Scientists cut the tolerable intake of PFAs by 99.9%

The primary difference between vintage, “artisanal” and modern cast iron (eg: lodge) is the former is machined and the latter isn’t.

Cast iron, seasoned, is supposed to be slicker than non stick. You should be able to fry an egg in it.

With lodge you have to build up that non stick over the sand casting “bumpies” that are left over from the iron casting process.

They used to machine those out, especially on the cook surface. Until this latest crop of modern cast iron manufacturers, one would typically have to retreat to vintage or perhaps machine your own.

I think most people just look at the sorry state of “lodge” then grab a pfa laden non stick and go home.

I got a cheapo Lodge for this reason, but I wonder if the more expensive makes add some postprocessing steps to smooth the casting. I found the rough Lodge finish to be unworkable since food kept sticking, and it was hard to clean. I ended up sanding it down to a glass finish and reseasoning it, and now it works properly.

I’ve been to the Lodge factory in rural South Pittsburg Tennessee and I don’t understand what makes “artisanal” cast iron any different from Lodge. It’s pretty much just a marketing hook to convince hipsters to spend hundreds more. The folks that make Lodge are just as “artisanal” as the fancy-pants brands. Lodge has been doing this for over a hundred years. They were “artisanal” before anyone ever used that work. I agree, Lodge can’t be beat. Their iron isn’t any better or worse than the more expensive brands, they just don’t have some bearded “skillet master” in their marketing department convicting people about how good their products are.

Others have covered this as well, but I believe they're all significantly lighter than the comparable Lodge products, and some of the handles apparently actually work pretty well - although the review I've seen of whichever one has that coil handle wasn't very impressed. I have a couple of Lodges that I use weekly, and neither has a handle that's impressed me.

They're also all machined to a smooth finish after molding, where the Lodges are cleaned, possibly sanded a bit to get rid of any lingering material from the mold, then seasoned. Part of the reasoning I've heard for the rougher finish on Lodge pans is that it makes that initial factory seasoning much easier to get on there. If you look around in the cast iron arena you'll come across a fair amount of information on how to do your own machining at home with drills, abrasive pads, hand sanders, etc.

Beyond that, some of them have different configurations of spouts, secondary handles, etc. - they're all somewhat different.

It's about saving time and work. Cast iron takes a lot of work compared to even plain old stainless steel plans in prep and cleaning. They are very heavy to handle and can't use such foods as tomatoes because they are too acidic.

An informal survey as to why you would use a cast iron is "it make meat taste better" and it "heats more evenly".

They're not the same thing. That De Buyer is thin carbon steel, not cast iron. I have one (an identical Paderno actually) and it's by far my favorite pan for crepes, but it sucks for everything else. It's no good for searing because it lacks the necessary heat capacity, and the thin steel causes hot spots even worse than cast iron.

Deeper carbon steel pans are great for stir frying, but I have yet to find another use for very shallow carbon steel skillets.

Note that Lodge makes skillets that it calls "carbon steel" which are actually just especially thin cast iron, and I love these. They are thick enough to perform like cast iron, but much lighter. I have 10 and 12 inch skillets (Lodge model numbers CRS10 and CRS12), and they're my go-to skillets for almost everything: pancakes, omelets and fried eggs, sauteing, and shallow frying. The only thing I don't use cast iron for is scrambled eggs.

EDIT:

Nope, nevermind, I'm wrong. I just checked my pans, and my Lodge thin cast iron skillets are the same thickness as those Mineral B pans -- 2.5mm. My crepe pan is thinner. So you're right, those De Buyer pans probably are excellent replacements for cast iron -- lighter, cheaper, similar performance.

EDIT 2:

Damn you batbomb, now I have to go shopping for pans. Restaurant supply store you say? Maybe ebay?

Ceramic pans unfortunately get sticky with age. My Zwilling J. A. Henckels pans [1] were amazing the first year or so, and then they started to get worse. Now I can no longer cook eggs in them -- complete mess. They're fine for plenty of things, like sauces and vegetables, but not eggs, crêpes, omelets or anything that needs a non-stick surface.

This is unfortunate, because the ceramic process doesn't use PFAs like PFOA, and they don't use PTFEs. Some people claim you can preserve ceramics' non-stickiness by not using oil, but I have my doubts. The short lifespan of ceramics is a pretty common complaint. From what I can tell, there's no way to get the non-stick back -- scrubbing the coating only makes it worse.

[1] https://www.crateandbarrel.com/zwilling-j.a.-henckels-vistac...

Ceramic is actually a marketing gimmick referring not to the material used but rather the process of making it. It is still teflon-coated and just as toxic as "non-stick."

Wish I had a source but I'm on mobile.

To add to this is the fact that we also have plenty of evidence that industry will do the wrong thing. Lead additives to gasoline is a common example but the story of Diethylstilbestrol (more commonly known as DES) is so much worse.

10 million or more fetuses exposed over 30 years with results ranging from fatal aggressive cancers in young children to birth defects. DES still shows effects two full generations later - in the grandchildren.

During the time DES was in use it was often defended using the “But women have estrogen already and this is exactly the same so obviously it’s fine” sorts of dismissals.

And now, here and again I encounter people dismissing concerns about BPA or PFOA and other endocrine disrupters with hand waving about how if there was really a problem we would have seen it and reacted to it by now so - the reasoning goes - obviously there is not a problem or, if there is one, it’s minor. And then I think of DES.

Most compostable bio plastics are made of Poly-lactic acid (lactic acid is the stuff that gives that burning feeling in your muscles after a workout) from corn.

PLA can compost in industrial sites, but (edit: add a not here) in normal environments, perhaps that is the reason for your quote marks.

So at least the bulk of the material in the bioware is pretty safe, especially when compared against PFA/PFOAs. That's not to say that it's impossible to mix PLA with some other, unsafe chemicals.

Yes many of them are made with this junk, a lot of hygiene products have it too like "Oral-B" floss and even things like microwave popcorn bags...

The more people realize the FDA does not care about us and learn to take personal action the better.

Can you link to it? I guess a distiller gets all chemicals out.

Distilling the water won’t remove the chemical.

I’ve heard a lot of bad things about reverse osmosis water effects on your body as well.

You're describing different things. Teflon is a brand name of PTFE, which is a finished polymer. PTFE is considered safe until it has been subject to heat stress and undergoes thermal breakdown (around 200C). This makes use of PTFE as non-stick coating in cookware potentially dangerous.

GenX and PFOA are notionally different chemicals used in the manufacturing of PFTE. They are both used to accelerate the polymerization reaction. It is nominally possible to have finished PTFE products which do not contain relevant (choose your definition) amounts of either family of chemicals. GenX and PFOA are both toxic in themselves, regardless of use - unlike teflon.

This is not correct. Please watch the documentary film. Teflon absolutely has these health issues. You can move the tail ends of the molecule around all you want to and it still has the same dangers.

So I can keep using my bread maker?

The torts system is almost certainly co-opting the criminal justice system, not the other way around.

It's precisely because of some law needing to be fair to hammer manufacturers, who literally no one cares about, that gun manufacturers, which pretty much everyone does care about, can do shitty things in this country. You're thinking in terms of law, and I'm talking about a court of public opinion.

And even if you litter (pretty much the worst a normal person can do in the court of public opinion re: pollution), we don't need years to litigate that in a court of law.

And yet, it took five years to litigate the BP Horizon spill, even though there's camera footage showing oil coming out of their derrick in real time. What was there to litigate there? Who really cares whether it's $18.7 billion, or $187 billion, or $1.8 billion, other than the BP chairman? Who really cares what they think, in the court of public opinion?

No normal person is ever going to have $18.7 billion to lose, nor will ever have the capability of doing the kind of environmental damage BP's bad oil platform did. So why allow environmental law to even adjudicate the matter, over years, which has never once, ever, delivered maximum justice to the public?

Why compromise on our values and the environment, constantly, to protect some essentially unproven economic logic that BP, or DuPoint, or whoever, generate more value for some community somewhere in "jobs" or whatever than the damage they did by polluting?

The primary normative question in that case: Should we just shut down BP? We didn't need 5 years of negotiations to resolve that, we didn't need any more evidence or calculations. Someone in the justice department, in an afternoon, made the determination that BP won't be closed, and then a complex legal strategy was pursued, by both sides, for five years, to generate the illusion of justice to execute on that determination.

Pollution cases act like criminal cases, and they shouldn't be! The whole problem is reductive, slow, storied, legalistic reasoning, and reductive, unproven economic aphorisms.