I don't cook, but I solder. And I got a lot of mileage out of a dirt cheap Radio Shack iron. Well, I do cook, but I'm not into it or as skilled at it to the degree I am with soldering.

Fair enough, but for anyone wondering, you can make a shit knife shine if you take good care of it! Sharpening it, using a chef's honing steel in between some harder cuts to take care of those nasty burrs and you're off to the races!

Now you've introduced "expensive" muddying the argument even more :-)

I cook, and I disagree with the assertion that a better knife makes you a better cook. Good knives are useful, but ultimately you're still going to produce crappy results if you're a bad cook with a good knife.

A better cook will want sharper knives.

A better cook knows that if her knives are dull, she won’t perform as well.

So untrue.

The only thing a better knife does is save you prep time. Being a good cook is about understanding how different materials cook, when different foods are "done", how flavors work together, and how to improvise when things go outside the plan/recipe or adapt to novel situations.

Cutting technique is only important if you're a professional chef with actual time constraints and can't afford to spend an extra 30 seconds cutting an onion.

A bad dull knife bruises and smashes more than it cuts. If a first time cook was making a salsa, the one made with the good knife would be better as the tomatoes would be juicer and not all smushed.

Use a serrated knife.

A dull serrated knife does the same thing.

> Giving an expensive knife to a new cook that has never cooked before will not make them a Michelin chef

Pick any Michelin-rated restaurant at random and visit the kitchen. You'll find plenty of $50 knives in use. It doesn't take a lot of money to build a good-enough-for-world-class-cooking knife. Once you get beyond a certain price point, it's mostly about personal preferences and "situations that apply to me but may or may not apply to you".

Hmm. I'm far from an expert, but I have seen chefs at work in person in about a dozen michelin star places over the years, and in videos/books/etc. of many more. My anecdotal experiences have lead me to believe that no, the knives they use for the majority of tasks day in and day out are not $50 knives. They might have some cheaper knives (usually victorinox from what I've seen) for specific purposes but when it came to chef's knives/gyutos, they were all more expensive. Not necessarily super expensive - I've seen tons of Globals, Macs, and Misonos over the years and their stuff is more like the $150-$200ish range. But I've also seen people with high-end small production Japanese blacksmiths, too.

Fair enough :)

I'll just point out that your standard workhorse Global 8" is easily available for $80ish. Probably even cheaper in Japan with the exchange rates.

While I do agree - you can (or should be able to) get any knife to shave. They may lack edge retention or proper geometry but slicing/cutting/chopping is doable with pretty much any knife, as long as you can sharpen them. I'd say getting any knife to cut tomatoes flawlessly with just a brick and some water is not a hard task.

That being said, I still prefer diamond stones (sharpening wise)

I have a ~80 dollar knife that is dull as an EA and you're vastly exaggerating.

Tomatoes, meat, fish, I use my $4 serrated knife. Everything else is fine. With proper technique it's basically impossible to cut yourself even with a very dull knife.