I've been a little disturbed at the amount of questions being asked that fall into this format. The one that really "pushed me over the edge" (the edge of making a comment about it; I'm not raging :) was the ban alcohol one.
Some background, I come to this SE through StackOverflow (SO). I wasn't involved in the initial SO beta, nor have I been much involved in the meta discussions there. I'm going to draw several parallels between the two sites, as it's the most relevant source I have as far as structure/intent if not subject matter. I apologize if some of it may be hard to understand for non-programmers.
SO addresses "programming" questions. Food and Cooking exchange addresses "food and cooking" questions. These are both ridiculously broad topics. SO intentionally doesn't have a list of "acceptable" programming questions. As far as I've seen there aren't debates as to whether assembly programming questions should be allowed. How are alcohol related questions any different? I've seen other comments that indicate that even "drinks" related questions should not be allowed. What? Should we have a non-alcoholic drinks exchange and and a separate alcoholic drinks exchange? Some have said "well pairing is borderline, but since it's so close they should not be allowed" as well. What? Is FoodPairing exchange the solution to that?
This site is not even a week old. We shouldn't be putting effort and time into drawing giant X's through broad subcategories with a Sharpie. We don't even know that this exchange will have enough sustained traffic to even live past public beta.
In the 5 days since Food and Cooking launched, the community has generated 245 questions (242 answered!), 721 answers, 229 users, and 1,270 views per day.
This is great! Yet, in the grand scheme of things it's not that much. Should we be alienating potential newcomers who will inevitably ask questions that you may think should not be allowed? Personally, if I came to a site and asked a reasonable concrete question, and it was summarily closed I'd simply think 'screw that' and not come back.
No, I'm not suggesting we pander to every newbie who comes along asking what I arbitrarily consider universally stupid questions. Examples: "What is the best salt?", "What is your favorite soup?". Those questions are clearly in the subjective or not-a-real-question categories, and should be closed as such. Yet even still someone should comment on why it's being closed, specifically. Reasonable people, people whom we would want to have be a part of this community, would understand that and rephrase their question appropriately or learn not to ask such a thing. What reason can we give to someone for closing their question as off-topic because they asked how to make a mojito?
It's alcohol related. Alcohol isn't a "food", nor is it "cooking". Plus 3 or 4 people in the early beta decided they should summarily ban it. Maybe one day there will be a MojitoExchange, if so, then you should ask there. Until then, Google.
No, that's clearly absurd.
In closing, I think the de facto regulators need to ease up. It's way too early to start slapping all this "xxx is not allowed" crap all over the place. Let it evolve. Use the objective reasons to close a topic such as "not-a-real" or "subjective-and-argumentative". The "off-topic" reason is itself subjective, and should be used with restraint and consideration. It should preferably only be used if a problem exists that needs to be addressed, or if the question is objectively off-topic.
TL;DR - RELAX