We have friends who insist they won’t eat microwave-cooked items and refuse to own a microwave oven, claiming it has deleterious effects on the nutritional value of food. I chuckle over their sensitivity–seems most restaurants today serve many items that are cooked rapidly using microwaves, so I’ll bet our friends eat some of these foods unknowingly. My wife, however, is becoming alarmed over their queer beliefs. Please give her peace of mind. Are our friends’ fears groundless, or am I the goat on this one? –Norm, via e-mail
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Probably your friends are getting worked up over nothing, but this is one subject where you want to resist sweeping pronouncements. On its face, antimicrowave propaganda (you’ll find loads of it on the Web) is none too persuasive–some of these people have yet to comprehend the crucial distinction between ionizing and nonionizing radiation. (Ionizing radiation is the nuclear, i.e., dangerous, kind, which includes X-rays, gamma rays, etc; nonionizing is everything else, e.g., microwaves, not to mention light.) When you dig into the research, though, you realize the controversy isn’t all hooey. On the contrary, what we’ve got here is one of the great coal-mine fires of science–an argument that, in this case, has been smoldering for 50 years without resolution. Unexpected recent developments, though, make me think we may get to the bottom of this pup yet.
Yeah, sure, whatever. But now that attitude may be shifting, in part because of that unexpected trend I was telling you about: microwave ovens’ finding their way out of the kitchen and into the laboratory. Scientists had long used microwave ovens to heat up their coffee just like everybody else, but in the late 1980s they came to a startling realization: The ovens could greatly accelerate useful chemical reactions, sometimes by a factor of a thousand. Processes that once took hours, days, or months could be completed in minutes, often without the toxic solvents previously required. Initially researchers used consumer-model ovens they bought at the appliance store, but soon realized what chicken potpie lovers had known for years, namely that an ordinary microwave oven is not a precision instrument and often gives unpredictable results. With burgeoning interest in “microwave chemistry” came a push to improve microwave hardware; meanwhile a few big heads conceded that maybe it was time to inquire more deeply into how these things actually worked. The matter has yet to be fully elucidated, but already some think the microwave effect may not be a myth after all: “One suggestion,” a bunch of chemists wrote recently, “is that this is some form of ‘ponderomotive’ driving force that arises when high frequency electric fields modulate ionic currents near interfaces with abrupt differences in ion mobility.”
