Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Counterpoint: this seems to be the crusade of a single researcher - I don't find the data personally convincing and am still using my black spatula for cooking.
https://www.threads.net/@gidmkhealthnerd/post/DBxbQERykRx?hl...
- The replication crisis means most science is bad and we should be extremely skeptical of scientific consensus.
- This one single scientific paper changes everything and you are negligent if you don’t immediately change your life based on it.
but it confirms my current bias so it must be true!
Is not a reliable, frequent, pattern that is in any way a valid criticism of the community as a whole. Incredible
Not everyone on 4chan is a flaming bigot but yet the community as a while gets (rightfully) judged for allowing it in their midst. Why are lesser forms of poor behavior not also reflective of the community?
Plus the risk of the alternative you pick being much worse than the original option.
There's also a risk that any cracks will fill with bacteria.
Should make it from RVS.
* "The Best Food-Safe Finish May Be None at All", https://www.finewoodworking.com/2024/10/10/the-best-food-saf...
TLDR; unfinished wood that is rinsed and dried on all sides will naturally trap and kill bacteria as it dries. Any finish interferes with this process.
The number one thing that made me mistrust scientists/science was doing it myself. I realized that they are not the arbiters of truth that Plato/Aristotle tried to make them out to be. The allegory of the cave/allegory of the divided line were fake/complete lies - and most of western philosophy implicitly acts as "footnotes" on these wrongful ideas.
As the secret of science-as-slightly-better-than-chance gets out to more and more, existing anti-intellectualism is supercharged. It's not just attacks of "cultural/postmodern neo-marxism" against your comparative literature department - it's claims of systemic academic fraud of your whole STEM field laboratories because it became known to the public that everyone cut corners so that they could be one step ahead in the academic careerist rat race.
I am firmly an Epistemology Anarchist - that is I agree with almost everything Paul feyerband ever wrote. I don't believe that knowledge/truth is influenced by the method for which it is found. Real, reproducible truth is found all the time outside of traditional academic or scientific norms/methods. The medium is firmly not the message and Marshall McLuhan is a quack.
Basically, when Plato says "the farmer should not rule" I respond with "neither should the philosopher or the so called philosopher king"
Trillions invested, decades wasted by global institutions and here my Ego outdoes them all in factual accuracy with an offhand 30 second post. What's there to not like?
And also true re: acidic foods -- I've got a couple stainless, but mainly use my enameled cast iron or clay (tagine) for tomato based dishes.
Definitely!
As much as I generally love it, e.g. pancakes with olive oil sound like a dubious idea, taste-wise.
Regarding frying things in olive oil, I was also under the impression that it's not particularly heat-stable and unhealthy substances can start forming at relatively low temperatures?
As for high heat with olive oil, I'm not sure about it being unhealthy or not. I just found this overview [1], and it seems like there isn't great evidence. I again hadn't considered it, since it's something my ancestors have done for thousands of years. Sample size of one family, but my grandmother lived to her 90s and my great-aunt is still walking around Paris in her mid-90s!
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/cooking-with-olive-oil-faq-safet...
and I thought of the sunny episode when I read your comment.
"just in case is as good a reason as any to believe in something", whether it's monkey paws, throwing salt over your shoulder, knocking on wood, etc.
Yes, it takes slightly longer to clean some stuff up, but at least I'm not eating as much plastic/PTFE.
Similarly, there are plenty of different metal spatulas for different purposes, like decorating cakes or cooking on one big stove-top (as opposed to individual burners, that's something you see in the restaurant kitchens more often than in private use). And, again, you don't have to use any specific one for any specific task. My mom never had a spatula and did everything with a single chef knife she had, and it still worked for her.
>> should be pretty obvious even before this study that plastic, heat, and ingesting the result do not go together.
I don't think this is true.
Also wood spatulas exist as a very good replacement for plastic spatulas for teflon pans anyway.
I suppose I could go cast iron, but I'm sure I can find a study saying those are terrible too.
Got a bunch of carbon-steel cookware and she loves it.
Or do you perform a quick season on the cooktop right before frying / searing? In that case, you could also use stainless steel cookware, which is even less maintenance than carbon steel.
Stainless steel is very foolproof actually, but at the end of the day, we mostly prefer silicone/wood utensils in the house, except a couple of items.
Pros: SS can go right in the dishwasher, it's safe & you can use metal spatula, no worry about loss of efficacy over the years.
Cons: It takes a minute more to prep, harder to clean (sides/edges aren't non-stick)
Personally, between this option and carbon-steel pre-seasoned, I see no reason to own Teflon pans.
And replacing sugar with sweeteners is even worse.
Sure, your T-Fal pan will "release a fried egg" instantly for the first 20~30 fried eggs, but then they will start sticking as the coating naturally erodes into your food and your body (including the adhesives that make a 'non-stick' surface adhere to metal). A splash of olive oil is all you need, and olive oil it is one of the healthiest foods out there.
> Needless to say it's a bit more involved, but I felt more accomplished when I figured out how to cook with it.
The rituals and sense of accomplishment. Teflon is very convenient, when it fails you buy a new one, RVS takes a bit more expertise and cast iron is even more of an adventure, it gets better over time, last many generations. It is different in that it heats very slowly but also stays hot when you put it on the table. Nice for slow dining and/or foods that don't stay warm for long. If the handle is also iron you can put it in the oven. You get to cook different dishes that go from the stove in the oven.
As for what you’re missing: nothing for cooking smaller foods, but it is unmatched for baking and frying. I’ve found it to be a lot more capable in keeping oil temps consistent and giving good crusts to pan pizzas and cornbreads. So if deep dish pizzas, breads, seared/fried meats and veggies, and huevos ahogados sound good I’d definitely recommend having at least one 10-12” pan around.
I think at the end, it boils down to cooking style and preference. We use both (non-stick and stainless steel), and some foods are easier to prepare in one w.r.t to other, however, nothing is impossible in either.
All non stick coatings require care though. Never scrape with metal, do not wash in the dishwasher, and do not overheat.
The rule 0 of item maintenance is, "if you care for your item, your item cares for you when you need it".
I'm very interested about how you can achieve this.
some minor outputs of food oil oxidation/polymerization are believed to be probable carcinogens. these compounds will be present in all food cooked on any surface. this varies more significantly based on your food choice and preparation method than your cookware selection. if you're eating, you're consuming oxidized and polymerized food oils.
the pan itself could potentially contribute iron to your food, or molecular variants like rust or magnetite (oxidized iron). this iron isn't harmful. you're more likely to be deficient than have too much iron. in fact, cooking with iron is occasionally advocated as a way to supplement iron nutrition, to treat iron-deficient anemia.
there are potential impurities in the iron alloy of the pan. most impurities are removed by the foundry process as 'slag'. when iron is heated to molten temperature, everything reactive will burn off or evaporate. other metals will float or precipitate. slag is removed before casting, but some may remain mixed - these will be oxides of foundry inputs used to regulate the melt such as calcium, magnesium, aluminum, and barium. these are controlled to low fractions, but even so are nontoxic or nutritious when ingested. if you're using metal cookware, there is some slag in your cookware.
i just now tried to find a study indicating some harmful property of cast iron but i couldn't find one.
just stop using plastic to cook. it's not hard, and it's not expensive. it's even easier than being miserable on the internet
No they don't. How can you even say that with a straight face? Scuffing the surface != damage.
There's a big difference between cooking on a piece of metal, and cooking on a multiple layers of chemicals invented by the aerospace industry; or overheating a metal spatula or overheating utensils made from recycled electronics' plastic.
This idea that it is impossible to cook without all this over-engineered, hyper-marketed, disposable, mass-produced QVC crap is utter nonsense.
Nobody needs teflon, or nylon, or plastic too cook with. You can cook perfectly fine with centuries old technology. The same way the people who invented the recipes cooked centuries ago.
Is his post supposed to be taken seriously?
If this person is a fact checker, he's probably run into plenty of people who would say "I don't find the data personally convincing" to explain why they don't trust vaccines.
Setting aside the fact that the purported harms (if specified at all!) are nearly always based on confounded observational studies and/or animal models at doses that may not bear any relationship to the doses you're being exposed to in real life, the claims for any particular item are usually presented out of context. For example, is exposure at X<10 parts per billion compound Y meaningful, as a human who lives in the real world? Typically, nobody knows, but you can nearly always find an "expert" who will confidently claim that any exposure is "dangerous."
Skepticism and awareness of risk magnitude is essential when reading stuff like this. Academics who specialize in obscure areas love to get their name in the press, and the easiest way to do that is to go to a reporter and make vague and irresponsible claims about risks to human health, even if those risks are very, very small. [1]
For what it's worth, I have a Teflon pan, I've used black plastic spatulas in the past, and I'm not worried about it. Compared to the reasons I already know that I'm likely to die, these things are irrelevant.
[1] Case in point: I knew a tenured professor at a prestigious university who was absolutely convinced that if we all continued to eat beef, we'd be looking at an epidemic of vCJK (aka Mad Cow Disease). Saw a lecture from this person on the subject over a decade ago now, where the risks were presented as looming and absolute. We're still eating beef. Guess what hasn't happened since then?
(1) https://www.buffalobirdnerd.com/storage/app/media/Teflon.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever
”When PTFE is heated above 450 °C the pyrolysis products are different and inhalation may cause acute lung injury. Symptoms are flu-like (chills, headaches and fevers) with chest tightness and mild cough. Onset occurs about 4 to 8 hours after exposure to the pyrolysis products of PTFE.”
There is basically no safe limit for these chemicals — EPA limit for drinking water is 4 ppt. U.S. residents already have average blood PFAS levels to the tune of 4000 ppt.
Indeed. When was the last time you left your nonstick pan sitting on a cooktop with nothing in it, for hours?
If you're the kind of person to leave empty pans burning for that long, I'd be more worried about cognitive decline and/or the risk you'll die in a fire of your own making.
The temperature is the least relevant part of what I wrote.
Furthermore, the quote above merely states that the pan has to reach a specific temp, not be out for hours.
If you live in the US, chances are your blood already contains these chemicals at 4,000 ppt or greater (four thousand parts per trillion is the nationwide average).
No, they aren't. At least, not in the way you're interpreting the word "toxic".
> If you live in the US, chances are your blood already contains these chemicals at 4,000 ppt or greater
The fact that you're telling me that I'm currently thriving with 1000x the "toxic" dose you just quoted should tell you that at least one of the statements is exaggerated.
Again, there are people out there who will tell you that any exposure to certain chemicals is "toxic". These people are not worth listening to.
If a company knowingly uses a toxic chemical, it shouldn't be everybody else's fault they did that.
You are fucking 10x more aware of bullshit you're doing just to keep baby safe. Probably more like 100x, really. Nothing focusses your mind like having CREATED A HUMAN THAT MUST BE KEPT SAFE AT ALL COST.
Can't we discuss the company's responsibility?
> if you're old and you die in an accident, you died of old age, not "that specific accident"
Your metaphor absolves any drunk driver from murder charges as long as their victim is old enough.
Or we could recognize that lapses of judgement are something every human is capable of and demand such outrageous things that our cookware remains safe at any temperature a reasonable stovetop can produce. Really it shouldn't just be safe but also not break the cookware.
Teflon flu is a thing, but it is relatively rare, especially considering how widespread Teflon pans are. That's a few hundred cases per year in the US, by comparison, there are about 1000x more house fire, with cooking equipment being a leading cause.
Worst case scenario here is people throw out their relatively harmless spatulas and buy new ones. Big whoop.
I won't deny that many such academics exist. And yet...
The numerous successful academics at reputable universities that I know (including me) are uniformly mortified when our names are associated with mistaken interpretations in the press. Some of us (including me) simply stop doing press interviews because it happens so often.
If you want to find an incentive to get undeserved attention, I recommend you look at economic incentives within the press itself. Too much time pressure, not enough training, desperate need to gather attention to sell ads. All the opposite of the academic world.
I think social media - such as HN comments that shoot down almost every OP without fail - is by far the best example? Most comments on social media on such things seek attention for being smarter-than-though and have no basis in anything, including the comment at the top of this thread by 'gidmkhealthnerd'.
> All the opposite of the academic world.
The pure academic world and the evil Media! If you're an academic, maybe we can something better than joining the mob against the bogeyman.
If the OP can't handle criticism it's hard to argue that the attention is deserved
Absolutely! You're one of the good ones! I just wish you were in the majority. :-(
Edit: that's unfair. I don't know if you're in the majority or minority. I want to believe that most academics are still just silently plugging away and doing good work. It just really feels like things have shifted to the huckster side of the spectrum, and/or that is what is rewarded.
That said, I grant your broader point about selection bias.
But you should also consider that only one or a few people championing for change is how safty has historically improved. We have had too many cases of industries knowingly poisinging people for profits while funding studies that say everything is fine and marginalizing the few reasearches who have morals and don't just go after the biggest profits to discard concerns like this just because there is only one person championing them.
Also, plastics have quality grades from "that's good stuff" to "this thing smells funny in a bad way". We have some IKEA food tweezers which use black plastic molded on steel prongs. It's stamped with "+150 degrees C" and the black is hazy, like it's colored with a dye or pigment, and plastic is hard like bakelite.
OTOH, I have used other "black" spatulas which are uniform in color, but neither as sturdy, nor smell neutral.
We have silicone counterparts to these items too. They're more rubbery, but they have hard plastic spines inside so, they don't flex.
At least now I'm angry in a constructive way.
Happy Halloween
Often media will say "people exposed to Y have increased Z" but fail to mention that in studies those people worked in industrial settings with Y and the exposure level is hundreds or thousands of times higher than in a consumer setting.
The industrial setting offers the hints that there might be a problem but, as you rightly point out, also might just be a case of too much exposure.
An example of this is radiation exposure, it took an embarrassingly long time for society to link radiation to cancer, and that was a somewhat obvious link. Radioactive beverages were literally marketed as health beverages because of their radium content.
Most of it comes from China, presumably from people who see waste byproducts of rare earth metal processing as a business opportunity.
There are easy, safe alternatives in wood, metal and silicone. There’s no need to risk it.
Precautionary principle? I'm sorry to say stainless steel may leech heavy metals into food during cooking [1]
And also silicone may leech potentially harmful chemicals into food [2]
Nonstick coatings? Teflon flu "could be a real concern" [3]
Wooden spoons are porous and can crack, making them a breeding ground for germs, and they can splinter [4] - and good luck finding a wooden spatula that doesn't suck.
So personally I don't think it's churlish to take these warnings with a grain of salt. Especially for rarely-used pieces of cookware.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4284091/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19680914/ [3] https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/teflon-flu-r... [4] https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1941959/replace-...
I don't have a cultural analogy for this situation but whatever it is is worse than "boy who cried wolf".
Edit: apparently you can tell the difference by squeezing them too - silicone will feel rubbery.
Also "capillary action" takes place in wood, meaning water and/or bacteria on the outside of the wooden surface essentially diffuses into the wood, "choking out" the surface bacteria and therefore not providing them with a good environment on which to grow. Additionally, wood has antimicrobial properties.
Honestly though, in home kitchens, you're waaaay more likely to get foodborne illnesses from accidental cross-contamination or time/temperature abuse of particularly risky ready-to-eat foods that people aren't as careful with as they are with meat— like cut melons and questionable been sprouts, cooked cut vegetables, cooked rice, and others. It's funny how careful people are with jarred mayonnaise, which is pretty indestructible. If that potato salad left out on the table at the picnic made you sick, it's the potatoes, not the mayonnaise.
As an aside: most people are completely wrong about what gave them food poisoning. To get a better idea, you need to look up specific symptoms and incubation periods... But contact tracing is the only way to be sure. And the most common— norovirus— could have been picked up anywhere. Even if you wash your hands right before eating, you could have gotten it from the seat you pulled out before sitting down, and alcohol isn't great at killing it. Working on restaurants, when someone said "you made me sick! I'm going to call the board of health!" I'd say "feel free. They're going to tell you to get tested to see what you have so they can compare it to other reports, and in the unlikely event that some of the other hundreds of other people who ate here when you did got the same illnesses, I'd want the board of health to know about that."
The big problems I've seen with greens all came from field contamination that couldn't be washed off, but that could also be because other types of contamination don't have a single source point and therefore don't trigger a recall/definable outbreak/news coverage.
And when it comes down to it, these are natural organisms that don't come from industrial food production, and will always be somewhat of a risk as long as we eat natural foods. Botulism spores naturally occur more frequently in parts of the western US in places that grow a lot of garlic and onions, which is why we need to refrigerate garlic oil and such— industrial food production is excellent at killing botulism and cases of poisoning come from improperly prepared home canned goods, because doing it 80% right kills everything else, and you could go 3 generations using that recipe before getting over contaminated with botulism, and then everyone at dinner that night dies. Eating industrial canned food exclusively could eliminate most risk of pathogens altogether, but then there's other risks like chemical leeching in many products, nutritional considerations, other contamination (normally a negligible risk, but would it be if you only ate industrial food?) and who really wants to do that, anyway.
But in the US, no for we sell is as risky as raw chicken. Not by a long shot. It's really bizarre that the FDA is so upright that they won't allow soft raw milk cheeses to be sold, but the USDA still, I believe, doesn't legally classify the deadly Salmonella Heidelberg to be an adulterant, as they do e. Coli OH157. Not sure if it's outdated, but when I was in culinary school some time ago, 1 in 4 chickens had enough Salmonella or campylobacter to make a healthy adult sick.
The most impactful things it seems to me home cooks can do to reduce their risks are a) don't to anything else while cutting raw meat, and immediately wash everything that touches it as soon as you're done, b) invest in an instant read thermometer if you cook meat that has a lot of surface area exposure to equipment (e.g. ground meat, sausage, cube steak), c) don't keep cut melons or bean sprouts for more than a few days, d) keep all uncooked meat in the bottom of your fridge below everything else.
There are other things that are risky that people don't realize— cooked room temperature rice, raw flour, room temperature brewed tea, etc etc etc— but they're less frequently problematic. It's a risk/reward just like anything else. A tea shop in Boston made a ton of people sick not refrigerating it's iced tea some years ago, but it didn't kill anyone, and lots of people have made sun tea without getting sick. People WAY overestimate the risk of eating raw eggs, but something like 1 in 10k eggs could do it.
I'm in the UK and didn't realise that. We easily buy raw milk cheeses here, but they do carry a warning about people with compromised immune systems and pregnant women.
> There are other things that are risky that people don't realize— cooked room temperature rice, raw flour, room temperature brewed tea
I was aware of the issues with pre-cooked rice and how reheating it is unlikely to make it safe. Raw flour is a new one for me - I would assume that it being dried would kill off most nasties.
However, room temperature brewed tea is incredibly dangerous here in the UK as you're likely to get lynched if you serve that to someone as a nice cuppa. Otherwise, I'd guess that it's the sugar content that gives the bacteria something to munch - it's why kombucha can be dangerous if not brewed carefully though that's more a case of getting the desirable bacteria to out-compete the nasty ones.
Heathens over here.
So properly made kombucha wouldn't be risky, but as you noted, it isn't always properly made. You can do most culinary things wrong enough to get you sick if you really put your heart into it.
Nowadays, I like to make kefir as that seems like the easiest fermentation - milk and kefir grains in a covered glass jar (not airtight) and leave for a day. Temperature isn't critical and there's no sterilisation needed.
Most of my utensils do not float. I finish them with a homemade or food grade beeswax. The act of cooking alters the new look, but they acquire their own, slightly less perfect, but reasonable finish.
I'll be making some katalox spoon/spats soon... another glorious wood, but not quite as remarkable as a good piece of cocobolo, which can be really special.
Anyway, my work with these utensils started for the precise purpose of avoiding plastic.
This is a clear case where a regulator should step in and just ban these black plastic utensils in favor of their safe alternatives.
That way you're not just protected from exposure in your own kitchen, but also when joining your friends for dinner.
Indeed. Although now I’m pretty annoyed about the 6 or so black plastic cooking utensils I received as a wedding gift nearly twenty years ago lasted this long, so I’ve been using them this whole time. Oh well, at least I don’t cook much :/
I'm not even sure it does that. My cheapo wood spoons/turners/spatulas get dishwashed ~every time they're used, and they're 10? years old at this point. One finally cracked a few years ago but the rest are going strong.
Not really, just avoid them as they come up. Case in point: Throw out your black cooking utensils and use an alt. Simple simple. No crazy to it.
If you're certain they're trivial concerns, then they should be easy to dismiss.
If the problem is that you're not sure if they're trivial -- or which are and which aren't -- then what we've uncovered is the shortcomings of a policy oriented primarily around notifications. You'd want judgments made by people with toxicology qualifications whose job it is to focus on questions like this. Which was the point of the comment you're responding to.
Have you considered the safety profile of the ink used for any markings, the stain on the wood, and any oil or wax coatings?
https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1473049577905401859
I use Tried and True linseed oil or linseed oil + beeswax for my coatings. Occasionally I'll use pure walnut oil.
I understand that not everyone likes to make such things! But I don't suspect its hard to find pure wood ones. Lots of people make them. Even just searching "unfinished wooden kitchen utensils" yields a lot of results.
> I actually made all of my wood cooking implements from scratch. I cut down the trees and carved them.
Is this trolling? "It's easy, simple, just carve your own tools out of trees". Sounds like "just don't be poor" to me.
It is inexpensive to buy unfinished wood utensils, anyone can search for them. And in the context of the problem, silicone is just as well if wood seems too difficult to find.
Only a regulating agency can truly protect you from exposure to harmful chemicals, because they can spend the time cataloguing all these chemicals and remove them not just from your home but everywhere else as well.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try and reduce your own exposure, it seems like a good idea. But ultimately it may just be a token effort because of all the other ways that you're exposed to those chemicals.
Good luck with that. Temperature isn't perfect and hot pockets of higher temperatures form.
I don't think that's particularly accurate unless you're considering the action of individual atoms. e.g. Water is considered to boil at 100°C but there will be some water evaporating at lower temperatures but this is a different process that only occurs at the surface. I don't think it's accurate to say that water is "slowly boiling" at low temperatures unless you're reducing atmospheric pressure.
Sure, you can get a cheap non-stick pan that may or may not give you cancer, but why? I'm in my 40s and since I can remember thought it made no sense to cook with plastic anything. My parents still cook with the same wooden spoons my dad brought back from Algeria before I was born. The pans will last multiple lifetimes. The same can't be said for their plastic and non-stick counterparts.
Another thing is that a loot of wooden utensil are made in several piece stick together with glue. A lot of cutting board are made that way for example (especially the cheap ones). Most glue are not very dishwasher safe. It might be fine for a few wash, and then you end up with pieces of a cutting board.
plus side, it's very clear when the piece is damaged beyond repair.
Lots of things can also absorb dishwasher detergents which is probably not great for your health. But for non porous things dishwashers are great !
It's why I like wood. You don't need to baby it, and if it breaks down, you throw it out and it returns to the earth.
a cast iron or "stainless" steel pan will get some gruff from cooking since its nonstick. It regularly goes to the dishwasher, some stuff won't get cleaned. Mostly oil burn stains it seems ("stainless" hardly!) .
Is that completely safe/expected ?
We obviously diddn't get that with the nonstick pans. We got rid of that stuff for a reason, now i'm not sure what is worse: nonstick pan surface OR hard-stuck burnt oil on a stainless steel pan. Thoughts?
I use mine daily for anything and everything. I wash it with Dawn. It continues to work as well as any cast iron I have ever seen.
Apparently the "don't use soap on it" advice stems from the era of harsher lye based soaps.
Stainless is pretty easy to get totally clean with steel wool and/or scotchbrite pad sponges.
Worst case-- you've gone too high in temperature for too long and you need some bon-ami.
I have never been able to figure out stainless steel on the other hand. Apparently the trick is getting to the right temperature but I have never gotten it to work.
On the health side, Teflon pans used to be considered totally safe until they were not. Now they are considered safe again as they no longer use PFOA. Burnt oil and iron oxide might not be ideal either but at least it isn't novel to humans as it has been used for thousands of years. Unfortunately, difficult to get hard science on such subjects as it would have extremely large studies conducted over large periods of time to overcome the noise. In any case there are probably far more impactful decisions in life than which kind of pan to use.
Stainless is can do the job too, but temperature and shortening is even more important. There's a much tighter window of temperature that it works at. You do the "water drop test" to determine that it's ready. See youtube for an infinity of videos on how to check the stainless is at right temperature!
I've given up on non-stick pans. They're semi-disposable because the don't last very long and you don't want to use them at high temperatures. All it takes is a little bit of skill to never have to use non-stick teflon pans.
My trick though is that I have a cast iron only for eggs... if I cook other stuff in it the smooth buttery coating gets lost and the eggs start sticking again. After a few days of eggs-only it becomes nonstick again.
Stainless steel also works very well. You just need to preheat it to get the Leidenfrost effect.
I haven't played much with preheating though, I'll have to try that - thanks for the suggestion :-)
There isn't really any clear data on what exactly the seasoning on our pans is, and what by-products are also formed. It seems somehow no one has done an academic deep dive on cast iron. Heating oils to the point of polymerization is very likely to have byproducts.
Now for the conspiratorial part, it seems likely that large manufacturers (Lodge) have done the research internally, but they haven't released anything along the lines of "We have research backing the safety of our pans!".
In some ways I really would not be surprised if it comes out that the seasoning process creates all manner of nasty byproducts.
Personally I make a lot of pressure cooker stews and things with more liquid which is less hassle and less chance of burning. If it needs to be seared in the outside then that can be done quickly without needing to cook the whole thing (pan or oven)
Maybe, but they're so easy to clean without a dishwasher. And even easier to clean later if you rinse them off immediately after cooking so stuff doesn't stick.
Some other options include getting a spouse that will do it for you, or to use the dishwasher and just accept that you will have to replace things more frequently.
Listen to yourself man. Get a spouse because you can't personally wash cookware by hand? If you make decisions in your own life how you're suggesting I should then I shudder to think what a horror show it must be.
For cookware with PTFE non-stick coating, it is basically the only solution, with silicone, but I personally don't like silicone utensil.
In any case, I also started to avoid PTFE coated cookware, because no matter how well you treat them, the coating will eventually get damaged (and PTFE is supposedly not very good for you). Now I just use stainless steel for anything that is not too sticky, and carbon steel for everything that need a bit of a non-stick surface to be cooked properly. They are not too hard to maintain and they don't get damaged like PTFE non-stick pan.
18/0 stainless steel is the best. No nickel etc.
I think there’s a balance between being neurotic and being blissfully ignorant, but given the high level health data in the west it’s probably time to be more neurotic.
There's more information on our current understanding here: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea...
The people who's moral compass seems far more faulty are the people in the comments who are doing the same thing but who have no comparable motive to behave in such a way. Generally, though there are a couple minor examples in here today.
A more fundamental error is say 'there's no proof, therefore I assume it's false'. There's no proof that it's safe either. We make almost all decisions without mass longitudinal studies.
And worse, IMHO, is the poison rhetoric: 'If I can shoot their plane, I'm smarter than the person trying to fly.'
A lot of people use it's black plastic tools like this one [1] -- like a lot of brands, OXO calls its black plastic tools "nylon" to differentiate from "silicone" -- and it would be really, really good to know if OXO has always rigorously made sure never to use recycled plastics, or if testing shows that its own products contain flame retardants.
In other words, when you pay premium prices for stuff like OXO as opposed to a dollar-store black plastic spatula, are you getting premium quality that avoids the kind of contamination described in the article? Or are the premium prices just going to the design and marketing, but not to the manufacturing?
[1] https://www.oxo.com/shop/kitchenware/utensils/sets-holders-a...
Edit: wasn't trying to be snarky or anything. Honestly concerned for my family's health and trying to figure out the best path. Wood spatulas it is. Replacing all our PTFE pans with much more expensive cast iron pans isn't an option for our budget right now. Plus I haven't seen convincing scientific evidence that PTFE is as harmful as people here seem to imply. My understanding could be outdated though.
Maybe one day we’ll all have affordable temperature controlled induction ranges similar to the Breville/Sage control freak. If you have the ability to preheat your pan to an exact temperature then getting nonstick results with tiny amounts of oil or butter becomes rather trivial.
1. Too much thermal mass and too little thermal conductivity. This causes poor feedback and unnecessarily high delay between heat being added and the measurement reflecting it.
2. Manufacturers love to cast their logo right in the bottom center, which means that the sensor doesn’t make good contact with the pan.
I wonder if someone makes a nice stainless-aluminum-carbon steel clad pan.
This pan exists! It's made by an American company called Strata. Stainless steel on the bottom/outside, carbon steel on the inside/cooking surface, and aluminum sandwiched in between. It came out this year. I've seen a few cookware YouTube channels do some first looks, unboxing, seasoning, and first cook tests but no long-term reviews so far.
Cast iron is definitely the most challenging cookware material to use with any flat-top cooking appliance. Whether induction or traditional ceramic, flat-top ranges tend to be quite poor at creating even heating in cast iron. Gas on the other hand works quite well because of the natural upward draft produced by the hot combustion gases which wrap around the sides of the pan, enveloping it in a blanket of heat from below.
What a lot of people don't realize is -- in non-stick, virtually all the oil winds up in the food. Since it doesn't stick to the pan. With steel/iron, most of the cooking oil stays in the pan.
So yes you will end up using 3x or more oil. But you're not consuming 3x oil calories. It probably isn't any extra calories at all.
For scrambled eggs you can use a double boiler (you’ll never have had fluffier eggs). An extremely well seasoned carbon steal pan will also work wonders (basically what fry cooks use)
For fish, cooking fish whole on a grill is amazing. Another technique with stainless pans is to get the pan searing hot first. Then add a tiny amount of oil and cook the fish and don’t touch it. This should set the surface protein quickly and create a crust that prevents sticking (requires a little practice but not too hard)
cast iron, stainless steel.
They're my least favorite to clean and most likely to throw away because I can't get them cleaned.
>Wood food working implements get stained, develop cracks and chips that may retain bacteria
This happens after years of use ... buy a new one? They're like 1 dollar. Lol.
Usually you would use different materials for different tasks.
I also do 70% of my cooking in that pan!
I make up for the lack of seasoning by using more butter or oil.
The true reason why I use these cast iron pans is that they have a very long lifecycle (going 12 years now for some of my pans) and they sear way better than other cookware.
We switched from gas stove to induction and now they work even better since the handle doesn’t get as hot and it’s easier to control the temperature.
The whole seasoning thing is extra credit, the only failure mode I’ve seen is trying to fry an egg on a completely unseasoned pan, which just means some extra soaking and scrubbing is needed. The pan seasons itself after a few uses. Hand wash the pan instead of sticking it in the dishwasher, done.
Either that or use a stainless steel pan.
That doesn't sound (and isn't) healthy.
Good tip with the coarse salt, I'll have to try that sometime.
Do not put them in the dishwasher though, or you'll have to re-season them.
Soap is more of a cleaning aid for removing flavor than a safety control.
That said, I usually use tumeric in liquid dishes with a stainless pot. What are you cooking?
Those are wrapped with enamel. Pretty hard to notice seasoning with that.
My big realization was that there’s a lot of macho information there about the care of cast iron, and it’s pretty much all pointless because the stuff is indestructible and the seasoning doesn’t matter much. Every time I make tortillas in a pan the seasoning gets wrecked, and it’s just not a problem. So long as you get the pan to the right temp and have enough fat, nothing sticks regardless of the quality of the seasoning. Skimp on the oil or set the temp too low, and stuff sticks no matter how good the seasoning.
I wash the pans with soap and water (and not too much scrubbing), I never season them deliberately, and they work wonderfully. It’s a very forgiving cooking surface.
I accidentally removed a little of the "seasoning" of a cast iron and in the following uses it started to come out around the scratch.
Where I live there's another plus to wood utensils, I can help the people that make them locally
At least once a week I give my vintage cast iron a good scrub with Dawn powerwash and chainmail, dry on the stovetop, apply a layer of Crisco, and then wipe it all off as if I put it on by mistake.
Man, I'm so turned off by the entire cast iron hype cult. I've tried so hard to make it work for me, and it just doesn't, and everyone's advice is totally different so it's impossible to know what to do. Wash it. Don't wash it. Scrub the shit out of it. Just remove the chunks and leave the rest.
The reply will inevitably be "it's simple, just...." where the words following "just" are different from anything ever written on the topic before.
It's a piece of iron. It's cheap. It just works™
* Let the pan cool (if I'm lazy or it's late, possibly this is overnight and then I do the rest in the morning).
* Scrape out any easy solid waste (burnt food bits, etc) with a wood spatula edge and throw the waste in the trash.
* Toss a healthy amount of salt into the pan and scrub the pan using the salt, with your hands/fingers. The salt is a great abrasive, like sand, but I don't want sand ground into my cookware, while salt is fine for food.
* Rinse out the dirty-salt-mess with plain water from the sink.
* Occasionally, if stuck-on things are particularly stubborn, repeat some of the above steps as necessary until the pan surface is smooth and clean.
* Wipe off most of the remaining wetness with a paper towel (the towel will probably look pretty dirty, that's ok).
* Throw the pan back on the cooktop, pour a few tbsp of cheap olive oil in the middle, and turn the burner on as high as it goes. Wait a few minutes for the oil to thin, spread, and smoke. Once it's smoking pretty well, shut off the fire and leave the pan to cool again.
* Later when it's cooled off again (possibly overnight or hours later, whatever), gently wipe off any excess liquid oil with a paper towel and store the pan back in the cabinet, ready for next use.
People use them for cooking different things, so the advice is bound to be different. Maybe they don't work for your cooking, and thats OK.
There’s also a potential health argument against cooking with Teflon pans to begin with, but people do and those people shouldn’t be using metal if they want their pans to stay non-stick for any reasonable length of time.
I switched to carbon steel as a daily driver two years ago and it is is trivialy non-stick with a little maintenance. The non-stick properties are infinitely refresha le, unlike "non-stick" pans.
I also have cast iron and stainless pans for other uses.
Unfortunately try as we might to get people to switch, the fact is that undamaged Teflon is more non-stick than anything else and most people don’t want to put the effort into seasoning their pans.
Teflon is popular, and Teflon owners could do with utensils that don’t destroy their pans or give them cancer.
The answer is wood and metal tools with stainless steel, carbon steel, cast iron, glass, stoneware, and enameled cast iron cookware and bakeware. Aluminum bakeware is also great once you put a layer of seasoning on it to protect the aluminum from corrosion.
Silicon is much more resistant to heat and chemicals. I believe the polymers are also more tightly bound.
I also think people cook too much on nonstick. Non stick has a place in the kitchen for specific dishes. But for the most part you can cook most things in a combination of high quality stainless steel pans and cast iron. Some food sticking in stainless is a good thing (Maillard reaction), deglaze the pan and scrape it up with a good wood spatula.
It might be time to look for a johnnycake recipe, and that's OK.
Has nothing to do with toxins. My old belly just can't handle waffle/pancake batter stuff.
I miss waffles...
The bone broth waffle here would be a good search root (you’ll pardon the colorful menu, I hope): https://coffeedose.cafe/pages/flagship-menu
^ I’m not even gluten free typically
As far as I know, I don't have gluten sensitivity, but it may be something that could make a difference.
Whenever I have anything made with pancake batter, I feel bloated and uncomfortable. I understand that gluten-sensitive people have much more ... adverse ... reactions.
Funny, though. I can usually eat most cookies, no problem. There's something about pancake batter that does it.
Pancake batter is characterized by lots of flour and baking soda, if it’s not one it’s likely the other.
I did not pay $400 for it, but it looks like this: https://www.hardmill.com/products/griswold-8-waffle-iron-wit...
It also works very well, and as an added bonus it makes much better waffles than the modern Teflon ones do. You just can't get the same crispy outside out of a nonstick surface.
I get your point , waffle irons are plentiful and available throughout history -- but finding some antique is pretty likely to just swap your contamination from one to another.
Or if you're lazy, copy me and get Åviken Elegance.
That said, I’ve personally been to multiple cookware factories in China and Taiwan and saw bags of Dow thermoplastic resins next to various cheaper-by-half China brands. The reason name brands go with Dow is the consistency in Pantone color matching colored parts. For black, it would be trivial for the contract manufacturer to cost-down to (toxic) China brands without the client (Oxo) ever knowing. It would also be trivial to spot check these products on a mass spectrometer for heavy metal contamination but I never saw that done.
If this kind of thing is important to you, I wouldn’t stop at just using Oxo but Oxo made in Asia. And if that’s your threshold you may as well use silicone.
I have worse stories about non-stick pan factories.
[1] https://www.oxo.com/corporate-responsibility/better-products
[2] https://www.eastman.com/en/products/brands/tritan/about/safe...
Aren't these contradictory statements? If it's "trivial" to spot check their product that is otherwise indistinguishable from the competition using mass spectrometry, why wouldn't QA do that? It -doesn't- sound like it's trivial for the supplier to rip off Oxo if it's "trivial" to use an industrial tool for quality control.
What am I missing here? Do you somehow have internal knowledge that Oxo does not do that "trivial" QC step?
What I hate is even paper containers have plastic lids. I worry the plastic snap-off lid is shedding microplastics into my orange juice, or by beef is getting plastic strands when I cut in to the vacuum sealed packaging.
Similar to its use in car tires, carbon black can impart strengthening and durability properties to the final product that other pigments do not exactly match.
Now if the final product is always going to be black anyway, then you wouldn't really need to start with clean virgin plastic, you could actually use some pretty ugly stuff and cover up unsightliness or inconsistency better in black.
Well the carbon black is made from a "special" oil scientifically known as CBO. I know the chemical jargon can be confusing most of the time so just take my word for it that the "full chemical name" is Carbon Black Oil. Unintuitive nomenclature, but aren't they all ;)
CBO is from some real dregs of petroleum refining, it is raw material that is going to be coked further and it does not need to pass the kind of testing that is required for black fuel oils. Shady operators have targeted these heavy black oil stocks as diluents for their non-refinery chemical byproducts that would otherwise end up as "chemical waste" in some cases.
In the heavy oil lab where people are checking things like viscosity or flash point, you need good ventilation all the time everywhere and never turn off the hoods. It has to be below acceptable levels without a respirator when an H2S-bearing crude is being handled. You still smell it because H2S is just that rough, but at least it doesn't linger and it's not enough to give you a headache. Tolerable now, not like it was decades ago before they started certifying fume hoods.
CBO doesn't have any H2S but it is never tolerable. It bears quite a variety of disagreeable notes that do not resemble any characteristic form of crude or refined petroleum, and it is often described as "weird smelling" by experienced oil chemists. The variety is amazing and hard not to notice, some batches are just so different and others so repulsive. This is when the most sensitive people reach for their respirators, even though they are just fine handling pure benzene without, because the ventilation really is that good.
Bon appetit !
It would appear that it's the PAH content of petroleum derived carbon black that is the carcinogenic component
Naively, I would think the paper you linked is about carbon (the charcoaley substance) derived from vegetables being used as a black food coloring, and the poster above is talking about “carbon black oil”, a type of oil derivative that looks black - two completely different things.
> Carbon black (with subtypes acetylene black, channel black, furnace black, lamp black and thermal black) is a material produced by the incomplete combustion of coal tar, vegetable matter, or petroleum products, including fuel oil, fluid catalytic cracking tar, and ethylene cracking in a limited supply of air.
"Carbon black" refers to both types, but "carbon black oil" is referencing the petroleum derived one which is not allowed to be used in foods as far as I know.
(@dang, please consider using it as the main link.)
i've heard it is reasonable priced in other countries but not the us.
My real rant though is there is no reason why induction should be an expesnive niche. There is no reason I should pay extra for features that don't cost extra.
So spending more than a 200 $ premium over a resistance stove with 4 hobs means you're being ripped off or spending on luxury.
In the US we almost always use a range not a cooktop. I need one with an oven. Something like https://www.homedepot.com/p/Amana-30-in-4-Burner-Element-Fre... - which is several hundred cheaper than what you linked. As long as I'm going to replace what I have, spending a little more for the other features I want seems like a good idea - I will likely use it for decades as you say, and induction is in a very limited selection such that I can't really get any other options at any price. (well I did eliminate some Samsung options - Samsung has earned their bad reputation in kitchen appliances)
This might be a better comparison:
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Frigidaire-Gallery-30-in-6-2-cu-...
Yes, induction is still more expensive, but it is not crazy more expensive either for middle class homeowners that no matter the fuel want something nicer than that shitty Amana linked (that's low end even for grad student slums).
What must have features are you unable to find in the current crop of induction ranges?
I expect my range to last for a few decades and I cook often. If I'm going to spend several thousand dollars I want something worth it and so far I can't find anything that fixes all the issues with the 40 year old range that came with my house and so I'm saving my money for some other 'toy' I will enjoy. as an engineer I'm in good finiancial shape but not so good I can replace my range whenever I feel like it (if I was I'd have a much larger kitchen)
Irrelevant. I'm not debating the merits of Ikea furniture, but they do not produce appliances, they rebadge Electrolux, Whirlpool (Amana) and Frigidaire, and the models they are offering are simply not the most basic ones (though they have just the tier above - this gets you at least a fucking oven timer and lighted, windowed oven), that's just a fact.
I grew up with a Calrod cooktop, like non-stick cookware they are iconic post WW2 marketing Americana. Like Oscar Mayer bologna, they were considered suburban "luxury" and marketed as superior to gas (the marketing of gas superiority is whole other thing, but prior to inductive it was actually superior for most things, that's why it was/is the mainstay of the restaurant industry). https://thisoddhouseblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/electric-s... But I have no desire to go back to that. Terrible heat conductivity, slow response, imprecise temperature control, terribly inefficient especially in the summer (as a side effect, piss poor cooking power compared to even a domestic gas range, yet no ability to go as low). It's hard to overstate how much easier (if not just possible) to cook certain foods on something with precise wide range heat control whether it be gas or inductive.
Obviously people made do with these for years, and if one is happy with that level of functionality and convenience (especially at the lowest of the low end of features), and it allows them to prepare what they want, it's unlikely they'll appreciate any of the benefits of an inductive cooktop.
But it gives precise and rapidly changeable heat control, a radiant heater does not. This is important to people preparing more varied dishes. This sounds like this is simply of little benefit to you, because you still haven't mentioned what features on the current selection of inductive ranges is missing.
They're also wickedly more efficient because you're not radiating a ton of waste heat into the conditioned space (at least in summer and warm climates). There are people that cook and bake enough that the electricity of both the heating and the space cooling are a noticeable monthly expense. Not the primary benefit point though, true.
When you add up all the things we're "supposed" to be doing for one reason or another it's a pretty large cumulative burden.
And for people who must have their gas appliances, there are always portable units/generators. They can use those.
I have been doing most of my cooking on a gas hob for 5 years now. Could you share more detail on this point?
I feel the need to be scared today (it is Halloween after all).
Comparing BTU's wouldn't be an accurate metric since with gas a lot of the heat is lost just going around the pan/pot and heating the air. This source [1] claims it took 992 BTUs for gas and 430 BTUs for induction to boil 1qt of water.
https://www.treehugger.com/which-more-energy-efficient-cooki...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_fuel#/media/File:Access_...
"Of the more than 200 black plastic products Liu bought at retail stores for her study, hardly any were labeled as being made from recycled materials, she said. Consumers have no way to tell which black plastics might be recycled e-waste and which aren’t. “It’s just a minefield, really,” Turner said."
I'm well aware of and own many of the more manual options that don't have this issue. However, the automatic feature is killer (heh) and this seems like an obvious miss by manufacturers.
The latter you can for instance get in porcelain.
Then again, the only things in the cold-water path of my machine are:
- silicone gaskets
- silicone grease
- PTFE
- silicone tubes
- clear plastic water tank
As for the hot path:
- silicone gaskets
- silicone grease
- aluminium
- steel
- copper
- brass
- PTFE (in contact with steam)
Definitely not.
But the thing about cold-brew is that it tastes mostly sour to me and nothing else (which is unsurprising given our taste-buds are most sensitive at higher temperatures, and proper extraction of coffee can't happen at those lower temperatures as some compounds just won't dissolve at the same rate, and sour compounds in coffee dissolve the fastest). With warm brewed (+ warm drank) coffee things are more balanced (not just straight sour) and you get the interesting flavour notes from the bag.
I don't think the quality of the coffee I am using is the problem. It might be the variant, but I enjoy natural light roasts (and light roast is already difficult to brew without it getting too sour).
700 ml water, 50-60 g beans, 24 hours in fridge. When drinking we mix with 3-4 parts water. I always drink cold, wife drinks it hot. Lots of flavour and fun to try the local roasterys seasonal tastes.
They're substantially more expensive than consumer units.
Instinctively, I'm much more worried about the latter, though I admittedly don't know anything about the science behind what temperatures flame retardants or other undesirable contaminants might leach out of the plastic.
The article also speaks of a black necklace for children that was found to be 3% flame retardant chemicals by weight, saying
> Those flame retardants migrate into toddlers’ saliva and into the dust in our homes
Perhaps it's fine if you don't lick your coffee machine, or perhaps not. I guess being less worried makes sense but I'm not sure that we need not be worried about boiling our drinks in fire retardants (assuming they're present in these materials)
I was just recently looking at bicycle seats for small kids and the one I found interesting happened to recently have a recall (Thule) as they grossly over applied the flame retardant to a point where it was immediately toxic. I am guessing it was in the foam pieces but such a depressing idea that we need to make outdoor bicycle seats flame retardant.
In general though, through the 50s-70s there were some tragic events where people died in fires. Part of this is federal legislation, part of this is California who required household furnishings to withstand an open flame. Most of the legislation still stands, some of it like CA's has been reduced to a smolder test but it still requires some retardants.
People don't pay attention to this one but its in everything, mattresses, couches, baby sleep wear. And for me, a bigger issue than PFAS.
As another commenter stated laws were passed but more so than that the companies who make things were concerned about lawsuits and reputation damage so treating consumer textiles for flame retardants just became standard industry practice.
As an aside, I know a historical reenacter who had a need to make some char-cloth. The only thing he could find that wasn't treated was cotton work gloves.
Every time I go over to mom's place it's so shocking to see these utensils being used for high heat applications they were never meant to be used for.
Flipping burgers in a pan, moving fries on a baking sheet - the ends of them are all warped and disfigured, bits carved out of them from scraping something and a piece of plastic chips off and ends up in the food.
Same with the pots and pans, she's been using the same teflon coated set for the better part of a decade and to her it doesn't matter that there's a spiral from the stovetop element burned into the inside of the pot where the teflon's overheated and chipped off.
I've tried buying her new pots and pans, utentils, etc. and educating her about how much plastic and teflon she has (and by extension I have) been eating over the years but it's in one ear and out the other.
We really need to stop making plastic cooking utentils. I've moved mostly to glass or metal bowls for storing, microwaving, baking foods - silicone for utensils (which I've heard is still somewhat risky even though it's inert?)
Microplastics are the leaded gasoline of my generation it seems like.
>educating her about how much plastic and teflon she has (and by extension I have) been eating over the years but it's in one ear and out the other.
I have much the same problem, though luckily I haven't lived with her for ages. According to her, eating plastic and teflon isn't a problem because she's so old that it's not going to make a difference.
She also has guests and visitors, so even if she doesn't care about ingesting microplastics herself, she should worry more about them I should think.
The real solution is sunsetting single-use anything for any other applications outside bio labs or medical procedures. But $$$
Indeed. The first step is for the planet to get rid of the pesky pollutants, perhaps by way of launching several “natural disasters” such as mighty strong winds, excessive floods, and particularly pesky deathly organisms. Then it can deal with plastic at its leisure.
Those $$$ correspond to real-world costs.
For examplee, we also want to lower car usage. Do you imagine that people who commute by bicycle or train are going to carry around durable versions of every single-use item they currently encounter? Cups, straws, plates, utensils, napkins, takeout containers, grocery bags, produce bags, tissues? Carrying around dirty versions of all the above until they get home to clean them?
Even if they do, detergent is also single-use, and damaging to aquatic environments.
I'm not some kind of hyperlibertarian, but I think we need to properly tax externalities (such as poisoning customers and destroying the viability of the biosphere), use the proceeds of that for mitigation, and let the market take care of the rest.
Napkins and tissues are not made of plastics.
So, yes I fully expect people to carry around reusable things even when they bike. It’s not that hard. You know how I know? Because I do it every day.
Honestly stopping using single use items must be the easiest thing to do to limit the amount of trash you generate. It has absolutely no impact on your daily life.
Would you be surprised to learn that napkins and tissues and paper towels have all sorts of plastic coatings on them? It’s an untold story and I’d love one of these pubs to do some research the way they did about pizza boxes back in the day
Your 100% cotton sweater has petroleum-derived coatings on it too, which give it a soft handfeel in the store and keep bugs from eating it on its way over from SE Asia :)
No one is asking you about buying using refilable containers you bring to the store. That's not what's talked about when people talk about single use items.
I am 100% in favour of putting in place a container-deposit scheme however because these glass containers are actually reusable most of the time and should be collected back. Plastic overpackaging should just be banned. The whole thing is just a waste of ressource only possible because externalties are not priced in.
As far as I am aware, those are mostly obsolete/moot/whatever. Still used for pickles, to the best of my understanding. Tomato sauces (spaghetti, etc) have started to switch over already several years ago. Glass is mostly for premium products, the $12/qt organic-grass-fed-shoulder-massaged milk.
Even if I'm generous and assume you're not talking about grocery stores... it's practically impossible to have a fast food industry without single-use packaging. Most of the McDonald's in my area are designed around drive-thru and delivery. The closest probably seats 30 inside, but has two drive-thru lanes and a large rack right next to the counter for the Uber Eats bags.
They won’t be if you start pricing plastic packaging generated externalities in the products prices.
> it's practically impossible to have a fast food industry without single-use packaging
It’s so impossible it’s actually done in France if you eat it and they are mandated by law to use your reusable containers if you bring them.
Sure. let's make food more expensive for poor people. That's always grand policy. It'd be one thing if it was limiting how many Chic-Fil-A sauce packets they got in their drive-thru paper bag, but this also (believe it or not) affects those trying to eat at home with minimally processed foods. At some point the 72-serving Gigantosaurus bulk Hot Pocket box in the freezer section looks better than some of the stuff that resembles food people should eat.
> It’s so impossible it’s actually done in France if
I have no clue why people can't just magically wish themselves French and have entire centuries of French culture and habits imprinted on them just because people who played too much SimCity 2000 as a kid think that other people's lives should be micromanaged for a higher score. God save us from the technocrats.
I know I started this whole argument by speaking up in favor of efficiently throwing things away, but I do want to speak out in favor of making (harmful) things more expensive for poor people; and giving poor people enough money to make up for it.
This also applies to a lot of other things, like taxing semi trucks for the insane amounts of damage they do to the roads compared to other vehicles, and then paying poor people for the increased price of goods at Wal-Mart. It may sound like taking extra steps to have the same result; but because you're reducing externalized costs instead of subsidizing them, everybody ends up better off.
The magic of deposit refund system is that you only pay more once. Plus really poor people can actually collect unreturned items to make some change. Have you ever considered how things worked before plastic?
> I have no clue
That much is pretty clear.
I’m very happy to see that you are able to claw at anything so that your initial impossible as actually been exposed as entirely possible. I think it’s nice that you are so afraid of change you can’t even fathom taking such large steps as using reusable containers to limit trash.
Your insight into the economics of this is shallow. If plastic is cheaper than glass, a "deposit refund scheme" doesn't fix the fact that forcing everything to glass makes it more expensive. Glass jars aren't just washed and reused, they have to be melted down to be reused at all. There's a big fuel usage penalty there (not to mention this is fossil fuel, so all the climate change connotations). In some really pathological scenarios, the single-use plastics can actually be better for the environment, since once the plastic is landfilled the carbon stays out of the air.
> That much is pretty clear.
Cheap shot. About all you have, isn't it? Just big dumb ideas that make you feel good, that you've never much contemplated to any depth, that would make things worse for everyone.
Glass, unlike plastic, is impermeable. In Germany, the pfand system incentivizes bottle return by around $.10 to $.50 per glass bottle; and they're washed & sterilized, then re-used.
This does work as a subsidy for poor people with time on their hands; pfand bottles are often left next to outdoor trash cans instead of in them, and they usually disappear very quickly.
Glass jars tend to have small fractures, especially around where the lid/cap are, making them unfit for reuse. Inspection is tedious and manpower-intensive. Melted down and put back into the blow molds, if reused at all. Industry works differently than the political perception of it. You might want them to be reused, but it's just not the way the world works.
Instead of jacking off over political videos, go watch some of the non-political ones of the "how it's made" variety once in awhile.
I couldn't tell you whether it's economically efficient or energy-efficient to do things that way, when you consider all the direct and indirect inputs; any more than I could tell you how to make a pencil. But I can tell you that Germany does it.
This used to be done in the UK with milk delivery, the empty bottles were exchanged for clean, full ones. They even used electric vehicles!
Some of the reason being that they are planning their trips and know what they can carry, and know that they don't want to carry more. Reusable water bottles in a work backpack are an example.
The other aspect is you don't have to carry all of these things. If you eat in a restaurant or at a house you are more likely to have reusable options available (ie washable plates and dinnerware). In many ways, car culture is linked to takeaway culture, which causes single use culture.
Top of mind; it's easy to picture the American automobile with bags of fast food trash.
Doesn't seem uncommon at all to me, that's what my colleagues and I do, same for my wife and her colleagues (and we work in very different environments and places, different countries even).
Some of my colleagues wash their dishes at work, I just bring them back and put them in my dishwasher a home. My wife has a dishwasher at work so they just put their stuff there. The products we use for washing at home or at work claim to be biodegradable and not harmful for the environment.
Properly taxing externalities is an obvious thing to do though of course.
It's bizarre to see how new chemicals are basically "allowed because they are new" (maybe except in food additives), and the producers are expected to do inhouse undisclosed self-testing without being held to any standard.
and it absolutely won’t be limited to coffee lids. when we don’t hold creators and sellers of products to any kind of real standard, they over and over and over will cut corners. we know this is a fact.
when we don’t hold them responsible for the harms they directly or externally cause, we have to waste our fucking time scrutinizing ridiculous items like coffee lids. soon it will be each of the hundreds of items we buy during our regular trips to target—from toothbrush to laundry soap to shampoo to batteries.
we have to get some actual enforceable testing, standards, and holding bad actors to account soon or it’s going to be a very very real mess.
when we can’t trust companies to sell us safe spatulas or the lids on our coffee cups, we know we’ve gone off the rails.
no one has time to “do their own research” on the hundreds or thousands of random products they come in contact with every single day, “the market” has never fixed this, this requires regulations with teeth.
Just use carbon/stainless steel pans, wood turners, and metal spatulas. Your food will be better and the implements will last ~forever.
I've also done it in stainless steel and while it does work there's a bit more of a learning curve imo. Have to heat the pan first then add the oil at just the right heat (when a drop of water glides around but doesn't evaporate too fast).
All in all I'm glad I learned how to use and care for cast iron.
1. heat empty stainless over med-high flame until a drop of water scatters and glides over the whole surface (leidenfrost). It should look like beads of mercury.
2. drop to a med flame, add a bit of oil (avacodo, ghee, ....). If you're going to a lower temp oil (butter, olive, ...) drop the flame even lower and let the pan cool for a minute before adding.
3. crack eggs into the pan, and don't touch them until there's a bit of fried edge
4a. if you want over-easy, turn the flame off well before you flip, and let the residual heat cook the top.
4b. alternatively, cover the pan with a pot lid to steam the tops.
If they stick, a little bit of extra oil, or a few drops of water on the edge can help release.
its strangely specific yet strangely vague?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...
"This study sought to determine whether black plastic household products sold on the U.S. market contained emerging and phased-out FRs and whether polymer type was predictive of contamination."
and they do say its mostly abs, followed by hips , then pp; and do not say anything about other colors and other materials, plastic or not.
Its glass transition temperature is approximately 105 °C (221 °F).[4] ABS is amorphous and therefore has no true melting point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styr...
for people arguing about the quality of research, yes you can argue on research but use your common sense and ask yourself if plastics are really safe?
The way it really works for plastic is this: almost all bad plastic is black, but not all black plastic is bad. That's it.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with virgin black plastics. (Well, at least, nothing more than is wrong with plastics in general.) So there is no reason to fear black plastic from reputable sources.
The trouble comes in when plastics get recycled. There may be sourcing issues for black resins, but the root of the matter is this: black plastics are typically pigmented with carbon black. Carbon black as a pigment is cheap, safe, and very effective. That's good! But that also means that when you throw together a pile of recycled sludge mix and it comes out beige, greige, or worse, you can't sell that (who would buy greige resin?? wait, don't answer that)... so you color it, cheaply... which means carbon black. So almost all random crappy recycled plastic resin ends up black. That's the real problem with black plastic.
That is, a reputable source, e.g. an established cookware company, may proclaim that their existing black plastics are fine, safe for cookware, and have been tested. But a smart move for them would be to stop using black plastics for cookware, because a customer will just remember one highly reductionist association: "cookware + black plastic = poison". It's not always true, but it may sometimes be true, and that's enough.
Even if the particular research will be found lacking by new investigations and reproduction attempts, a lot of people will still remember this association for years, due to its shock value, simplicity, and trust to The Atlantic (which is generally a really good resource).
This and the fact that it's a high risk / low reward scenario.
There's no reason to not forgo black plastic now
Frankly, nobody should be so credulous as to trust what a consumer goods company claims. You just have to look up how often well trusted consumer goods companies get caught "accidentally" using slave labor.
The need is for a regulatory body like the EPA or FDA to step up and check that the claims are more than just that.
The issue here is that these plastics are super cheap and testing is expensive enough. I have absolutely no faith that a consumer goods company will follow through or continue to follow through without a monetary penalty. This is something that's just to easy to cut once headlines die down.
Is there a way to see if/how comment was edited?
I'll try to quote things more directly from now on...
But how do you even judge that? My coffee machine is all black plastic. It has dozens of parts. The hot water runs by/over black plastic.
It's an expensive and reputable brand of coffee machine, but I have absolutely no illusions that some/most of the black plastic parts it contains are straight from different factories in China.
And I would be surprised if anybody QAs the chemical makeup of raw plastic input. As long as the parts mold correctly and hold up structurally, nobody would notice when the Chinese injection molder changes suppliers mid-batch.
Yes, they are.
> I would be surprised if anybody QAs the chemical makeup of raw plastic input. As long as the parts mold correctly and hold up structurally, nobody would notice when the Chinese injection molder changes suppliers mid-batch.
And yes, they do care. Critical parts (and food contact parts are always critical) usually specify a specific resin from a specific manufacturer on the procurement documentation. The major brands absolutely 100% audit this when they check in on their suppliers. And the major brands absolutely do check on their suppliers. (Many of them are even supplying the resin themselves, so they really care if it's getting diverted.) The factories are not incentivized to mess this up, because they know it's game over for their business with that brand (or even OEM/CM) if they screw up, so they instead get it right and just charge more. This is what you pay for when you buy name brand products.
And it's what you give up when you "save money" buying on AliExpress!
Everyone wants to reduce their plastic intake, but nobody wants to throw 80% in their kitchenware in the trash. There's no obvious steps you can get people to follow to check if their spatula is one of the "good" ones, so tossing black plastic is a good concrete step to advise people to take.
This said, the parent article recommends silicone utensils among the safer alternatives.
Are we saying that plastics are bad and then redefining "plastic" as the subset of the previous classification which are bad? That's the kind of language trickery that duped us into making utensils out of an industrial waste product in the first place. If we're going to protect future generations from whatever harm comes after plastic we're going to need to stop being so vage.
Silicone is better for food preparation as it withstands heat better, has low toxicity (especially compared to additives used with plastic utensils), low reactivity, high resistance to oxygen, ozone and ultraviolet light, doesn't support microbes and repels water which is great for things like spatulas.
HN seems to have huge unfounded FUD around anything plastic related even when there's no scientific evidence.
Toxicological evidence takes a long time to acquire. By it's very nature it's a lagging indicator. Remember when everybody freaked out about BPAs? That's because good studies showed the accumulation of those compounds in the body, and the potential health issues it could drive.
And what about now that we have all these BPA free plastics? Most of them have replaced the BPA with other compounds. They haven't been studied, so there isn't evidence against them. But the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
Finally: what, in their long and storied history, has led you to believe that 3M, DuPont, or Eastman are acting in the best interest of your health? Because their incentive structure favors wealth creation, not population health.
That's not exactly relevant. Relevant is if it leaks from the plastic into liquids or not.
>what, in their long and storied history, has led you to believe that 3M, DuPont, or Eastman are acting in the best interest of your health?
I don't. That's why we have EPA and FDA.
The glass one is most likely going on my Christmas list (even though that is sort of expensive for what it is)
Once you have nailed the grinding process (with a single dose grinder for consistency, for example), the filtering parts of the procedure are 2 minutes.
Or the thought of pressing too hard on a glass AeroPress, having it tip over and shatter, slicing through my arm. Would be the silliest way to go out.
I timed it once and I can literally get in the car and drive somewhere and get home with a 32oz coffee faster than my chemex can produce the same amount.
I’d pay $3k or more for a coffee maker that
1) had water line hookup capability, or at least a large glass reservoir 2) integrated conical grinder 3) all stainless/glass internals/zero plastic 4) timer functionality
I want to wake up and get ready finding a perfect pot of coffee on my schedule, with the only manual work being to remove the previous grounds each day and periodic maintenance.
AFAIK no one makes this.
I can recommend porcelain pour over and paper filters. I fill up around 1L in the morning with hot water from the boiler. It’s very boring and non-fancy, takes about as much time as a coffee maker (pouring is slower but cleaning is faster). Use a thermos if you want it hot for longer. Great flavor for non-snobs.
IDK if these are part of the problem, but if so, that is a LOT of goods to replace. Anyone have any details on the type of plastic used in these coffee pots and if it is part of the problem set?
PET is the opposite of flame-retardant, BTW. Light the top of a clear PET water bottle and it'll often burn like a candle (though much faster).
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/002689708020778...
Now I know that yet I drink water exclusively from plastic bottle, because ground water is contaminated with pesticides here. So it's either micro plastic in the water or pesticide, choose your poison.
Because I don't use Teflon (plastic) covered pan, I need more oil to avoid food to stick to the pan. The oil comes in plastic bottle, category 1, that are known to transmit pollutants to liquids and especially oils because they're fat.
I choose to go with butter then, so I can avoid the plastic bottle. Every butter comes in a soft plastic coating that definitely doesn't look natural. Didn't search internet for it but pretty sure it is also plastic and it exchange pollutants with the butter.
Not even speaking about the cow milk used to make butter and it's different contaminants, mainly pesticide residues, metals, mycotoxins, hormones, and others reaching the cow through feeding or drug administration by producers.
My rant could go on forever, the point is that plastic and pollution is absolutely everywhere. You can at best mitigate it by being proactive and wealthy enough but it's still not enough.
Even if you buy good quality food from non pollutated area, you don't really know if it hasn't been tampered with. Findus sold beef lasagna that were made with Romanian rotten horse meat..
You can filter your tap water; there are various ways to do so. I’m sorry your water is contaminated. That’s awful.
I wouldn’t always assume the worst with the cows milk and butter. There is a wide range of product and conditions out there.
Certain kinds of plastics and applications are known to leach chemicals far worse than others. Frozen peas in plastic? It’s minimal. Food pouches for kids? Awful - it’s liquid that’s heated in the plastic to pasteurize it.
You can get olive oil in glass very easily. It’s usually the default. I order from the Napa valley olive oil company in bulk - glass jars with high quality oil that used to be excellent value. They’ve gone up in price but still decent value compared to the market.
Analysis of microplastics in commercial vegetable edible oils from Italy and Spain - 2024
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...
• MPs were detected in all samples which were stocked in both PET and glass bottles.
> You can at best mitigate it by being proactive and wealthy enough but it's still not enough.
Even with your example of free pollutant olive oil, it's easy to find studies that it is in fact contaminated.
I'm sure it's rather limited, but the point remains that pollution is inevitable nowadays.
I worked in building construction, we learned at formation that because of the asbestos used in construction all over the country there is now asbestos fiber in the air absolutely everywhere. Again, it's maybe 1 fiber per liter in middle of countryside, but still...
Pollution is rather recent, it's been only 200 years we pollute so much and the fact is its effects are increasing very fast.
> All of our food contact products comply with EU regulations which states that materials do not release their constituents into food at levels harmful to human health. [2]
and they aren't some no-name brand that wouldn't suffer from lying about that.
[1] https://www.josephjoseph.com/products/elevate-carousel-utens...
Press release: https://toxicfreefuture.org/press-room/first-ever-study-find...
Personally, I just got afraid of ever buying takeout sushi, put a label on the black spatula and hope to use it for garage experiments but you do you...
We can afford to take the slight efficiency of not using dubious chemicals to store and prepare our food. Bring back glass, wood, and untreated metal. No more cheap plastic microwavable crap. In the scheme of things, the incremental cost increase won't matter, and such a shift would at least give us peace of mind --- and maybe even improve our health.
For anything that requires cooked goods to be intact, I use metal. Spatula, fish spatula, and a large spoon for serving.
For anything that is going to be stirred, I usually use wood. It's hard enough to scrape fond off the bottom of the pan but it isn't going to damage non-stick, to the little extent that I use it.
For viscous dishes, I use silicone. The ability to get the very corner at the bottom of the pot and actually get the stuff up is great.
Of course, you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware, but they are, so...
- I tend to re-season my cast iron every time I use it and it’s a chore to do this for my early morning meals.
- Non-stick is just more non-stick, with cast iron I am constrained to using a certain heat and/or fat content to create the non-stick property which I might not want for a certain dish.
But I have to agree that non-stick pans are even more non-stick. That's why it took some convincing here to not buy new ones in my home.
But I just wanted to make sure you don't re-season it with the whole procedure, like oil, potato peels and salt fried for a long time. Because that would be definitely a lot of work each morning ;)
You don't even need the entire paper towel. During the Hamas attacks last year I was unable to leave to the store for quite some time and began seriously reducing consumption in the house. Half or even a quarter paper towel is enough.
And even that doesn't need to be thrown away - the paper towel is still clean for purpose of reoiling the pan the next day if you absolutely need.
Use soap to actually clean it.
Or maybe Im mistaken, but does cast iron work equally well on a “hot surface” (ceran) type stove?
Actual steel is an alloy that is much more advanced, even when it is not a stainless grade.
Eggs and egg dishes (e.g. pancakes) mostly. No other pan works as well. Washing after cooking is also very quick and easy. Perhaps you've never used a non-stick pan that was maintained correctly, i.e. never overheated, stirred only with silicone utensils, and washed by hand using only non-scratching sponges. Most non-stick pans I've seen owned by other people have been in poor condition. If you think cast iron makes better food you probably use it for searing, which should never be done with non stick. And many people falsely believe wooden utensils are incapable of scratching non-stick pans.
> Eggs and egg dishes (e.g. pancakes) mostly.
That non-stick spray PAM is straight out, unless maybe you're huffing it. For eggs & pancakes I find that cast iron is responsive enough to temperature changes when used with induction, and that butter works to prevent sticking just fine.
> never overheated, stirred only with silicone utensils, and washed by hand using only non-scratching sponges
Things like the weight of the cast iron means lifting it with wrist, cleaning it (in the sink). Other things like making it easy to cook proteins. Seasoning and maintenance.
Cast iron is heavier, can't cook acidic foods, and just isn't as non stick. They have their place, of course, and are excellent for searing.
Oh and wash your cast iron. Soap no longer contains lye, and won't remove the seasoning.
I use a wood spatula at home. I flip pancakes and eggs.
I opened an incognito tab and googled "spatula" and this is literally the second result https://www.target.com/p/acacia-wood-solid-turner-brown-figm...
> I’ve not gotten sick from home cooking once.
How would you know that? Unless you’ve never been sick at all, I don’t know how you could say that.
And many people do not understand where actual danger comes from. For example it is a really bad idea to rinse raw chicken meat. Yet this practice is still widespread.
https://www.cdc.gov/food-safety/communication-resources/wash...
Every argument there could be used to justify not washing your hands. Just lick them to keep the germs to yourself. Wouldn't wanna spray them around.
I'm in my mid-50s. I use wooden cooking implements a lot. I clean them pretty carefully. So far as I know, no one has ever got sick from eating food I've cooked.
The sample size is one person cooking but it isn't only one opportunity to get food poisoning. Let's say 20 years, 300 days per year, one meal per day; that's 6000 food-poisoning opportunities, none of which has obviously resulted in food poisoning for anyone involved. That is in fact quite good evidence that the risk of serious food poisoning on any single occasion, if you use wooden implements but are reasonably careful with them, isn't high enough to be noticeable above the baseline rate of people getting sick.
If someone doesn't take any particular precautions and never gets COVID-19, that is evidence that COVID-19 is less of a threat than it's sometimes felt to be. But not very much evidence, and it can readily be outweighed by all the other people who have got COVID-19, including some who did take reasonable precautions. Similarly, my and iamacyborg's anecdotal evidence could absolutely be outweighed by statistics correlating food poisoning with type of cooking implements. If anyone has those, I'd be very interested to see them.
Wooden boards need to be maintained, however, which with frequent use means occasionally sanding them down a bit in addition to the usual cleaning and oiling. The problem with wooden boards is mostly that they're not dishwasher-safe and people are too lazy to clean them properly by hand. A plastic cutting board you regularly put in the dishwasher is probably safer than a wooden one you only half-heartedly rinse, at least in terms of contamination.
Using metal spatulas with non-stick is a big no due to the scratching. Ideally, you should throw away any non-stick cookware that gets a scratch on it.
You should use silicone spatulas instead.
https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/y...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
For what it's worth, the simulated cooking experiments involved cutting up the utensils into small pieces, grinding those into a powder, then vigorously combined with hexane (the terms "vortexing" and "ultrasonication" are used), then subsequently combined with sulfuric acid, and dried. Small samples were then immersed in olive oil maintained at 160 Celsius for 15 minutes. (I may have misinterpreted this section, but it described the first step as "pre-treatment of samples")
It's perhaps interesting to note that the only sample listed as "new" in Table 1 with substantial levels of bromine was a thermos cup lid (180 μg/g), and only a small number of other items had detectable levels in the 3-10 μg/g range. Meanwhile, many samples purchased to 2011 had levels well over 100μg/g. That said, I also don't know how representative this study is in the context of, say, a thermos lid if you're not storing any liquids substantially above 100 C.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
A nice, smoothly polished stainless steel spatula with round corners and a slightly convex edge shouldn't do anything to your non-stick pan.
You have to deliberately be trying to damage the non-stick surface with such a spatula to do any harm.
If the non-stick surface actually working, you shouldn't be using any force to scrape anything off. And there's margin for that.
I use one of those 5-in-1 painter's tools to remove grime from just about any surface without damaging it. I would cheerfully use it to take a dried paint splatter off a $100K Steinway. :)
Non-stick cookware was invented for a reason.
The cooking process it also far better, with the whole pan being uniformly hot and staying that way.
Eww, gross.
This is not necessary, you can (and should) actually clean your cast iron pans. I certainly clean mine.
Or clean as in industrial degreaser or varnish stripper?
Soap artist and still do that process though. Handmade soap will probably have some sodium hydroxide in it.
(Does anyone use that for dishes?)
I see people worrying about this shit while walking on cliff edges, honking down cans of energy drinks and puffing away on vapes. There are probably larger health and risk considerations to make in your life.
Plus stickiness affects quite a few foods - eggs, pancakes, but also ie low burn simmer. There are cca inert linings like porcelain enamel on La creuset and similar, but in convenience its still subpar to non-stick and prices are high.
The whole point of why people go for non-stick is that you don't become a bit a slave to such an insignificant stuff like freakin' pans. Maintaining them, redoing the 'non-stick' surface... that's not direction we generally call quality of life, in fact it goes directly against it (have less things, free up yourself to have more time for yourself and our closest ones and not just continuously maintain gazillion stupid little or bigger things).
> You will get tremendous amount of iron oxide (rust) into the food to the point when you can taste it
is generally not a problem. In fact, cereals are fortified directly by adding iron oxide—enough that if a magnet is run over it, it will pick up a substantial quantity of iron filings.
If you're especially concerned about your food tasting iron-y, a good substitute is stainless steel. Bring it up to 200°C, add in a small touch of high smoke point oil, add your proteins, and cook. No sticking.
All my cookware is metal including my spatulas, spoons, pots, and pans etc which are stainless steel, aluminium, or enamelled cast iron. Metal is infinitely more durable and flexible (in terms of where and how it can be used, not literal flexibility à la Young's modulus) than any silicone/plastic/non-stick cookware. You can pop a stainless steel pan directly from the stove into an industrial oven. You can put metal (even cast iron, really) in a dishwasher. You can violently scrub at any metal with steel wool and Cif/Gif to attack stubborn stains. The likelihood of something sticking to it is a small price to pay for the sheer peace of mind and flexibility.
Oh, final point. If scrubbing stuff off is such a pain, get a dishwasher.
That statement doesn't seem compatible with the chemistry. The seasoning on a cast-iron is a (plastic) polymer that is fairly resistant to acid attack—especially the weak acids in food. It's why the strongest and most concentrated acids are stored in plastic and not glass beakers.
in every pot or pan i have ever used, scratches were a problem. and only metal tools could have caused them.
They are obviously something like 70% plastic resin, 30% sawdust.
Just use metal wood or glass. One thing I'm not aware of is if Pyrex or the other tempered glasses are safe or if they also contain plastic. That would be good to learn.
Old Pyrex was borosilicate glass.
Most conveniently differentiated by the branding on the product.
All caps "PYREX" is the classic (high quality) borosilicate stuff.
Titlecased "Pyrex" is the modern ordinary glass stuff.
https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/y...
Will I actually see actual difference if I throw away all my cook ware and replace it with non-non-stick ones and wooden utensils?
What about pollutants in the air from car and industry exhaust? Is this cookware worse? Should we first consider moving somewhere else than worry about cookware?
What about just the ingredients you cook with? Is using teflon worse than buying highly processed foods? What about GMO vs non-GMO? What about grass fed/free range vs in-prison-meats? What about vegan vs meat?
What I am trying to say is that it is easy to point to something that is (or even might be) toxic and say that we should fix it, but we have to put things in context. You simply can not be afraid of everything. Like drinking out of plastic vs glass vs metal, I know people who swear that drinking from a plastic cup is about the worst thing you can do, but I have been doing it my whole life and at least aren't dead yet.
B) Unless you scratch the hell out of your pan the teflon coating (probably) isn't that bad
C) Cooking on a teflon pan is just so much more pleasurable
Every single thing you mention, except for cooking, does not get exposed to fundamental transformation via heat, or if they have (such as ingredients), they have passed the test of time (nutrients). Ingredients being heated has happened for millenia with fire wood and metal. This is why we care about what we cook and what we put into our bodies. Have we done this before for a long time? Was it safe for a long time? Time matters
I can't say the same about teflon, highly processed foods, etc.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B4T...
So let me ask you again. Its Friday. You have a rib eye, asparagus, and an old credit card on your plate. I’m sure you would not eat a credit card, and would think people were insane for doing so.
So why not try and avoid it if you can. Sure you can’t avoid everything but if you can avoid some things in your control why wouldn’t you?
The argument is that you probably are doing way worse things health wise than using a teflon cookware or black plastic cooking utensils. This is just a scare click bait.
The "scares" are overwhelming only because you live in a society where things are (slightly) toxic by default, because those things are cheaper and can be engineered to barely pass safety standards.
We can and should change this situation. Hopefully not on the individual level, but at least public awareness is useful.
The "scares" are also overwhelming because some people are extreme in everything, for example the person who swears never to drink from a plastic cup. But it doesn't mean the opposite stance (i.e. drinking from plastic cups is good for you) is true. You can believe plastics are slightly bad for you without overreacting, and acknowledge that if it's feasible it's better to avoid them. Reacting emotionally to extremists isn't what a rational person would be doing.
They're glass. They don't contain this. In particular, oven-safe glass is supposed to be of the borosilicate variety... but about 20 years ago manufacturing was moved to China (haha!). They're not properly formulated or tempered anymore, and in many cases not oven safe. They tend to shatter with large temperature changes, spilling hot casseroles over people who aren't in the habit of having steaming hot casserole showers and then complain about those.
> Just use metal wood or glass.
I like those materials, but think of the damage you're doing to the CPI with your advice. How would we combat inflation if we weren't able to constantly substitute in cheaper packaging materials and so forth?
Same with most kitchen cooking implements.
Stainless steel pots and pans are much cheaper, last longer, you can scrub and scrape them and the big upside is you don’t have to consume DuPont non stick chemical coating nor feed it to your children.
Despite all the celebrity chefs in the world attempting to sell you their name brand chemical coated fry pans.
It is possible to cook with cast iron in a way that won't leech too much iron into food, just as it is possible to cook with nonstick in a way that won't leech Dupont chemicals. But I'd much rather just use foolproof stainless or ceramic cookware that doesn't have these issues.
I mean I know iron and blood are related but this particular statement just won't compute
Hemoglobin in blood contains a lot of iron; it's used to bind oxygen. Too much iron intake apparently can result in its overproduction, and too much is no good. Donating blood rids you of excess iron, while also benefiting other people.
I suppose you should first check if your levels of iron are indeed excessive.
Also, you get a free iron/anaemia test before donating.
The way the comment is phrased, it implies that it's bad for men in general. Your link says for people with a specific issue.
The link actually says iron overload can also be called haemochromatosis too so a bit confusing that that page says it’s inherited…
My understanding is that to get iron overload, your body would need to absorb excess iron and store it. This happens with haemochromatosis over a long time (30+ years), but it can also happen if you consume way too much iron by, for example, taking too many iron supplements when you don't need them. In normal circumstances and with a standard diet, the body will regulate it's iron intake so that too much doesn't get stored and so there's no iron oberload.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this leaves me a little confused about what the commenter meant. If you have a normal diet and don't have haemochromatosis or some other confounding factor, I don't see how enough iron could be leached from a cast iron pot to cause iron overload.
It makes no sense to fixate on elemental iron residue from your cast iron pan, especially if you're still getting heme iron infusions from red meat.
Anyone who doesn't lose blood somehow - for modern humans that usually means either menstruation or blood donation - should be careful of sources of excess iron in their diet. It's one reason why multivitamin supplements are often labelled as "for men" or "for women". The women's one will have iron.
A pan is about 1 kg (a good cast iron one could be much heavier). That's enough for 200,000 bowls of cereal.
Even if you reckon the pan is degraded enough to be obviously useless after losing 5% of its weight, that would require you to use it every day for 30 years, not "a handful of cooks".
[0] https://www.haemochromatosis.org.uk/breakfast-cereals-and-th...
Consider all outside food is toxic too.
If so, my huge respect! (Otherwise...)
"you have to grow your own" is hardly the way to think about it .. we source the vast bulk of our food locally from our state and various farm groups.
To address your questions; Yes, we (the household I live in) have our own poultry, yes we grow our own grain, yes we have our own sheep. Ditto potatoes, figs, oranges, lemons, manderins, blueberries, garlic, herbs, olives, olive oil, etc.
No to "milk cow" - this isn't prime dairy country; that's some 500 km south and that's where we get milk from .. still extended family though. Beef cattle and the best fish is some 1,000+ km north - still the same state and still from extended family.
Essentially what we eat comes from our land or that of people we know either directly or with a single intermediary.
It's pretty healthy that way, we have one of the highest life expectancy's on the planet and COVID was a non issue here, both of the two roads in|out of the state were "closed" (goods trucks loaded | unloaded with no driver social contact, just sleep over, move on) the ships and airports quarantined with a mandated seperation of people or a mandated one-two week isolation if coming in.
Here's the local grain co-op: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBH_Group .. we can pass harvest on and get back ground grain in sacks for home use.
State land area is 3x that of Texas, state population 2.5 million (ish), mostly city dwellers.
"Outside food" - overly processed as found on (say) US supermarket shelves ... dunno much about that.
The south west corner of the state is dairy country, forrests, caves, big surf, cool year round, the northern part of the state can get pretty hot - the Pilbarra is sparse dry desert country that explodes with colour when the rains pass through.
Though you won't need to scrub very long if you use this:
https://barkeepersfriend.com/products/cookware-cleanser-poli...
Because of chemistry I don't understand, oxalic acid is amazing at removing burnt on food.
The chemicals don't appeal to me - I don't want them in the house, in the sewage water or as residue on the pots.
Soak pots in plain water for several hours and they'll clean easily.
For reference it is how wok cooking is done and they use extremely hot pans/burners. If you're using gas switch off the heat for a second.
That said, at Waffle House, we used carbon steel pans for eggs. There was a point where every pan would start to stick, no matter how it was heated. Those pans, we would clean with oil and salt, which is very abrasive. I'm not sure exactly what the effect was: either cleaning off accumulated dirt or filing out scratches and dings that would develop. I'm not sure because the salt should have created more scratches, but there was definitely a "worst" pan that had a deep scratch in it that always had some sticking problems.
1) Amazingly smooth, clearly old cast iron pan in an Airbnb. Perfect surface.
2) Cook some of the breakfast sausage they left in the fridge for us (it was a farm)
3) Cook the eggs in the sausage grease.
No sticking at all.
I can’t do this nearly as well in the pan I have. Yeah, yeah, I’ve seasoned it a dozen times. Doesn’t do much, really.
- hot pan
- high smoke point oil
- high heat
- hot oil
- move it once it’s got the brown crust
I’ve made scrambled eggs in it before too but these were the things I did today and I’m not expert enough to minimize them without experimentation. I frequently eat eggs and don’t have much trouble.
Cast iron is fine for certain applications but not many others. I’d fry and egg in one but you can’t make a great matter in one due to the thermal capacity properties they have.
Steel lined copper is the king. But yes they are cost prohibitive for some. Carbon steel is nice too.
Maybe they are the same people who praise Apple and Tesla products for the same reason?
The pans are magic. I even take my pans camping for cooking on a fire. Truly amazing things
Consider trying carbon steel. It's lighter than cast iron and just as non-stick once it's well seasoned. It's ubiquitous in restaurant and hotel kitchens.
I love my carbon steel skillets.
It is very fast and reproducible, regardless if you scramble them or leave them intact to look like fried eggs or if you separate the whites and the yolks and cook them separately (which I prefer), and regardless whether you prefer to add some oil or not.
Even without using any oil the glass vessel will be easy to clean. You must use reduced power at the oven, to avoid explosions (obviously you should never cook eggs in their shells and you should puncture the yolks before cooking and glass vessels with a glass lid are preferred).
i've cooked a lot for a long time, and I have never gotten stainless steel to not stick absolutely everything (except water for pasta :)
I use cast iron and anodized aluminum and they are slippery AF
Stainless steel has relatively poor heat conductivity, so a direct flame would heat it very non-uniformly in comparison with an aluminum or even a cast iron vessel. Hot spots lead to sticking.
For this reason the better stainless steel cooking pots have a bottom that encloses a copper sheet, to spread the heat. In such pots or pans you will not normally have problems with sticking. With simpler pots or pans you must use an external heat spreader.
Since the article repeatedly made a point to talk about cooking spatulas and hot oil, our only hope is that those flame retardants don't dissolve well in water - but dissolve very well in oil.
But if they do dissolve in water, it's safe to assume you're boiling them out of your kettle lid every time that thing runs.
Toxicity studies like this, which quickly make national headlines, will only result in deterring people from cooking at home. It's like the 1 or 2 stories of poisoned Halloween candy that killed community trick-or-treating
Look at the actual health outcomes in the USA. Black spatulas are not a big problem. People are eating out at tremendous cost to their welfare -- the food is toxic, they eat too much of it, and it's 5x too expensive.
Does the kitchen of the restaurant I’m eating at care about that? Am I still going to drink 2 whiskeys tonight? Anyone got any tiny individually wrapped shitty Halloween candy? How do those synthetic made-in-x-country gym clothes feel against your skin? Wanna have a cigar? Are you breathing recycled air during an airline flight? When was the last time you stretched your legs? When’s the next time you’ll drink a plastic bottle of water? Got a k-cup? What’s the inner workings of that coffee machine do with the near boiling hot water? When was the last time it was cleaned? What chemical was used on your toilet that your buttcheeks are now sitting on? Want some bacon? How bout a hot dog? Been outside recently without sun screen?
So many things are actively killing us or giving us cancer. I’ll try to remember the black plastic thing, but I honestly think I just might forget and continue living in my blip of existence.
> Does the kitchen of the restaurant I’m eating at care about that?
I'd worry less about one-offs than I would about long-term exposure here.
> Am I still going to drink 2 whiskeys tonight?
Possibly, and if I was going out tonight there might be wine. I'm not, I haven't been to a sit-down restaurant since September, and I don't have anything like that in the calendar for a few weeks.
> Anyone got any tiny individually wrapped shitty Halloween candy?
Nope. None in the house.
> How do those synthetic made-in-x-country gym clothes feel against your skin?
Levi's and a cotton shirt. Probably terrible for other reasons, but today isn't awful on the synthetic-fibres front. That's not true every day, but coincidentally I'm getting away with it right now.
> Wanna have a cigar?
I don't smoke.
> Are you breathing recycled air during an airline flight?
Haven't been on a plane in over a year, haven't flown long-haul in five.
> When was the last time you stretched your legs?
20 minutes ago. (purely by chance. Couple of hours before that, though).
> When’s the next time you’ll drink a plastic bottle of water?
This isn't something I regularly do. Might go months between them.
> Got a k-cup?
No.
> What’s the inner workings of that coffee machine do with the near boiling hot water?
The wonderful thing about pour-over coffee is that the inner workings are outer workings. It's slightly-less-than-boiling water on enamel into glass, and that's about it.
> When was the last time it was cleaned?
Lunchtime, when I gave it an extra rinse.
> What chemical was used on your toilet that your buttcheeks are now sitting on?
Mostly vinegar, as far as I can tell. Bleach for the ceramic, but I'm not sitting on that bit.
> Want some bacon? How bout a hot dog?
Yes. But sadly I do not have bacon. Or a hot dog. Nor can I exactly recall when the last time I had either was - over a month, certainly, probably more.
> Been outside recently without sun screen?
Yes, but given that I've been wearing a raincoat outside for the last month I don't think that's quite as relevant as it might be for others.
> I honestly think I just might forget and continue living in my blip of existence.
I'm not pointing any of this out as a superiority or a gotcha thing, but "continue living" pretty sums up my feelings about most of this stuff too. I'm not doing anything actively, really, to avoid pretty much all of the things you've brought up. Inevitably that's partially luck of the draw: I'm sure there are plenty of other examples you could give that I'd be equally at risk from, or worse. But it is striking just how alien that list of concerns is, from my point of view.
I think that says a lot more about differences in culture and choice architectures than it does about our personal preferences. You evidently do feel that there's an overbearing weight of attentiveness needed on avoiding more bad stuff, whereas I'm lucky enough to be in a situation where the mental effort to rule out Yet Another Thing just doesn't register. And I'm not sure what the right solution to that is.
Of course this is the perfect place to do it: if you can convince HN, HN will convince the rest of the world.
one tool is for scraping food (generally solid) inside a hot frying pan
the other tool is for scraping foods (generally liquidy generally cold) from the sides of a bowl or other container.
in the first case you want to flip your pancake and it's sticking to the pan
in the second case you want to get all of the pancake batter to pour into the frying pan.
The picture is the article is of a hot frying pan black plastic scraper.
GP's picture is a silicone cold bowl scraper.
is the disconnect
it is potentially true that you should eliminate all such spatulas made of "plastic" hot or cold, and it is potentially true that in all cases substitutions with silicone is the right move, but I'm not sure if that's what is being suggested
However we have an extra word for the silcon one to get all the pancake batter: marise. It is not used very much, though, outside of some cooking books or shows.
https://www.seriouseats.com/best-nonstick-silicone-spatulas-...
But if you’re cooking on a pan that tolerates stainless steel, this one and its smaller cousin are excellent:
https://www.oxo.com/large-stainless-steel-flexible-turner.ht...
The black one makes an acceptable bowl scraper, but it seems to not appreciate dishwasher life as well as a typical rubber scraper would.
Plus it won't scratch anything enameled or nonstick etc.
https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/teflon-polytetrafluor...
* When heated to high temperatures
Below 450F or so they don't react with anything. PTFE won't react with your egg you're frying, or the inside of your knee. (PTFE is used in surgical implants, among other things that can safely go inside your body)
And if you did encounter such temperature, and you had oil on the pan - well you've poisoned yourself more than the Teflon would!
The answer is that Teflon is safer.
I thought people in many long-living cultures often cook with high temperature oil, and not just the street food wok cooking. There is bad chemistry that can happen with other food components at high temperatures but what is the problem with oil itself?
My point is that the temperature necessary to cause this oil toxicity, is lower than what you need to make Teflon toxic. Teflon becomes toxic at temperature FAR above any cooking process (unless you eat charcoal).
i.e. if you cook normally and don't burn things Teflon is obviously fine, if you do burn things you have bigger things to worry about than the Teflon, since the other stuff will kill you first.
And you don't even have to forget about the pan. Just setting the stove to high temperature when the pan is cold can quickly create superheated spots due to the way induction works (the temperature sensor is hidden and so it "lags" a bit).
Obviously, if you're careful, always start with a low power, wait for the pan (and stove top) to heat up, then gradually increase power, you'll be fine.
With a stainless stell pan, the worse that could happen is the bottom of the pan might warp. But there is no toxic hazard.
Also, maybe you do it differently, but I put the oil in before heating - so if I had stainless, with oil, heated in your "unsafe" manner I would have toxic smoke in the air long before I would have fumes from Teflon. Meaning avoiding Teflon isn't helping you in any way at all.
Of course in actuality there's simply no issue, induction does not perform as badly as you describe. Go ahead and heat at full power and simply cook, it will work fine and not overheat.
I fully understand that this may just be the manufacturer covering his, um, behind. But I am not going to risk it.
Teflon begins to decompose above 260°C which can be reached by heating an empty pan, but yes you wouldn't want to be cooking at that temperature.
Removing spaces after punctuation has the physiological downside of making my eye twitch.