Hacker News Reader

Comment by iab | Hacker News Reader

Anybody close to just giving up at this point?

Reminds me of one of my personal heros, Bruce Ames[1] who invented the Ames test, a relatively cheap biological assay that tests for mutagenicity[2].

Essentially it turns out that tons and tons of stuff, both synthetic and natural is mutagenic to some degree, but we tend to think about it as a binary instead of a spectrum. His argument was that some things that are technically mutagenic, like pesticides and fire retardants have a net benefit in spite of this(e.g. pesticides make a better diet more financially attainable which has a bigger impact on public health than a very small increase in the base rate of cancer), but we lump them all together. It's why California's Prop 65 is just completely stupid; we lump fairly benign things like coffee and wine in with things like asbestos.

The quote I always think of is, "if you have thousands of hypothetical risks that you are supposed to pay attention to, that completely drives out the major risks you should be aware of."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Ames

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_test

Fire retardants are a net negative for public safety. Consumer protection groups, furniture manufacturers, and fire fighters all banded together to eliminate California's requirements for them. It still took over a decade. During that time, the fire retardant manufacturers were literally the only group that supported using them.

That’s some interesting stuff, thanks

Cast iron FTW. Haven’t checked if an enamel dutch oven is naughty or nice. Slow cooker’s pottery glaze is unknown.

Why not carbon steel? It's lighter and just as durable, that's why it's used in restaurant kitchens.

It rusts if you leave it damp, and the rust is porous and consequently impossible to keep clean; you have to scrub it off or remove it with acid. Restaurant kitchens wash and scrub their pots constantly but they also use a lot of stainless steel.

cast iron has the same problem

That's true, you have to keep it well seasoned to prevent it from rusting. Can you do that with carbon steel? I'd think the surface chemistry would be about the same, so maybe? Does the greater flexibility of the thinner cookware make the seasoning flake off?

Yes carbon steel cookware is seasoned almost exactly the same as cast iron. Although it's sometimes thinner, it's still quite dense and heavy cookware that's comparable to cast iron stuff in use and seasoning lifetime in my experience. It cooks just as fantastically well too--I love carbon steel pans.

Thanks!

Carbon steel is the same as cast iron, just less brittle due to lower carbon content. They sometimes make it thinner (doesn't have to be as thick since it's not cast), but there is plenty of thick carbon steel cookware out there too.

The carbon-steel itself is very tough, but most people try to keep a layer of seasoning on it to prevent rust. Sometimes it takes a lot of care to maintain that seasoning, and it still might flake off because of e.g. metal spatulas.

Good stainless steel, OTOH, is generally hard enough to survive reasonable run-ins with metal utensils, and doesn't require re-seasoning.

Carbon steel also contains chromium and nickel, and presumably also leeches those into food as you cook like stainless steel.

Cast iron is 100% iron.

FWIW, I use all three types of pans happily in my kitchen and won't judge anyone for using any of the three, but this question is kind of hilarious given the linked study about steel cookware.

> Cast iron is 100% iron.

plenty of cast irons have all sorts of things mixed in them. i don't think anyone particularly cares to use pure iron, because additives make the process easier.

if your pan manufacturer will even tell you which kind they used, you can check matweb for the composition.

some of them include chromium, nickel, molybdenum, etc.

Yes that's true, but compared to stainless and carbon steel it may only contain trace amounts of the metals that are the focus of this study.

Everything in the study is trace amounts!

I don't think they're really comparable though. For example: Stainless steel contains 10.5%+ chromium. Carbon steel contains up to 10.5%. Steel (with a non-trace amount of chromium in it) ends up leeching trace amounts of chromium into food. Some cast iron probably has trace amounts of chromium in it, but far less than the 10%+ in steel.

This may also leech chromium into food, but most likely at an even further insignificant amount. It's not part of the study and I am not a chemist, so I don't want to make a conjecture.

Chemistry is complex enough that layman cannot make any assumptions. For all we know stainless steel and carbon steel have higher content than the cast iron, but leach less because it's far more stable.

Doesn’t chrome and moly make it stainless?

It’s the chromium. Cookware usually has nickel too. When a pan is advertised as 18-8, they mean roughly 18%Cr-8%Ni. Basically the same as 304 stainless steel. You have molybdenum additions in something like 316 stainless steel.

I think it depends on the amount, though I'm no expert.

Cast iron is not 100% iron. It contains carbon and silicon and usually other alloying agents and impurities.

Well true, but compared to stainless and carbon steel it contains trace amounts of the metals that are the focus of this study.

Can anyone just admit they were wrong? Ffs.

lol You're on a website catering to people who dislike having others prove them wrong and will stretch "technically correct" as far as possible, in the face of all else. If computers didn't exist, they'd be lawyers. If lawyers didn't exist, they'd be clergy.

I think you just won HN.

Lots do. Not all. Intellectually honest and educatable people hang out here too. But you’re understood.

I don’t expect anything to be perfect. Maybe just some metamorphic rocks that have been heated by coals that I can roast my food in.

Thermal mass is a desirable feature for cooking some things, the cooking surface loses less temperature as you introduce ingredients.

I prefer spun iron which is as thin (and light) as a carbon steel pan but still pure iron. I do like cast iron, though, as it's just a thick chunk of metal you can throw in the oven or on a barbecue etc. without too much care.

This. We literally take iron as a supplement because it's an essential mineral for the body.

K.I.S.S.

Only for anemic women. Iron is mainly poisonous otherwise, especially for men or people with a history of hemochromatosis (ie British people). That's why multivitamins have separate ones "for women", everyone else just increases their risk of colon cancer.

I think only pre-menopausal women should routinely take iron supplements. Men run the risk of getting to much iron.

Obligatory cereal-iron extraction

https://youtu.be/NHqN-Be5nlU

With cast iron or carbon steel you're getting bits of polymerized oil (i.e. seasoning) in your food.

Don't worry too much, all this stuff will take a few years off your life on average and those years would've sucked anyway.

This is ageism which assumes that the elderly are in constant misery and would rather be, or be better off, dead.

You’re wrong. When you are older you will realize that life is worth living at every age, and you will hope the young don’t treat you too badly in their ignorance.

They'll also make you start having "old age" diseases at a younger age, on average.

How many years are shaved off by worrying about all of the things that shave off a few years?

I meant all of this stuff, in aggregate.

I was making a lame joke.

Yep I'm going back to my mercury and lead alloy pot.

This isn't really "new news", it's been a known thing for a while [0]

Personally became aware of it when looking for camping cookware; Stainless steel or aluminum are very good materials for pots taken on trip, they sturdy but not too heavy, tho have this issue of not being good for anything acidic due to the increased leeching.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1514841/

:-)

Maybe you shouldn't read how new buildings poison you with radioactive gas.

https://www.epa.gov/radtown/natural-radioactivity-building-m...

Yup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30622479

What's the point? Whether you just give up or try to go on, you die anyway. Might as well not give up :D

In the worst case, we're left with air-frying as a healthy way of cooking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com