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.
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.
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.
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...