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Maker of popcorn, melter of army men & destroyer of CDs

You can’t “mike” metal, shouldn’t “wave” plastic and isn’t it sort of weird we want to eat anything that’s been “nuked”?

Think about it. You can’t stand in front of it or look into it while it works. What kind of prima donna appliance is this? Is there any other in your home that carries as much fear and respect? Does the washing machine demand complete solitude during its spin cycle?

I, for one, am tired of tip-toeing around this kitchen contraption like it’s a Decepticon. So I’m going to Bittel Me This the cuss out of it.

Is it bad to look at the microwave while it cooks? Will standing in front of the microwave give me cancer or liquefy my eyes? Is the microwave dangerous?

Radiation 101

When (and if) you think about radiation, things that come to mind probably include Chernobyl and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But you might not realize that radiation is commonplace. In fact, it’s all around us.

From your FM radio and microwave oven to the sun’s rays and the X-ray machine at the dentist’s office – radiation is simply emitted energy. Depending on where it falls on the Energy Spectrum, you can tell a wave’s potential threat by the size of its wavelength.

 

 

As you can see in the image, radiation comes in two varieties. Here’s the skinny, according to the EPA:

Non-ionizing Radiation – “has enough energy to move atoms in a molecule around or cause them to vibrate, but not enough to remove electrons”

Ionizing Radiation – “has enough energy to remove tightly bound electrons from atoms, thus creating ions”

Translation: Since the radiation emitted from a microwave oven isn’t powerful enough to choke-slam the electrons off your atoms – potentially changing your DNA – we can conclude that microwaves are mostly safe.

A Word on “Mostly”

Yes. Non-ionizing radiation falls short of shuffling your deoxyribonucleic acid. But that doesn’t mean you should cozy up to it. (Sunlight is on the “safe” side of the Energy Spectrum, too, but science tells us ultraviolet rays will suck out your soul.) 

Aging microwave ovens can leak radiation, usually around the cracks in the doors. Keep yours up-to-date or buy a leakage detector on Amazon – which is not as exciting as it sounds. Leakage is rare, but the FDA recommends you not stand directly against the oven while it works. Though, if you’re using a microwave oven to hold yourself up, you likely have more serious problems than leakage.

Now… IF your microwave is leaking (not likely) and IF you should happen to position the soft tissue of your eyeball directly in front of the leak (not likely), well, then you probably watched too many episodes of Myth Busters where they took two minutes to decide the myth was harmless and spent the next half hour trying to manipulate it into Armageddon.

So even though eyeballs are more susceptible to radiation damage than the rest of you, as long as you don’t have your face against the thing, you should be fine. Microwave energy “decreases dramatically as you move away from the source of radiation,” says the FDA. Move just 20 inches away and it’s power will be 1/100^th as strong.

(Skip to :55 for the moral of this story. And how about Christina Hendricks?!)

Tea Time

Want to hear what’s most likely to hurt you? A cup of tea.

Trying to boil water in a microwave can be extremely dangerous. Or rather, when water does not boil due to the absence of nucleation sites, you might burn your face off. But we’ll get to that.

Next time on Bittel Me This: we learn how microwaves cook and explore erupted hot water phenomena – otherwise known as Magnetron’s Revenge.