Such people should perhaps consider a ceramic-bladed knife. They stay sharp basically forever because the blade is extremely hard, with the downside that it's not repairable with ordinary equipment if chipped. But if the owner would never maintain their metal knife anyway, then it's not _really_ a downside.
On hard material and when overloaded, they will chip in large, unfixable chunks.
On softer material, they continuously sharpen their edges at a microscopic scale, fracturing away tiny chips as they're worn, to new glassy ceramic molecular edges. A well used ceramic blade becomes micro-serrated.
This sounds fantastic until you think about what is happening to the shards of hard glassy ceramic which briefly become part of your food before becoming part of your gastrointestinal tract.
How much mineral and metal grit does one consume on a regular basis? The ceramic material from a ceramic knife blade is, obviously from just looking at it, very small. I bet the amount of grit I've eaten from having a taste for raw oysters vastly outweighs what I'd get from a lifetime of using ceramic knives.
People can work up to eating fairly large shards of glass. Eating tiny bits of ceramic occasionally are unlikely to be an actual issue any more than ingesting a little bit of sand.
Glass eating is a real thing with a surprising number of documented cases. In some cases it’s classified as Hyalophagia a form of Pica where people focus on glass, but it doesn’t necessarily have significant negative side effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
There’s also a magic trick where people eat sugar that’s very clear and looks like glass, but that’s a different thing.
No, I’m saying some mentally ill people consume vast quantities of glass and medical professionals are only concerned with the most extreme cases. It’s like saying the forces involved in a boxing match are a useful benchmark for brain trauma, on that scale a 6 month old infant punching you is so far below that benchmark you don’t need to worry about it.
Which means if you’re worried about consuming 1/100,000th as much it’s clearly not a big deal.
If your body didn't have ways to deal with sharp things you eat, we'd never eat fish due to the risk of pin bones. Microscopic shards of ceramic pose very little risk.
I used to be a fan, and used them heavily for years. They stay sharp... for a while, and then there's no practical way to re-sharpen them. You get a couple good years out of them and then a lot of mediocre to bad years.
Running a steel knife through an electric sharpener once a month (a 2-minute operation) keeps it feeling consistently like new.
It's cheaper than an electric sharpener and doesn't carry the risk of taking off too much material from a blade due to overenthusiastic use.
I am 100% certain that there are multiple people on this thread that could tell me I'm getting less optimal results than their tools and/or method. I don't care. I'm getting results that work when I cook. I don't trust myself to get the angle right with a diamond stone.
Pull through sharpening creates an edge that does not last. This channel has great explanations about this and what to do instead: https://youtu.be/pagPuiuA9cY
That is an amazing video. I can confirm that the methods are correct, he mentions exactly what I've been doing for years, explains and demonstrates very clearly.
I have one, I use it on my knives every 1-2 months. My knives will last decades rather than "lifetime" but I don't care... they're always sharp and I don't have to work at it. I can buy new knives.
