Cooking might be the way to someone’s heart, but it could also be the way to hospital. The number of accidents involving knives, boiling water, and deep-fat fryers is truly impressive. More than 67,000 children alone are injured in the kitchen in the UK every year, according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, and that doesn’t include those adults who decide to deep-fry a whole chicken or put the bagel knife through their finger.
Some of the dangers lurking in the kitchen are more insidious than you might realise – there is one source of indoor air pollution that you probably use every day and have never suspected. And yet, we’ve come a long way over the last century towards making the kitchen less of a death trap.
After World War Two, the boom in consumer goods and materials meant that the home became flammable in all sorts of exciting new ways. Nylon and other synthetic fabrics draped housewives and children in elegant, fluttering costumes, and now a sleeve against the gas range could not only catch fire, but melt, coating the skin with droplets of molten plastic that caused horrific burns.
A 1946 poster campaign from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents urged citizens to use close-fitting garments and put guards over fires, lest their children wind up like the one on the poster, sporting a dress of flames. Legislation brought flame retardants to many home furnishings, though lately we’ve realised these have brought other dangers: they are endocrine disruptors, interfering with hormones.
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Sometimes the danger in the kitchen came from gadgets intended to be safer than the ones they replaced. Electric kettles are a particularly ironic example. Even as early as the 1920s they had automatic shut-offs intended to keep them from boiling dry, and some even had plugs that would pop out when the correct temperature was reached. However, the plugs could easily plop into a full sink of water if the kettle was on the drainboard (death to whoever was washing the dishes, sadly), and if the safety mechanism made it hard to put a popped plug back in, people would inquisitively shove knives and other metal objects in.
Pathologist F E Camps wrote in 1956 of one instance, involving an elderly woman: “Under the impression that there was ‘something stuck’ she took the plug in one hand, thereby earthing herself with the earth safety metal strip upon it, and with the other hand introduced a metal screw driver into the positive terminal which was still connected to a 25-ampere power plug at ‘on’, she somewhat naturally received the full charge with fatal results.”
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Originally Appeared Here