the high end-option is to get an induction stove. I have one, and it's extremely pleasant to cook on. Granted, I've never cooked on gas because that alternative is mostly not used, in my experience.
Want a restaurant-quality stir-fry? Your only choice is a wok on an intense gas plume. The thin material of the wok gives it low heat capacity, meaning that when you turn on the heat it rises in temperature very fast, and cools relatively fast when you turn it off. This allows very precise control necessary to get the best flavor. The wok is curved, which is critical to mixing ingredients correctly while cooking, but the gas flame does a fine job of following the form of the pan to give adequate heating throughout. Electric or induction stoves come short on both aspects: you need thicker pans (higher heat capacity) with flatter resistive elements built-in. You simply can't get the same flavor with those setups.
So no, it's not so simple as "heat is heat."
Pay attention to the kitchen next time you're in a Chinese or Thai restaurant. They really make use of the industrial gas-powered ranges that are universally equipped in their kitchens.
That said, certain types of high temp cooking like wok cooking require jet-burner gas stoves to get the right sort of flavor, but I think induction is superior in most cases.
Also, high-heat wok cooking, while delicious, is terrible for air quality.
Few years ago I moved from a little apartment with an electric range to an SFH with gas everything.
"Good for you," my gas-enthusiast family said, "now you have a REAL stove"
It still takes forever to boil water in a pot. The food tastes the same. I wonder why furnaces have these fancy high-efficiency heat exchangers and stoves don't? Cost?
I wouldn't mind going back to electric. I just assumed it cost more, but maybe cooking isn't significant compared to running a furnace.
I don't see how a design like that would work for a range. The purpose of a range is to heat small, movable objects (pots) to high temperatures (~500°F) with good responsiveness (= short time constants). The purpose of a furnace or water heater is to heat fluids contained in large spaces or tanks to modest temperatures (~100°F) with very limited responsiveness (= long time constants).
The heat exchanger really helps the case of heating a stream of fluid, as that's where the exchange is most useful. The physical and thermal mass of the heat exchanger and flue condenser are both considerable.
I'm not seeing how to make a gas rangetop significantly more thermally responsive without making it no longer practical. For people who can't abide gas for whatever reason, induction units are supposedly excellent these days. (I've never tried one. They can't possibly be worse than an electric smoothtop range, though!)
Induction stoves are pretty good for dumping watts into water. However, it's very hard to get a good mid-range temperature. Gas makes it really straightforward to get something cooking at exactly the heat you want.
Are you sure you’ve used an induction stove and not just a regular electric stove?
Glass flat top electric stoves are not usually not induction stoves though they look the same.
I think I have tried 5 different models in the last few years, from the very cheap, to the relatively pricey, and all were relatively lacking when it came to fine control.
I don't think there's any real reason why they shouldn't have fine temperature control - presumably the temperature is controlled by the switching speed of the mosfets in the coils?
No idea if that's true or not, but I'd believe it.
"When the meta-analysis puts everything together, they come to the conclusion that gas cooking produces a small increase in asthma risk for children, perhaps a 1.5 percentage point increase in risk." (https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/gas-stoves-finally)
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/42/6/1724/737113
To me, a 24% increase in risk of lifetime asthma is significant and well worth avoiding both at an individual level and a societal level, given that good alternatives are readily available.
Given this 24% number, I guess the "1.5 percentage points" you quoted must be the absolute increase in asthma prevalence across the population, i.e. gas stoves in every home would cause 1.5% of people to develop asthma (when they otherwise wouldn't have it). That seems quite bad actually. If true, not using gas stoves (currently in 35% of households) could have prevented over a million cases of asthma in the US alone.