At what point are questions too subjective on a cooking site - aren't recipes and advice on types of foods subjective?

Question

Of course my question on organic foods was closed as being too subjective, despite there being studies quoted in answers. There are plenty of objective materials out there which people would be able to provide regarding this.

What is the use of a cooking site where anything like taste is too subjective?

What's next, people spending more time complaining in comments about people who don't accept an answer instead of just answering questions?

Answer 1

I wouldn't have closed the question because it was about Organic foods, but because it was too broad and didn't have "one" answer.

As a question it will prompt discussion and debate, which isn't what CookingSE is for. Stack Exchanges work best when questions are specific, and can be answered directly.

Hope you're not disheartened and will continue to participate :)

You could split your original question and ask two seperate questions from your original question. e.g.

Which foods are most affected by pesticides? And which "organic" foods are not noticeably better than conventional non-organic versions?

Is actually two questions, I'd suggest the first could be region specific, e.g. the answer could be wildly different depending on federal regulations in USA, Canada, Mexico, European Union . . .

Also, what is "better" is often subjective, better from a health perspective, environmental perspective, cost, eithical to farmers . . .

I had several Stack Overflow questions closed until I got my questions detailed and specific enough.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

1. it's a food site, not a health site.
2. food labeled as organic can still be grown using pesticides - frankly, the subject would be a huge can of worms even if it was made on-topic.

Answer 3

I believe that there should be a limit to the subjectivity thing. There is one thing when you are discussing at SO about a programming questions. Computers are deterministic, so you can have many questions that have a single -objective- answer.

But as soon as we move into something much more flexible (like cooking) we must expand our tolerance for subjectivity. For example, when someone asks a recipe for a certain food, that discussion itself is subjective.

"Your recipe uses too much sugar" or "A touch of lemon makes it better" are something that you could read in such a discussion.

Cooking is in itself subjective, almost completely a matter of taste. So I feel we should establish some guidelines on where to draw the line so that we don't transform this into a "scientific cooking site"