How is a razorsharp kitchen knife safer than a duller one?
In: Physics
From my years as a boyscout that was one thing that was ingrained in us. The logic is that with a sharp knife you need less pressure to cut through whatever you’re cutting whether it be roast turkey, a wooden stake, or a rope. With less pressure there’s less of a…. release I guess?… when you finally go through and you have more control over that.
It’s not, people just say this because they hate dull knives. Yes, its easier to lose control of a dull knife, but overall super sharp knives are more dangerous.
I have an chef’s knife that I sharpen by hand using whetstones. It is razor sharp. If I take a tomato, place the blade on top of it, and pull it backwards (with only the weight of the knife itself pressing on the tomato) it will slice clean through it.
Using less pressure means more control and less chance to cut yourself. It should also be said that if you are using a knife that sharp you should probably be acquainted with good knife skills to insure that you don’t slice a finger off anyway. At a minimum there are plenty of knife skills videos that will show you the fundamentals.
Less force needed to use, meaning more control. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten cut slicing tomatoes with a dull knife.
Personally, as someone who recently started sharpening my own knives, I have cut myself more on sharp knives than dull one. Maybe that says more about my knife skills than anything.
Sharp blade go through objects with little force. This gives you more control as you are using less force.
A more controlled blade goes into the food and not into your arm. If it does, since you are using less force, its easier to stop yourself.
A dull blade is more likely to slip because it has a harder time getting into the thing you are trying to cut. If it slips, and you’re using more force because it has a harder time getting into whatever you are trying to cut, you’ll end up shoving the knife somewhere it doesn’t belong with more oomph than is necessary a d then you’re in for a bad time
In addition to what others have said about greater control and less pressure, if you do injure yourself with a sharp knife, the cut will be cleaner and easier to treat with first aid.
A dull knife, on the other hand, has a good chance of tearing rather than cutting making the injury harder to treat and more prone to secondary injury in the form of infection.
I acknowledge the reasoning previously mentioned, but I’ve come to believe otherwise.
I think safety is a curve, where a “pretty sharp” knife is the safest. It will cut your food cleanly without requiring excessive work or pressure. However I personally have an expensive Japanese santoku knife that I hand sharpen. I have two scars on my fingers from that thing when I just casually touched it in the wrong way. And it cuts so cleanly that you barely feel it, and it bypasses your pain response.
If you get one of those fuckers you have to be really aware of where it is at all times.
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