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I recently asked a question on toxicity of chicken bones, if I should continue using them, eating them or making chicken bone soup. But it was closed as irrelevant.

https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/32569/eating-chicken-bones-and-chicken-bone-soup

Then, why is this question not irrelevant? ...

Do sodastream PET bottles have normal 28mm threaded caps?.

The chemistry of food & cooking ... for example, I am sure, if I asked the following, they would be legit ..

  • do cooking with claypots leach beneficial minerals into food.
  • do frying with plastic ladles leach bpa into my stir-fry.
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  • I'm going to close this as a duplicate of the existing meta question about closing your question (it was linked to in the comments on your question), but I went ahead and wrote an answer to cover the secondary questions you included here.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Commented Mar 13, 2013 at 6:50

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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It wasn't closed as "irrelevant", it was closed as off-topic. Not everything to do with food and cooking is within the scope of the site. The second section of the faq lists some common categories of off-topic questions, including "General health and diet issue (e.g. 'Is cauliflower healthy?')".

I'm not sure why you want to compare this to the soda question; while that question does have issues, it's about kitchen equipment, which is a perfectly acceptable topic

Chemistry of food and cooking is of course on-topic. A variation of your first example question is fine: "do claypots leach minerals into food". Whether those minerals are good or not is a health/nutrition question, though, and that's off-topic. Your second example about leaching BPA is also fine.

But questions about health and nutrition have always been off-topic here. We're not a health site, and we're not going to start giving medical or nutritional advice. We can answer food safety questions like "is meat safe to eat if it's been left out for 12 hours?", using accepted food safety guidelines (generally from government agencies), but we're not going to get into health questions like "how much meat should I eat?", "is chicken healthier than fish?"

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  • My understanding of the English language is: Off-topic <---> irrelevant.
    – Cynthia
    Commented Mar 13, 2013 at 7:07
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    @BlessedGeek to make it more clear where the line is: You asked about "toxins" in general. An answer would have had to make assumptions about what substances in chicken bones may be toxic, or maybe even whether these substances are bioavailable after eating the soup. This is the part where we do not have any expertise. If you had asked about a specific substance, for example "does phosphor leach from chicken bones into soup", it would have stayed open, because it is then a matter of food chemistry. The question whether phosphor, BPA, etc. is toxic ceases to be relevant in this type of q.
    – rumtscho Mod
    Commented Mar 13, 2013 at 11:42
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    @BlessedGeek Stack Exchange sites very deliberately use the term "off topic". The sites have defined scopes, and questions outside of those scopes are off topic, even if they are completely reasonable questions that are relevant to many people. So "irrelevant" is not really a good word to describe this - it suggests a judgment about the question we're not making, and has negative connotations (unimportant, insignificant). In other words, your understanding of the English language is oversimplifying here.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Commented Mar 13, 2013 at 19:32

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