From gidmkhealthnerd, a scientific fact-checker:
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...
This article is brief and uses big numbers to make a scary point but I'd be interested in if there is proof of causation of significant physiological effects at the exposure level from domestic cooking.
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 precautionary principle plus what we know about heating plastic makes your reticence seem churlish.
There are easy, safe alternatives in wood, metal and silicone. There’s no need to risk it.
The problem is that even when there are easy, safe alternatives trying to avoid every little risk in your life will drive you crazy.
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, panicking about everything little thing like this is a psychological nightmare— it leads to the same mental fatigue as the infinite list of item known to the State of California to cause cancer.
Why, exactly, would those California notifications cause even mild anxiety (let alone "a psychological nightmare") if you know as you claim that they are merely "panicking about everything little thing"?
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.
[flagged]
Sure, but this is pretty low hanging fruit. Moving to only metal and wood spatulas, cooking spoons, etc. has been a pretty cheap and easy switch. I would love to ALSO see regulation, but in the meantime I can at least improve things for myself.
Putting wooden spatulas in the dishwasher shortens their life, but it doesn't destroy them straight away. I don't feel bad at all about putting cheap wooden cookware in the dishwasher. And, of course, if you're using non-stick pans, worrying about black plastic is a mote/beam kind of situation.
Well, I stopped using non-stick years ago (though I have a waffle iron which I suppose has a non stick coating) and haven't missed it.
I don't really understand that POV. It is easier to never have to worry about it if you simply decline to use plastic cooking utensils. You never have to revisit the topic, never had to read any Atlantic articles at all coming out with "new risks" because you just decided to use wood long ago.
Haha, well, yes. I actually made all of my wood cooking implements from scratch. I cut down the trees and carved them. eg:
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.
Sure and that protects you in your own kitchen, but not if you're eating anywhere else. Also what about all the other harmful chemicals with easy alternatives that you don't know about yet?
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.
Except, I don't think wood would be any better as you still have to worry about how it was sourced and made to make sure nothing was added to it, right? I see a lot of people using bamboo for example. The only really safe alternative is stainless if you want to avoid thinking about it again.
Agreed. I don't have the time to pay attention to every 'maybe this is bad' thing. Figure it out for sure then ban it.
Being deliberate about the materials you choose for your cookware is not the same as stressing out over every little risk in your life. For some people these are the materials that they use to prepare their food literally every day and one purchase will last years.
> one purchase will last years
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 :/
[flagged]
> The problem is that even when there are easy, safe alternatives trying to avoid every little risk in your life will drive you crazy.
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.
"Should I risk this?" is the wrong question in life. The burden of proof, as it were, is on those who are alleging a risk. I'm not gonna go through life worrying about every little thing just because it might be a problem. That goes double because people are constantly finding new things to worry about, most of which amount to nothing in the end.
Holding its probability constant, if the cost of avoiding a risk is sufficiently low and the potential harm sufficiently high, avoiding it is more rational than both looking further into it or taking it.
That would make sense in a just society. Here in the USA, I would factor evidence in such as, do corporations have a habit of using chemicals that are later shown to be toxic? Do corporations prefer to let people die rather than recall, say an exploding car? Do corporation put out armies of lawyers and doctors to convince everyone that their product does not cause lung cancer? Do corporations now use automation to brigade and create the appearance of a majority?
Obesity 5% to 42%, Alzheimer’s 0% to 33% in the last century.
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.
Maybe a stupid question, but how can I tell the difference between plastic and silicone? We use a black spatula that's flexible (shapes a bit to the curvature of what you're wiping, super convenient) and doesn't scratch the pan while not being porous like wood (where I always wonder how many bacteria live in these crevasses). It seems perfect and is being sold specifically for cooking so I assumed this plastic, if that's what it is, is safe for that. Now, reading the article, it says it's not, but then in the comments I read it may be yet another material. How can one tell what's what?
Side note: If you regularly and promptly clean your wooden utensils, bacteria and germs won't set in. Bacteria only becomes an issue when the wood splinters or is damaged in some way.
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.
I make spoons and spatulas from various hardwood, one of me favorites being Mexican cocobolo. They hold up exceedingly welland despite reports of it containing irritants, neither myself or those I've made them for have any problems - I believe it's pretty much only the dust that tranfers the irritant.
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.
There's no single important thing— It's a combination of killing as many pathogens as you can with heat or chemicals, removing as much material as you can that bacteria feed on, and drying. Drying isn't going to do any good if your spoon is contaminated with hepatitis a, for example, and drying is much less important if you're really taking down the bacteria count by sanitizing it and don't have much for bacteria to eat in there. But if the spoon has been around the block and you're just throwing it in the dishwasher on a regular cycle, drying is a larger part of the risk reduction.
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."
Plastic isn't as heat tolerant, so you could subject the utensils to high heat (200°C should do it) and see if they start to melt. Whilst it's a destructive test, it's probably worth destroying and replacing plastic utensils as silicone ones are much better.
Edit: apparently you can tell the difference by squeezing them too - silicone will feel rubbery.
I read somewhere that if you bend/squeeze silicone, it shouldn't turn white. If it does, it's plastic. You may need to really bend/squeeze it.
Nope. In fact, the higher density silicone with better heat resistance will turn white on bending far more readily than the low grade stuff designed for hair dryer pockets and such.
Not all plastics do either, but it’s something.
Buy something that is silicone and use it as a reference. Silicone is distinct, but a lot of the words that one would use to describe it can also apply to plastic, strictly because language is vague. But once you have a reference it becomes pretty clear what is and isn't silicone.
The black part in plastics is due to the addition of cheap carbon black to recycled plastic which is usually pale and unappealing grey, it is a form of 'soot produced by the incomplete combustion of coal, petroleum or vegetable matter. It is added to plastics as a reinforcing substance, the same reason for which it finds widespread use in tires' .https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment-did-you-know/d...
Silicon is rubbery, but unlike rubber it is normally not sticky to either your hand or food.
Wood is not dishwasher safe, metal will damage the cookware's non-stick coating, which may be worse than the plastic I'm trying to avoid. I guess that leaves silicone.
I have wood spoons that go in the dishwasher multiple times per week for years and they're fine.
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.
For what it's worth, I stopped using non-stick cookware in favour of carbon steel and haven't missed it.
I spent some time fiddling with seasoning, etc. but at this point I just cook like normal, use a bit more oil with eggs (still not much), and keep steel wool handy. Some people decry steel wool but for me it works great and the pan is a delight.
If we're talking about health and cookware, you're not going to want nonstick cookware.
> don't overheat it
Good luck with that. Temperature isn't perfect and hot pockets of higher temperatures form.
Diamond coated ceramic should be fine.
Didn't read the whole comment did you?
Wood is technically not dishwasher safe, but I have wooden spoons that I’ve inherited from my grandma and they still hold up despite being in the dishwasher regularly.
The anecdata of this thread alone might be enough to re-categorize wood spoons as dishwasher safe.
Sincere question - my mom always told me to never put wooden utensils in the dishwasher, but I never got a great answer as to why. I put my wooden spatulas in there. My question is, is it just because it's destructive to the wood? Or is there something else that I should be concerned about?
Within the last 20+ years one of about 5 wooden spoons in our household has cracked even though they're always cleaned in the dishwasher. I don't see the problem.
It really depends on the wood used. Some should absolutely, under no circumstance, be expose to a hot + wet environment. Some, you can put in the dishwasher and they are fine. I do use a lot of wooden cooking utensil and most of them go in the dishwasher. But I do have some nicer wooden spoon that are made from a more precious wood that I would always wash by hand.
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.
Just to echo this comment. I don't put my wood cutting boards in the dishwasher because they dry out and crack. Wood utensils have been fine in the dishwasher. They seem much less prone to cracking than cutting boards and, when they do crack, I just throw them out and replace them with cheap new ones. I see wood utensils as a wear-item.
A lot of wood is dishwasher safe. But you should ask / check before hand. If it is made a several pieces glued together, it will probably not 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.
> Wood is not dishwasher safe...
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.
After you have finished cooking and have transferred the food to the plates or serving dishes or wherever (and your cookware is still hot!), add some cooking wine or tomato juice (anything that is a bit acidic) and deglaze the cookware. You can use the result or discard it, but the end result is cookware that is far, far easier to clean.
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.
Use a carbon steel or cast iron pan and learn how to season properly. They are very nonstick if you cook correctly in them, and their surface is incredibly durable (I use metal spatulas and I primarily cook on carbon steel and a cast iron griddle.) you can also incorporate stainless steel pots, although stainless pans are not nonstick and very hard to use for beginners.
I use cast iron for everything I possibly can, but there is one use case I still need non-stick pans for: frying eggs. The only way to get them to not stick in even the best seasoned cast iron pan is copious amounts of oil, which seems like it's probably worse than a few molecules of PTFE derivates.
I'm with Kenji Lopez-Alt on this one. No matter how nonstick your cast iron or carbon steel pan is, it's not as nonstick as Teflon, which is so nonstick that we had to come up with new methods to get it to bond to surfaces. Carbon steel pans are great, but they simply are not a replacement for nonstick.
Not the person you're replying to, but here's my $0.02. We have a couple stainless frying pans that we've had for a long time, and I've never been much a fan of them. I find they stick pretty bad no matter what procedures you use. Our main pan is a 12" cast iron that I smoothed out the bottom cool surface with a flapper wheel on an angle grinder. It's been used thousands of times over at least a decade and never gives me any trouble. I usually clean it with a stainless steel scrubber and hot water, and then either wipe it clean with a paper towel, or just put it on a burner on low to dry out. I'm not afraid to use soap if needed, but I find it rarely is. We also cook anything in it, including tomato sauce or whatever, and have never had a problem related to that. I find that most of the conventional wisdom around cast iron is just a bunch of voodoo. Just use it and don't worry about it. Beyond the cast iron, we have some ceramic coated cast iron dutch ovens/pots (including a real Le Crueset and a couple knock offs) and stainless steel pots. I'm real happy with our setup. No teflon, no grief, lots of thermal mass for even cooking. I don't feel like we've had to make a tradeoff. With the right equipment, it's really all upside from my point of view.
Not a cooking enthusiast but you should not put cast iron in the dishwasher. Heat some water in the pan, add a tiny drop of soap and use a spatula to scrape off any residue. Once dry add some oil (otherwise it will rust)
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.
A weak acid (tomato paste, dilute vinegar, ...) will help with burned-on stuff, but the real trick is just good, hard scrubbing with an abrasive (steel wool or similar).
Stainless, when used properly, won't have hard-stuck burnt oil on it. They clean up nicely by just boiling some water in it and then a light scrub-- no need for dishwasher.
Worst case-- you've gone too high in temperature for too long and you need some bon-ami.
Cast iron is intentionally seasoned with oxidized cooking oil to make it non stick, and that should not be cleaned off.
Stainless is pretty easy to get totally clean with steel wool and/or scotchbrite pad sponges.
I could be wrong but I thought it was well known and studied that the seasoned part of oil in cast iron were types of trans fats. Not great for you in any amount but also probably very tiny amounts are actually consumed.
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)
Silicone's flavor leaches into your food, which some people can notice.
isn't it more that silicone absorbs lipids and soaps? so you are tasting the dishwasher or last meal. I bake silicone cookware in the oven on broil, as it removes absorbed food. Fair warning, this is a terrible idea if the cookware isn't 100% silicone.
The only unsafe thing I've ever experienced with wood in the dishwasher is a fire risk from a spoon getting blown off the top rack onto the heating element at the bottom.
Silicone is not rigid, which is sometimes a problem.
Glass...which is silicon I guess.
In my country we have some ridiculous newspapers that will publish any story with "may cause cancer" in the headline. So for a lot of people these stories are a boy-who-cried-wolf situation.
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 can relate to your distrust of the various click-baity headlines of papers, but Teflon flu is a real thing. It's easily avoided by not over-heating pans - keep them under 260°C and don't heat them when empty as that can result in hot spots.
I think that’s kind of the point - all the things they listed are real things. Which are most important to avoid?
The part that really drives me up the wall is that the demographics who decades ago decried plastics to be superior because they don't harbor bacteria like wood or break dangerously like glass are roughly the same ones who are now complaining about plastic.
I don't have a cultural analogy for this situation but whatever it is is worse than "boy who cried wolf".
I am old enough to remember when we needed to switch to plastic bags over paper to "save the trees"
'Busybodies'
i only use wooden spoons and spatulas and i almost never had them crack or splinter. if an edge does break off i can use a knife or sandpaper to make it smooth. the only downside is that some spatulas are not thin enough on the front edge, making them more difficult to use for things like pancakes or omelettes. i always keep an eye out for good wooden spatulas. i had some quite nice ones over the years. and when i move i take them with me, just in case i can't get another good one in the next location.
A well made point, but you won't get through. When you're in the fad, it's the center of the universe. Plus there will be an endless number of presently unknown medical worries and niggles. It all comes out in the wash, the best bet is diversification.
Dismissing the papers as lies is very different from considering your usage of the studied tools/materials, and deciding you're not actually recreating the failure-modes studied in the papers enough to worry about your current tools.
in California, every metal utensil is marked with "causes cancer"
I'll add to that.
18/0 stainless steel is the best. No nickel etc.
[dead]
I appreciate your skepticism. This article has that feeling of almost being designed to create a panic. First, there's the headline, which is written in the same tone as someone warning you that you're about to step on a snake—a tone which does not invite critical thinking. Then there's the fact that since most people aren't subscribers to The Atlantic, they'll just see the first couple paragraphs and make their decisions based on that. I currently do not know how much weight I should put on what this article says, but I'm certainly scared by it, and I have enough media literacy to know that's when I should be really careful not to be fooled.
The difficulty here is that the diseases happen years or decades after the exposer, sometimes.
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.
You can still find radioactive trinkets being sold for their alleged health effects. Thorium in pendants and that sort of shit. They don't disclose their radioactive nature but they market with some new age woo like "emits vitalizing energy waves using crystal technology."
Most of it comes from China, presumably from people who see waste byproducts of rare earth metal processing as a business opportunity.
It is about the money:" The “black” in plastics is due to the addition of carbon black, which is basically a form of soot produced by the incomplete combustion of coal, petroleum or vegetable matter. It is added to plastics as a reinforcing substance, the same reason for which it finds widespread use in tires. Another benefit is that carbon black absorbs ultraviolet radiation that can cause plastics to degrade. Now for the problems. Carbon black contains numerous compounds, some of which, like the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), have carcinogenic properties and have led the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to categorize carbon black as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” Whether this is an issue in the containers used for many prepared foods, including those that are to be microwaved, is not clear, since the carbon black is locked within the matrix of the plastic and may not leach out in any significant amounts. Prepared food marketers like the black containers because they are cheap and are visually more appealing than their clear counterparts. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment-did-you-know/d...
Carbon black is why the black nylon zip ties have a reputation for aging better all the other colors (like for like, not comparing a $20/100 hipster zip tie to a $2/100 cheap one).
It's a tricky subject to get solid numbers on as most studies focus on just a limited number of the thousands of PFAs now in our environment. There's also the issue of identifying the source of the PFAs as they're in our water etc. Also, due to their very slow breakdown, PFAs are likely to accumulate in our bodies over time.
There's more information on our current understanding here: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea...
There may be no investigation of your specific question, but is there evidence of known dangerous chemicals. If it was covered in dog poop, would you use it unless there was evidence that the use of dog-poop-covered spatula at the exposure level of domestic cooking caused significant physiological effects?
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.'
Journalists I get. They're paid to attract eyeballs and they're not above being a little misleading in pursuit of that goal. "When a man's salary depends..." and all that jazz. I see it the same way I see cops who are misleading on the stand, despicable but understandable.
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.
I really wish OXO would put out a statement here.
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...
Oxo claims they use Eastman Tritan Renew recycled plastics [1] which are FDA and EFSA certified for food use[2].
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...
Where can I read all of your stories about all of it? I do a lot of work in food production but none in cook tool production and find it very interesting
>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.
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?
Some corollary to Murphy's law? Whatever is not independently tested / audited will go wrong? I've known plenty of people in my own country who don't take trivial steps, because they didn't feel like it.
These are not contradictory.
Just don't use plastic for cooking.
Metal spatulas aren't an option for most, either, as they scratch pans. So what's the suggested realistic alternative? Wood?
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.
Nonstick pans are covered with plastic; that’s what PTFE is.
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.
Wood spatulas are great. They are also cheap. If you have a fireplace, you can even burn them at the end of life so very little waste!
Burning wood in your fireplace is much more certain to harm you than using plastic in your cookware, and the harm is more severe.
burning garbage doesn't create any waste? You could just put it in your organics/composting...
I've been a fan of using stainless steel spatulas on cast iron for years now and it doesn't seem to scratch or degrade the "seasoning" on the cast iron in any apparently meaningful way.
I've been cooking exclusively with Le Creuset cast iron pans. I use to care about seasoning and never using soap to clean but I've gotten way more relaxed as of late. I still take care of the pans and "season them" when it looks pretty bare, but I haven't really noticed much of a difference between seasoned and nonseasoned as an amateur chef.
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.
I do almost all my cooking on cast iron—no philosophical reason, it just works well and once I figured out how to use it I found that I pretty much always reach for a cast iron pan over stainless steel or non-stick. (Except non-stick for omelettes and stainless steel for anything where I want the find.)
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.
(reply really meant for @arrowleaf)
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.
If your cooking utensils are gouging or pulling up 'seasoning', it's not 'seasoning'. Seasoning is a micrometer-thin layer of polymerized oil. What you're describing is carbon build-up from a poorly cleaned pan.
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.
Yes, wood is one. Why not wood?
My mantra is that anything is dishwasher safe if you care little enough about it.
I put my unfinished wooden cooking utinsels through the dishwasher literally every day. They’ve been fine for 10+ years
Hmm, have you actually used wood? I've been using it for decades.
>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.
Wood is quite antimicrobial. You can look at studies on plastic/silicon cutting boards vs wood for a bit more peace of mind.
Food-safe wood conditioner (or just beeswax, or coconut oil, etc.) is basically free, and you should be taking care of everything wooden in the kitchen on a semi-regular basis. If your wooden cookware is degrading, I'd be more worried about the state of your wooden cutting boards.
One thing that's helped me is to every-so-often oil my wood utensils the same way I oil my wood cutting board. It's helps protect the wood and retain moisture so it doesn't crack. Also, at least some (if not all) woods have anti-microbial properties.
I put my wood cooking spoons in the dishwasher. They're the cheap kind and now they're quite bleached but they still work.
Glue e.g. in bamboo spatulas, porosity and bacteria, hardness for scraping etc.
Usually you would use different materials for different tasks.
the scratch non-stick pans, which also are horrible for your health.
cast iron, stainless steel.
Lodge cast iron pans are like $20 and will outlast your grandchildren. You can get a set of them for < $100. Carbon steel are more expensive, but are easier to handle and I think are worth investing in at least one for daily use. They'll also last generations.
+1 for carbon steel over cast iron. They heat much faster and my wife wife doesn't need my help to lift them.
Cool, appreciate the tip! I'll check them out.
Metal. I haven't noticed scratches, and have been using exclusively my whole adult life. I suspect my pans are covered in superficial scratches, but I don't notice.
I've had my share of non-stick pans, including higher quality ones. They all degrade to the point where I need to use oil.
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.
They only scratch nonstick pans. Just use stainless steel, it's not that hard to clean.
Carbon steel solves this issue. You can get nonstick eggs and fish with a very minimal amount of oil. You can also do this with stainless steel but it takes more practice to get the temperature control down.
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.
I think eggs and certain fish recipes are the primary use of non stick. But there are also ways to cook those without non stick.
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)
I only use non-stick with low heat and for items like eggs and fish. Stainless steel for everything else. Don't let perfect be the enemy of better.
Counter-intuitively, it doesn't really add calories.
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.
I don't have SS cookware, but cast iron is basically non-stick. A teaspoon of oil isn't going to break the bank.
Why not silicone ?
Yes, exactly. I can’t believe how little mention of silicon and wood there is here.
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.
Use cast iron pans. I used to love my non-stick pans but I would never go back.
Where I'm from wooden are norm for stirring while cooking. Plastic are used as well but after the food is already cooked.
Using non-stick pans and worrying about plastic spatulas is wild, imo.
How do you find a non-Teflon waffle iron?
I have a cast-iron waffle maker from like the 20s that works very well and is very fun to use. Added bonus, you can bring it on a camping trip and make waffles in the woods.
I did not pay $400 for it, but it looks like this: https://www.hardmill.com/products/griswold-8-waffle-iron-wit...
We have a reconditioned electric waffle iron from like the 40s. There are folks out there who specialize in taking them apart and replacing all the electrical components with modern stuff.
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.
A superficial web search reveals a handful of options; I'm sure if you spent a little time, like 10-15 minutes, you'd find dozens. If you only look at what's on offer in stores, and aren't in a place with a lot of variety, then you're not going to have many options.
Shipping something that weighs only a few pounds and can be shipped along with tens of thousands of shipping containers (i.e., is not needed at the destination in a day or two) costs almost no CO2 emissions.
If you're really and truly concerned about this, you have to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself, "what's more important to me, my health or waffles?"
It might be time to look for a johnnycake recipe, and that's OK.
There exist truly exceptional gluten free waffle recipes^, might be worth a shot at least.
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
Try almond or oat flour waffles.
I mentioned it because it was an issue for my family growing up. My mother is an oncologist and has long been concerned about any plastic cookware. However, we were never able to do anything about the waffle iron, and family waffle mornings were a pretty important fixture in my family.
The waffles and syrup are likely to do more damage than the teflon.
If you go after buying the waffle iron THE RIGHT WAY, spending few days researching, reading reviews etc., you'll see that it's hard to buy a good one that still uses teflon.
Or if you're lazy, copy me and get Åviken Elegance.
Look— simply. People were making waffles in the Iron Age.
ah yes, the good ole iron age where castings were likely to have large amounts of arsenic/beryllium/copper/bronze contamination. much better than 'black plastic'.
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.
I mean this in jest but this is the least compelling unironic retort that I can imagine here. How important are waffles in your diet?
is silicone ok?
Get enough researchers to train their metaphorical microscopes on it and it's interaction with any dimension of human biology for long enough and I have to think the answer will eventually be no.
We need to eliminate plastic wherever possible, especially where it might come into contact with food.
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.
Dispose of it ASAP.
You sure are leaning-in to that username...
Another thing to think about is the pigment used is often "carbon black" instead or in addition to some of the other colorful powders that are opaque enough to provide a full pallette, when starting from virgin white or clear polymer pellets.
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 !
Carbon black can also be produced from vegetable matter and is labelled as E153 in the EU for colouring food.
It would appear that it's the PAH content of petroleum derived carbon black that is the carcinogenic component
Are you sure this is the same thing? The word ‘petroleum’ is not in the paper you link.
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.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_black
> 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.
Or a gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/10/black-pla...
(@dang, please consider using it as the main link.)
Not working for me. It loads, but still with paywall.
it works, but it is covered to 90% with a "subscribe now" popup that i can't seem to close. perhaps for your browser size the popup covers the whole screen. reader mode makes it all go away and reveal the article text and pictures
interesting, does work for me
I thought this was going to be about clean cooking fuels. One of the significant projects of the WHO is transitioning the world towards cooking with clean fuels that reduce indoor air pollution. In the worst case certain populations are burning plastics to heat their water, food, and homes, and as you can imagine this is incredibly destructive to health.
We also need trash collection, otherwise people are forced to burn plastic to get rid of their trash. The whole city of Kinshasa is nauseating due to this.
Even in developed countries like the US a lot of people burn fossil fuels for indoor cooking, even when they could choose a better alternative.
What better option? resistance electric is clearly worse in other ways. I've heard induction is good but it is an expensive luxury option and not common even in that niche.
i've heard it is reasonable priced in other countries but not the us.
Is $59 for a single hub, or $849 for a full cooktop really that much of an "expensive luxury"? These things last for decades and cost less than most mobile phones.
You're linking to literally the lowest end builder grade piece of crap* non flat range, you even picked the one that doesn't have the oven window! I've even had near slumlords at least spring for the windowed glass top GE special when it was on sale. (I say crap, but that is unfair, having used these growing up, they are simple and basically won't break down and exceptionally easy to get parts for and repair [because it doesn't have any, not even a timer], and if the tenants destroy it, who cares). But Ikea doesn't even cater to that market at all, so it's disingenous to use that as a counter example. Most people are looking for something at least slightly better and those are going to cost more in the $800 and up range. And now that I have a job and a little money I would never willingly go back to a calrod electric cooktop. I'm sure there are some John Bircher types that pine for the days of mom's 1961 GE P7, but that seems like a minority.
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'd like to see a good comparison in running cost of a gas stove versus an induction stove.
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...
I don't think any cook at home has ever used enough energy that that matters. Once in a while someone will have a broken furnace and try to use the oven to heat their house (this is dangerous: don't try it), but otherwise cooking doesn't use energy to really matter.
No one ever figures in the cost of medical care from breathing low-grade gas fumes for years. Or the occasional spontaneous house explosion.
It's a tale as old as time: "I don't want to poison myself, but I also cannot bear a minor inconvenience." This is honestly one of the main reasons I believe that environmentalism will never meaningfully succeed.
There are many options to make environmentalism also the better choice. My electric is 104% from wind last year (which is to say for every 100kwh my entire city used last year, my utility claims they generated 104kwh from wind - I don't know what they did when the wind wasn't blowing or what happened to that other 4kwh) Cooks tell me induction is better, but there are enough roadblocks that shouldn't exist such that I can't try it.
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.
You can get an induction hob for 50 bucks at IKEA.
So spending more than a 200 $ premium over a resistance stove with 4 hobs means you're being ripped off or spending on luxury.
Right, but the premium tends more to $1000 for the brands that have earned a bad reputation. If you want something that you can expect to be good quality you are looking at more like $2000.
Hence getting the 200 $ total of 4 hobs as a premium to whatever the base standalone stove costs, assuming that you could in the factory just mount these units in the hobs. Just need to modify a little to have remote control as the original uses a microcontroller to handle the touch IO and the high frequency transistor triggering, which may both not work over a wire long enough to reach from the back hob to the front of the stove where you'd want the controls to be to not reach over or even in-between the hobs in operation.
Okay so keep your current ones, and mainly use the induction one for which will probably satisfy upwards of 80% of your needs anyway.
In the US and other developed countries, they burn clean fuels like natural gas or propane. These emit minimal soot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_fuel#/media/File:Access_...
Unfortunately perhaps not as clean as you would hope: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819315/#:~:text=5.....
A lot of coffee makers run hot water over black plastics too.
Your coffee maker is exposed to at most 100 degrees C. Spatulas are exposed to temperatures over 200 C.
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.
Might not matter:
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)
Ugh you reminded me how much I hate flame retardants and the horrible laws we have in America that have us spray it everywhere.
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.
The necklace, that sounded like a byproduct of recycling plastic.
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.
The people of the 1970s clutched their pearls and wrung their hands about flammable sofas in the same way that we today clutch our pearls and wring our hands about leeching plastics. The breathless articles were mostly the same except they were in places like Readers Digest instead of The Atlantic.
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.
All of them, I don't believe they serve any to the net of society and probably harm more individuals than protect.. YMMV like everything, flame retardants are generally just like PFAS, they are forever chemicals. The mains ones used up until the 2000-2013s were PBDEs, these bio-accumulate just like PFAS. THe EU and US have switched to alternatives but I don't believe these to be any better, just newer.
My read of this article is that the main problem comes from black plastic that claims to be made of recycled material being contaminated.
There is no way to tell, as stated in the article.
"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 was under the impression that labelling something as "recycled" was a value add, and it would be done where possible. I suppose that is not actually the case.
[flagged]
You are wildly incorrect.
Article says flame retardants are added to recycled plastic, not virgin plastic.
At the end of the article, the author states this is why she does not recycle her old black plastic.
Your reading and comment of that is sophomoric.
The article is nonsense. Only engineering plastics carry UL94 ratings (and if it's got flame retardants in it, it's got a UL94 rating... otherwise no one would go to the expense!) and there are just not a lot of engineering plastics in the waste stream compared to consumer single-use plastics.
I thought the latest news was recycling doesn't work, it's just green washing for petroleum companies. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...
This is evidenced in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
"To investigate the extent to which kitchen utensils are contaminated with BFRs and the potential for resultant human exposure, we collected 96 plastic kitchen utensils and screened for Br content using a hand-held X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer. Only 3 out of 27 utensils purchased after 2011 contained detectable concentrations of Br (≥ 3 μg/g). In contrast, Br was detected in 31 out of the 69 utensils purchased before 2011."
Let me emphasize: Only 3 out of 27 utensils purchased after 2011 contained detectable concentrations of Br.
Further vital information: "Simulated cooking experiments were conducted to investigate BFR transfer from selected utensils (n = 10) to hot cooking oil, with considerable transfer (20% on average) observed."
Fine, I don't cook with hot oil. I don't melt my utensils when cooking, I don't damage them at all. I see the reason for concern, but for my cooking styles this really doesn't affect me.
I am bit weirded by using recycled plastics for anything interact with regularly with my hands for example. Also stuff that get heated. Sure it has places like furniture, decking and so on where contamination doesn't really matter. But what about something like re-usable cup for hot beverages or disposable cutlery?
[flagged]
I’ll take the hit, he was being a dick.
Thanks for a useless comment, keep going!
I think he's referring to my small farm, we grow raspberries.
It's admittedly been a while since I've looked but there don't seem to be any (automated) drip makers whose use doesn't result in plastic coming into contact with hot water.
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.
We make coldbrew coffee in the fridge. No need to heat up the coffee until it is in your cup with some extra water and into the micro. And it taste a lot better than anything else I tried. And I didn't even drink coffee a year ago because it taste so bad. Now I can even drink it without milk! :-)
Some people like cold brew, others don't. I fall into the latter camp.
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)
> Maybe you preffer the bitter taste of cooked coffee?
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).
There's quite a few, actually. They're all commercial units that are expected to make hundreds of pots a day and stay cleanable and serviceable. Bunn, for example, makes a bunch of machines for which everything in the 'wet' service is stainless. By default they use a black plastic grounds holder but you can pay extra for a stainless one.
They're substantially more expensive than consumer units.
The article does speak of black specifically, not just any plastic. Even if there aren't any that don't put the hot liquid in contact with plastic, it might be worth looking at the color (is my understanding from the article)
Yeah, sorry, that was implied. I would assume that's what they all use. Based on my recent personal experience, even the higher end options like Moccamaster and OXO use black plastic.
I guess that's preferable to black plastics (like in my fancy OXO) but I really don't want there to be any contact between hot water and plastic.
Ah, darn. I'm not a coffee drinker myself so didn't know that they're all black on the inside :(
What do you mean by automated?
Obvious answer is to distinguish a drip coffee machine (think office coffee) vs just a drip filter, e.g. Hario V60 or Melitta.
The latter you can for instance get in porcelain.
[dead]
There's a bottom of the barrel, dollar store brand under the Betty Crocker name brand in Canada - all black plastic cooking utensils, cheapest you can get in all varieties.
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.
>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.
>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.
Is she wrong?
Well she's been saying this for at least 10 years now I think, so she's lived longer than she expected to.
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.
yes unfortunately mps are in the air from tires now.
Maybe the most interesting takeaway from this article is that black plastic is dirtier than other colors because it’s easier to use recycled materials if you don’t care about color. Very good to know.
Barista: you want a lid? Me: what color is it?
FYI most coffee cups which appear to be paper are also plastic lined.
The real solution is sunsetting single-use anything for any other applications outside bio labs or medical procedures. But $$$
It will solve itself, nature adapts fast, if you have enough dice throws- and plastic is everywhere. A million evolutionary dices roll everywhere out there- and one day all the plastics get a mold and that building block of civilization just drips away.
> It will solve itself, nature adapts fast
Indeed. The first step is for the planet to get rid of the pesky pollutants, perhaps by way of launching several “natural disasters” such as mighty strong winds, excessive floods, and particularly pesky deathly organisms. Then it can deal with plastic at its leisure.
[flagged]
> The real solution is sunsetting single-use anything...but $$$
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.
Straws are useless. Plates and ustensiles can be provided by and cleaned at the place you eat. Takeout containers don’t take more space than the non reusable container you will have to carry back anyway. They can also be provided by your place of work if you generally go for take out for lunch. Reusable tissue bags take no space or paper bags can be used for a cost.
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.
I would think that durable versions wouldn't be made out of them, unless they were synthetic fibers.
Don't turn the argument into a parody of itself because you don't like what it implies.
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.
I want a mobile service that steam cleans the glass bottles and refills them with the product of your choice. Hand soap, ketchup, etc etc.
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!
At present, yes, I believe bicyclists are more likely to carry some reusable items with them.
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.
> 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?
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.
That's what happened at my workplace, we now have plastic screw-closed cups with silicon seals that stain easily. Blue though, not black.
Just drink in a civilized manner from a porcelain cup in a civilized cafe then the whole problem is avoided.
While I get your point, unfortunately “civilised” means plastic cups. You don’t see people in poor countries with no industry going to coffee shops to drink expensive coffee from plastic, they drink from handmade reusable cups.
I wouldn't worry too hard about the coffee cup lid. It's almost certainly made of PLA (polylactic acid). Nobody's making flame-retardant consumer appliances out of PLA.
It's wild how something as simple as a coffee lid can become a point of scrutiny
it is.
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.
[dead]
If we as a society leave "safety" to the producers, yes it is.
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.
[dead]
The only reason to use ever plastic spatula is to avoid damaging a 'fragile' nonstick pan ... that you probably shouldn't be using anyway.
Just use carbon/stainless steel pans, wood turners, and metal spatulas. Your food will be better and the implements will last ~forever.
I minimize my use of nonstick pans to as little as possible but some things are pretty much impossible to cook in stainless steel pans. Like how would you go about making over easy eggs? That’s something I have a lot of.
I do fried and over-easy in my stainless all the time. My procedure:
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.
Seconding steps 1-2. I don't do step 3 because I want to whisk the eggs. It takes some practice, but the end result is worth it. The eggs taste better when cooked on a stainless pan.
I cook over easy eggs a few times a week in my cast iron. Works great.
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.
people generally don't use metal tools on enameled cast iron, which is plenty strong
you can use wood on enamelled cast iron. Why would you use a spatula with enamelled cast iron?
to flip an egg?
im lost. whats a plastic? silicone is not plastic? why specifically black plastic? which black pigment? all black plastics use the same pigment?which plastic? is black silicone ok? how about rubber? other colors with same flame retardant is ok? or somehow only black (all plastics?) use 1 particular flame retardant?
its strangely specific yet strangely vague?
Silicone is a rubber, not a plastic and black silicone should be fine.
so black silicones and rubber don't use the same pigment or flame retardant? or they don't leach out?
ok this is far more informative n coherent
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.
abs is really a quite weird choice as a cooking spatula material?
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...
I'll add one: is nylon plastic?
its clearly a plastic? polyamide?
Years back I took a "common sense" decision to eliminate plastic from my food storage and cooking and only use steel or glass. The basis for this decision was primarily that there have been many instances in world where after decades it was found that something generally used was harmful for humans. Steel and glass have existed longer than plastics and are generally known to be safe (also I have to use some products, can't leave everything).
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?
Glass Tupperware also just feels better, like more mature. Wished I switched sooner.
The correlation-causation in this article is really rather screwed up.
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.
This is correct. Sadly, this is also unhelpful. As long as you can't guarantee that the cooking utensil is from newly-made and clean black plastic from a reputable source, there is still risk. Think about a random convenience store item. OTOH e.g. a green or red utensil is free from that particular risk (unless a new investigation finds something for these types).
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).
> 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.
This and the fact that it's a high risk / low reward scenario.
There's no reason to not forgo black plastic now
> 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.
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.
> So there is no reason to fear black plastic from reputable sources.
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.
> some/most of the black plastic parts it contains are straight from different factories in China.
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!
The recycled plastic may, indeed, be worse than "virgin", but any plastic melting in your food seems ill advised. I'm not a zealot refusing to drink out of a plastic cup, but spatulas see a lot more heat than most cookware. My wife and I noticed our plastic spatulas (including one from a well known "reputable" brand) showing signs of melting years ago, and into the trash they went. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
I don't think it's worth nit-picking in this case.
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.
Are you sure there's absolutely nothing wrong with virgin plastics? Maybe it'd be safer and simpler to just avoid plastic in e.g. cooking since the growing amount of research about effects of plastics doesn't seem very positive.
> nothing more than plastics in general
Maybe I'm having some kind of brain fart or mixed something up, but I thought "absolutely nothing" was a direct quote from them and no mention of plastics in general.
Is there a way to see if/how comment was edited?
I'll try to quote things more directly from now on...
Does silicone rubber count as plastic? I think we need a more precisely defined villain here.
Silicone rubber itself is much more inert than carbon-based polymers, but it could always contain undesirable additives. Hopefully such additives would not be used in food-contact products and silicone does not need at all some of the additives frequently used in plastic products, like flame retardants.
This said, the parent article recommends silicone utensils among the safer alternatives.
According to https://www.greenmatters.com/p/is-silicone-recyclable I wouldn't worry about it. If it's recycled, doesn't appear to be recycled into cooking utensils.
It was called out at the end of the article as an alternative to black plastic, so I think it is fine?
No - silicone isn't a plastic and is much better for food preparation.
Ok, but why? It's a synthetic molded polymer, so I think it fits all the definitions that I can find.
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.
What we commonly refer to as "plastics" are mainly chains of carbon atoms, whereas silicone is a chain of siloxanes instead.
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.
My Aeropress filter cap is the only remaining black plastic in my kitchen. The Aeropress is pretty much the only plastic that remains in my kitchen. I'd pay good money for a replacement cap made out of white nylon, PMMA, PEEK, etc.
They make a glass aeropress that comes with a stainless steel cap now.
I had no idea either. Thanks! When I first got my Aeropress, really hot water being forced through all dark-colored hard plastic had me concerned. Still does. But after getting the routine down it takes only three minutes and my daily coffee is so much better since I got it, I don't want coffee any other way anymore.
The glass one is most likely going on my Christmas list (even though that is sort of expensive for what it is)
The Aeropress is absolutely great, but I have the same reservations about putting 96c water through what's essentially a bunch of plastic. What I'm about to suggest is not a substitute, but there are solid glass/metal french press kits, and chemex/filtered glass/ceramic coffee setups which will make great drinks.
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.
Wow, had no idea. $150 / ships in February. I hate that I might grab it at that price. https://aeropress.com/products/aeropress-coffee-maker-premiu...
What's wrong with the Tritan one instead?
What issues does Tritan have? Tritan is used in the medical industry for passing blood and other fluids safely without contamination.
HN seems to have huge unfounded FUD around anything plastic related even when there's no scientific evidence.
The number of times that I've dropped a Aeropress makes that impractical for me.
Same. Cleaning up the hot water and coffee grounds slurry off the counter top or floor early in the morning is already a huge pain in my assholes, I don't want to add glass shards in the mix.
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.
The Aeropress is made in the USA. While not a guarantee it's safe it's much more likely to not contain contaminants.
I would like to know if the plastic used in my Moccamaster is subject to these hazards. I bought it specifically because they claim to use food-grade quality plastic that is supposed to be safe.
Even if you don’t care about chemicals, plastic does in my experience absorb a lot of “burnt/old” coffee flavor, especially if it goes through rubber/plastic/silicone tubing.
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.
I just went through a whole thing trying to get rid of plastic from my coffee setup, since I make coffee almost every day (sometimes twice). I couldn't find any plastic-free drip coffee makers, other than maybe the Ratio 8. In the end, I settled for a Chemex and doing pour over, which I've actually really enjoyed. So I recommend that if the plastics are giving you pause, although I can imagine giving up your Moccamaster is a hard sell! How do you like it, by the way?
My problem with a pour over is how agonizingly slow it is, and it requires 3-4 refill interactions to actually make a decent “pot” of coffee even with the largest chemex they sell.
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.
Yeah, I probably should just get good at pour-over. The Moccamaster is great, but I have a pretty low bar coming from a MrCoffee.
Just checked my Moccamaster and it says that it uses PET 7 plastic, which supposedly designates "other" resin. Not sure what that means if anything for food safety.
I saw this report and the first place I thought of a LOT of black plastic being in contract with hot food preparation is coffee-makers - I recall seeing zero plastic filter-holders and pot lids that are not black plastic, and every drip of coffee goes through the black plastic filter funnel and lid, then across the black plastic carafe rim.
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?
When I was a kid everyone told me never to burn plastic, because it produces tons of hazardous chemicals.
As far as I know, burning a clear PET water bottle is harmless as it only releases carbon dioxide (and water vapor).
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).
Bit more than that.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/002689708020778...
It strongly depends on which plastic. PVC is the really nasty one.
Avoid plastic if you want to live long, whatever if it's cooking or drinking.
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’re falling down that slippery slope pretty fast there.
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.
unfortunately microplastics are found in oil from both glass and plastic packaging. possibly contam from manufacture?
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.
But in what concentrations? Seems to require paying to access, couldn’t see the raw data. That’s not the only thing to worry about - other chemicals leach over time. Constantly putting olive oil in contact with plastic will just continue to concentrate it.
That's my point.
> 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.
At least in the US butter comes in wax paper
If you eat a lot of fruit (I guess not seeing your tastes), you almost don't need to drink extra water, or very few, and vegetable water is extra pure and super valuable. Trees should be so much protected, they're doing a hell of a job
you could buy oil in glass bottles. also if buying larger quantities it comes in some type of metal container.
I went through my drawers and I have a bunch of black nylon Joseph Joseph spatulas and fish slices and things [1]. ChatGPT tells me that nylon is not frequently recycled because it's tough to do so - so I'm hoping that these are safe. They also say:
> 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...
Anyone know if I should ditch this thing before thanksgiving? Oxo makes great stuff, this is food grade plastic but who knows what that’ll really mean in 50 years…
ALL my black plastic utensils are OXO and I'll be damned if I'm throwing them all out. They'll have to pry them from my room temperature dead carcinogenic fingers.
Paper link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...
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...
Our society is the richest and most productive one ever to exist on planet Earth. We're at the cusp of another order of magnitude increase in both metrics.
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.
I use three types of tools in the kitchen:
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.
How about, don't fry with any color plastic spatulas.
The main problem here is that many people use non-stick cookware, and metal spatulas will scratch them up badly. Plastic or rubber spatulas don't do that.
Of course, you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware, but they are, so...
Wood is an option, but look for solid wood, I don't trust these bamboo ones that are made from laminated / glued slats. Bamboo "wood" will be the next major thing I'm sure, sold as co2-neutral and biodegradeable, but soaked in glues / resins to make it useful.
Have you seen those "bamboo" bowls, and cups and whatnot being marketed as environmentally friendly?
They are obviously something like 70% plastic resin, 30% sawdust.
I have a Japanese electric fry pan, non-stick. I use a bamboo spatula for it. It was not originally intended for the purpose, but I took a rasp and file to it to give it a sharp edge. I usually don't need the spatula. I flip things with chopsticks. I mean that's why you use a non-stick pan! If you have to peel the food off it with a spatula, what good is the non-stick surface? I mostly use the bamboo spatula for lifting things that are delicate, like sunny side up eggs.
Other than the hygiene argument of bacteria build up what is wrong with just using wooden spatulas for example?
Do you have any sources for wood cooking implements being unhygienic? I recall one a few years ago finding that wooden cutting boards are _more_ hygienic than plastic as they pull bacteria into their pores and trap and kill them: https://news.ncsu.edu/2014/09/cutting-boards-food-safety/
I don't cut into my spatula, though. It doesn't have the same grooves as a plastic cutting board
I don't think I've ever even seen a wooden spatula, and I don't see how you could make one thin enough to flip pancakes (or worse eggs) and it stay durable.
I use wooden spatulas, and gladly take the short-term biological risk over the long-term hormonal risk. In any case, in a modern kitchen where utensils are washed thoroughly and regularly I don't see an issue with wood.
Some people even carve them from lumber. If you are into DIY and you have no Christmas gift ideas :)
They are common in the US too.
Ok, I think I've seen those before, but that looks too thick for flipping eggs or pancakes effectively.
> you can say that they shouldn't use non-stick cookware
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.
I am still not convinced that scratched non-stick stuff is a real danger. As far as I know, the whole point of PTFE (what the coating normally is made of) is that it’s chemically mostly inert. I don’t know the mechanism by which eating PTFE flakes would be harmful. I’m not a chemist though so I would be grateful for corrections.
This particular article seems to be referring to brominated flame retardants (BFRs) -- there's a single reference to "PBDEs" in the text, and the original cited research paper [0] talks about various BFRs. The purported issue is with plastics recycling, where both new and old products may contain previously banned compounds.
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...
But wasn’t that only used in production? Some bouillon is also made by using hydrochloric acid, but it is neutralized and only NaCl remains. Isn’t it the same here? The PFOA is basically used as a precursor for PTFE and doesn’t remain in the product?
The big "no" with non-stick is using steel wool scrubbers for cleaning. That and using sharp instruments like forks.
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. :)
This entire discussion points me towards a conclusion that metal-on-metal is the conservative way to go. So what is the problem with this as a solution ? Do we have to worry about microbits of metal disrupting physiology ?
Raw metal like cast iron is pretty terrible for red sauces due to tomato sauce acidity. You will get tremendous amount of iron oxide (rust) into the food to the point when you can taste it, with no idea if you don't cross safety thresholds.
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).
I really disagree on the tomato sauce being okay in cast iron. Cooking high acidity food will absolutely strip all the seasoning off your pan if done for long enough. It has nothing to do with rust.
>So what is the problem with this as a solution ?
Non-stick cookware was invented for a reason.
If you just started heating the pan 20 years ago, you'd be good today without anyone telling you anything.
Ironically I have to use more fat/oil in a non-stick pan than a cast iron one.
And that even when using plenty of fat, a sticky pan can be a bother to clean.
metal spatulas make scratches into the pan, which destroys any surface coating (so it goes into the food) or, if there is no coating, at least destroys the smooth surface which makes food stick even more.
maybe they have higher quality pans that are less easy to scratch, or they are learning how to use those tools without causing scratches, or they simply replace them more often.
in every pot or pan i have ever used, scratches were a problem. and only metal tools could have caused them.
The problem with metal is that it isn’t nonstick, so stuff sticks to it.
I thought we had found that all non stick pans were toxic? They said at first just to avoid teflon, but then the replacements were found bad too, or even worse. Are there actually safe ones now?
If you’re cooking a lot with aluminium pans, yes, maybe.
I am mostly worried about the stress of things sticking to that like glue. Stress has physiological consequences.
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.
For those of us who don't walk on cliff edges, though, it is a concern.
Use a wooden one? Has the added benefit of being part of the short carbon cycle.
Wood is not good if you want to handle raw meat, since it's fibrous it makes it pretty easy to eventually cross contaminate something you eat. It's the same reason wooden cutting boards are usually avoided if you're working with raw meat. Every single time, the risk is small, but over time, the dice rolls add up.
And that's why you should pour boiling water over any implement that has been in contact with raw meat.
Wood and plastic are not the only two options in your life, this is a silly framing.
How do you know by what mechanism you’ve become sick? Do you cook that sparsely that you can positively say you’ve never become sick a few days after eating something you’ve cooked?
This is as useful of an insight as saying that I'm in my late 30s and never gotten Covid, I think you might be overstating the potential harm here. A sample size of one is not much use when we talk about statistical probabilities.
When cooking meat, I use two pairs of chopsticks: the raw chopsticks and the cooked chopsticks. The raw chopsticks are used to loaded into the pan and to flip it once. Once that batch is flipped I use the cooked chopsticks.
Just wash it properly after use.
I honestly cannot understand the appeal of non stick. Cast iron is so much simpler and the food comes out better. And the pans are indestructible and cleaning is so much easier (just wipe usually). I have three cast iron pans with which I cook for large numbers of people regularly and I'm flabbergasted when I visit other people's homes and find endless stacks of speciality pans. What are people possibly using these for?
>What are people possibly using these for?
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.
> never overheated, stirred only with silicone utensils, and washed by hand using only non-scratching sponges
I've been using wooden spatulas on my non-stick pans for years without any issues. Maybe only cheap non-sticks have trouble with them?
You can cook eggs on non stick with no added fat at all.
Go to any commercial kitchen, and you'll find non-stick pans. eggs and omelettes are just foolproof with non stickz and nothing else comes close.
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 used to be like you until I lived with my mother then saw first-hand problems from her point of view.
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.
I love my cast iron, but usually choose a nonstick for eggs and crepes/pancakes in the morning.
- 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.
That’s the kind of re-seasoning I mean: first I dry it (paper towel), then wipe with oil (more paper towel). It’s more work than cleaning a nonstick by hand and produces more waste.
Yep, I ditched my "non stick" and all plastic utensils over a decade ago. It's just never seemed right to me to cook with plastic and I don't understand how other people can do it.
Cast iron is nice for certain things. However they lack any type of finesse. You can’t reliably change pan temp quickly and that’s often desirable.
Not everyone has a gas stove.
Or maybe Im mistaken, but does cast iron work equally well on a “hot surface” (ceran) type stove?
Induction might be the key here. It really is fast to change.
One thing about it is, it's pretty much plain elemental iron, straight out of the "iron age".
Actual steel is an alloy that is much more advanced, even when it is not a stainless grade.
If you have a teflon frying pan, using metal damages the surface. I wouldn't think eating teflon bits is good either.
It is wild how well the old marketing worked, leaving consumers to think Teflon was something close to indestructible. In my industry, a lot of the machines I work on use Teflon bearings, and customers are almost always flabbergasted when I show them the bearing wore down considerably after 8 years of continuous use.
Using the dishwasher is what really damages the surface. Or just extended duration high heat and cooling.
Wood and bamboo are good options if you have to use a teflon pan
How about silicone ones?
After I learned about the harmful effects of Teflon, I became much more cautious about consumption. It's nearly impossible to avoid the toxins when eating out because wax has been replaced with synthetics that leach into food from packaging.
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.
Does any of this matter in a normal life?
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.
I never understood this argument. Would you eat a credit card? I mean, why not, you eat a credit cards worth of microplastics a week per this article:
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?
Well, for one it does not say that. And if that was the case does most of it just pass through me or why isn’t there hundreds of credit cards worth of plastic in my body?
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.
Heat is a transforming agent in nature, and time is the ultimate test. That's the context i think missed from your thesis.
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.
TBH it might not matter in a normal life for the individual. But (as long as the claims have some truth too it) statistically, it definitely matters.
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.
There are many things to consider and it's up to each individual. It can become exhausting if you choose to continue to learn and grow, but if you don't ... what are you doing?
There are still people who use plastic electric kettles. It's crazy out there.
Just living my life. If I live a year less because of my cookware then so be it.
A) Cookware is expensive
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
Tempered glass does not contain plastic. No glass contains plastic. The formula to make glass has been known for centuries. Tempering is a thermal process, it doesn’t change the chemistry of the product. Old school pyrex involved the addition of Boron —- no hydrocarbons in the mix.
Modern Pyrex is ordinary glass, mostly, and sometimes strengthened glass.
Old Pyrex was borosilicate glass.
Pyrex the brand switched to soda lime glass in North America, but you can still find borosilicate glass kitchenware from different vendors.
> Modern Pyrex ... Old Pyrex
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.
From what I know, Teflon is neutral as long as you don't overheat it and breathe in the gas. Can you point some sources stating otherwise?
Regardless of the health concerns that arise from using Teflon, the industrial process used to produce it has caused significant issues that were covered in the documentary "The Devil We Know"[0].
Teflon itself is not the issue (unless it goes over about 260°C), but the PFAs which should have been phased out of modern non-stick coatings. The problem is if the surface is scratched from using metal utensils or scourers as this can cause PFAs to leach into the food.
https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/y...
It's not possible to fry in a safe range. The safe range is <500F. I use pans at a greater temperature than that for frying. Additionally, when the pans wear the surface degrades and becomes your food. This probably always occurs, but more when the products wear.
Also the vaporization of teflon is probably not a step function but a curve, and they set the safety range at some threshold. So in all likelihood you are inhaling who knows what at even the safe ranges.
> One thing I'm not aware of is if Pyrex or the other tempered glasses are safe or if they also contain plastic.
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?
I never use glass for cooking. I've had two Pyrex dishes explode on me. One was contained in an oven, thankfully, so that all that was lost was a week's worth of chicken. The other, unfortunately, shattered in the "kitchen" of my studio apartment, 5 feet from my bed. I had to spend the next hour using a flashlight to try to find and pick up the tiny shards that had flown everywhere.
A lot of vintage glass things including Pyrex contain high levels of lead. I need to look into it more, but it seems to be from paint or colors added, and clear glass items are likely fine.
If you want to have proper vintage glass fun, https://www.reddit.com/r/uraniumglass/ is endlessly entertaining.
I have some old glazed ceramic plates that I won't use any more. One of them developed a crack half way through and I noticed that, in the microwave, food on it would stay frozen but the plate would be blazing hot. The glaze was conductive with presumably lead and was absorbing all the energy. The crack created a slot that blocked eddy currents.
Stuff today is still using ceramics with lead. Importers don't give a f about lead poisoning when it's a race to the bottom for cost.
I threw out all my pots and pans that have non stick surfaces and replaced them with stainless steel.
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.
> you can scrub and scrape them
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.
>> 50% more grease-cutting detergents
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.
Clean freaks might object to standing water in pans. But it really does work. First rinse & brush out what you can before soaking, so that it looks like water and not sludge.
Water is a powerful solvent it just needs time.
It’s the best thing ever. However if cleaning many things I highly recommend gloves. Will leave your hands feeling odd for awhile otherwise.
I kept saying this for a decade but no one listens, even my mom.
Consider all outside food is toxic too.
Just curious: do you raise your own poultry? Milk your own cow? Grow your own wheat?
If so, my huge respect! (Otherwise...)
( not the person that made the "outside food" comment )
"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 wheatbelt is pretty seasonal, lush green in the winter months, dry yellow to brown following harvest - our neighbours here put up a lot videos on their channel year round, this is after harvest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE
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.
If you're buying and preparing whole foods, and not buying processed meals or eating out, you probably have a good enough handle on what you're eating. No need to become a certified organic smallholder.
Not op and not raising my own cattle. However IMO finding a farmer you trust and ordering directly once a month or so is easier and cheaper than buying meat in supermarkets.
I did the same. I still use cast iron and ceramic though.
I have, very regretfully, stopped using cast iron. Being a man, in a country where I can't easily donate blood, iron load is something that I want to be careful of.
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.
What? Unless you have haemochromatosis this is really tinfoilery over the iron levels acquired through natural ingestion, especially the thought of leach levels from a pan. You get more iron from meat or a bowl of cereal than you could ever get from a pan without it being flat out dissolved in the process over the course of a handful of cooks.
Iron filings (mostly elemental iron with some iron oxides) are used as supplements, so definitely bio-available.
Is this comment an implicit endorsement of giving blood as a health benefit because it allows to slough off heavy metals or something? what…? News to me.
Am I missing something? You link is to an inherited disease. If you don't have this inherited disease is this relevant for most people?
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.
> particularly for men (I wonder why)
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.
My other half works for the NHS blood/transfusion department and was able to trace my blood (after I gave her the number on the blood pack) and confirm that I was negative for various diseases including syphilis.
Also, you get a free iron/anaemia test before donating.
Sorry, I can't understand the idea, why iron is bad and what does it have to do with blood donations?
I mean I know iron and blood are related but this particular statement just won't compute
Too much of anything is bad. A quart of table salt would kill you. A bucket of water force-fed into you could kill you.
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.
[flagged]
> are you bringing it up for a reason?
This article relates to "hidden dangers of cookware." If he was talking about the vagaries of the solar cycle on Mars, I'd be on your side, as it is, this comes across as reflexive gatekeeping.
> Do people on this site now just read the headlines and then come to comment their stream of consciousness based on the title?
And.. what, precisely, do you think _you're_ doing in this comment? Is it not precisely what you complain about?
Must people restrict their comments to only what is raised in the linked pages?
Staying on topic is viewed more positively.
What about silicon or wood utensils? Are you saying we have to use black plastic utensils because of non-stick pans?
Aren’t we talking about chemical contamination from kitchen cooking items?
No, like hand towels and bunt pans are not what's being discussed, article is about plastic utensils.
People use plastic spatulas because they are worried if they use a metal spatula they'll scratch their non-stick pan.
People use non-stick pans because it's easier and they are bad at cooking.
If you don't understand why a stainless steel spatula would be preferable to a plastic one, maybe you're just not paying attention much to the world.
[dead]
Just cook with stainless steel, it's not that hard. Add and warm fat before adding your other ingredients to prevent sticking or if you don't want additional fat, then add liquid to reduce at the end (the same way you do a wine reduction you can just use a bit of water) if your food sticks and you need to scrape it off the bottom.
>Just cook with stainless steel, it's not that hard
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
You may have a stove that heats the stainless steel vessel non-uniformly, so you might need a heat spreader.
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.
I want to but my eggs stick like crazy. I’ve even tried all the tips too like oil when droplets float, etc.
Cast iron? My eggs slide around great every time, and I scrub it with Dawn and a sponge after every cook (it is a myth that you cannot do this)
Cast iron is the best. The hardest part of cast iron is all of the nonsense people believe about cast iron, leading them to think it's inconvenient and, worse, that gets them to actively make cast iron problematic.
It’s hard to talk to cast iron zealots. They’re usually people that never seriousky cooked before and went from cheap, thin steal pans to cast iron and assume all pans are like the thin pans they had before.
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.
Yes, carbon steel pans are great as well.
Cast iron is so easy I honestly have no idea why people think it's hard. Even the people who claim you can damage the seasoning. They're not wrong. You actually can. You know whats great though? You just reseason it by cooking in it with a lot of oil.
The pans are magic. I even take my pans camping for cooking on a fire. Truly amazing things
It is incredibly difficult to damage cast iron and not hard to clean. I love the stuff.
Carbon steel is better in every way. There's zero objective reason to cast iron over it.
Price
I’ve never seen eggs not stick to cast iron.
If you have cast iron and you’re having a lot of food sticking issues then you may need to reseason it. As a person that uses mostly cast iron, I prefer it, but I think it does require a bit more care.
It must be, because I know the pans were seasoned in all cases.
I am not used to be around the kitchen but I actually did an omelette two days ago with a cast iron. I was worried it would stick. I used a small amount of oil and pre heated the pan at high temperature. After putting the eggs I lowered the heat to medium low. The idea is to have a thermal shock on the outside of the egg so that it solidifies. And then cook it at lower temperature. It worked wonders.
I make eggs all the time in mine, no sticking. It just needs butter or something.
I fried some this afternoon:
- 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.
But I don't want a crust on my eggs. I want them pale and fluffy, especially my scrambled eggs. Any brown spots on my eggs and I consider them ruined. If you tell me I won't be able to make eggs the way I prefer them in a cast iron pan, then cast iron is not for me.
Absolutely. Hot pan, hot fat, let the egg set enough not to tear before you try to turn it.
At that point I could just cook in stainless steel. The hope is to not have crusty eggs imo
You need way more oil than you think.
I’ve managed it.
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.
Eggs in hot oil in a clean, smooth preheated pan should not stick...
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.
Carbon steel is also seemingly indestructible; cleaning if something is stuck means deglazing the hot pan.
I love my carbon steel skillets.
Is it possible to skip the seasoning ?
No, then everything will stick to it.
The easiest way to cook eggs is in a glass vessel in a microwave oven.
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 cook eggs in a stainless steel frying pan several times a week, and I just use plenty of butter. The egg doesn't stick. Also, don't let the butter burn, and don't let the pan get too hot.
Tips: 1) use more oil 2) get the oil to the right temp 3) try cooking the egg at a lower temp 4) stir the egg more while cooking 5) don't overcook
Do you heat up your pan before adding butter and/or oil? That's an important step to avoid sticking.
Use butter.
Microplastic and heart disease are both potentially going to affect my health, but the direct impact of heart disease is a lot easier to prove and test for...
Although the fats in butter have good heat stability, and the proteins can be easily removed by melting the butter and letting them settle out to make clarified butter, butter also contains cholesterol, which is not so easily removed. Although dietary cholesterol is likely safe to eat in its raw form, it's easily oxidized by heating in air, and oxidized cholesterol is implicated in health risks, e.g.:
I've seen no mention of margarine in this entire comments page. The consensus has changed over the years.
Neither of those things mean it’s better. You could say that about battery acid.
Only total amateurs would use butter for making eggs. It's full of proteins and sugars that would burn.
Here is Julia Child making eggs with butter. FOH.
[dead]
This - its super easy. I use an IR temp gun and once the pan is 170, add 1 tbsp. of butter, and it never sticks. I've showed friends and they still insist on their nasty Teflon/non-stick crap.
170c right? I do the same but use 350f. I also heat the pan before adding oil. Works perfectly every time. Even more nonstick than any nonstick pan I’ve used.
yep, 170c and I also heat the pan up before adding fat/oil and agreed, its better than non-stock and honestly even easier to clean.
Does your IR temp gun accurately measure a shiny stainless steel surface?
Oh dear my kettle is made from black plastic…
If you're speaking of an electric water kettle, my advice is throw it out. At least where I live (Germany) you can buy good quality electric water kettles with seamless stainless steel container for well under €50,— (I bought mine a quarter of a century ago for €25,—), so there's very little incentive to save money. I once had an impossibly cheap water kettle with open heating coils. That thing not only smelled of plastics but the water was ruined, too. Add to that that open heating coils have a reputation of shedding nickel into the water. Just say no.
Does it count if the black plastic part is not in contact with the water/food? The inside of my kettle is stainless steel, but the lid is black plastic (not directly in contact with water)
In your case, the lid of the kettle is effectively in contact with the water. It sits exposed to hot steam, the steam condenses at the lid, and drops fall back into the water you're boiling.
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.
Plastic inside and out…
what bothers me is the black plastic handles on pots and pans when cooking with gas. they get way to hot and produce a strong odor that makes me worry about what kind of gasses are released there that i am breathing in.
Go throw it away if you smell any odor. I'm glad even my cheap IKEA pots come with stainless steel handles. My even cheaper cast iron pans have, well, cast iron handles.
Awareness is the first step
My induction hob is pretty fast anyway. What are the morals of gifting it to the charity shop?
A minor concern that will discourage families from cooking at home and maintaining a healthy diet
If the family is thinking rationally, it will notice that restaurants have less of an incentive to get rid of black plastic cooking utensils than they themselves do -- and will react by tending to eat out less.
It's foolish and backwards to expect families to make rational decisions. Nearly every sociological and behavioral study has proven this.
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.
I imagine most of us here likely follow well-known conventional kitchen wisdom: don’t use metal utensils on non-stick pans, wash your hands after handling raw meat, etc. And I suppose I can add, generally avoid black plastic kitchen gear to my list. However, how much does it even matter at this point?
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.
The difference for me is that this can easily be something I'm using every day, so it's believable that there might be a cumulative effect. The replacement cost is trivial, and I need to do it approximately once per decade, so I might as well chuck out and replace my battered plastic spoons and spatulas now while it's fresh in my mind then not think about it again. But the rest of your list... I don't think of myself as particularly healthy, or particularly observant in this regard, but I ran through it and honestly most of the answers are "no":
> 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.
This discussion is being monitored and steered by nameless PR companies doing paid damage control for multinational companies that rhyme with the expressions ”YouDont” and ”Lemurs”.
Of course this is the perfect place to do it: if you can convince HN, HN will convince the rest of the world.
Steel (cast iron) skillets. Wooden or stainless spatulas.
https://www.target.com/p/oxo-silicone-spatula/-/A-80221533 Here you go. Replace it with this one.
That's not the kind of spatula they're talking about, I've rarely seen that kind be black. I'm pretty sure they mean the flat offset kind you'd use to flip eggs or pancakes.
Indeed. Look here instead, perhaps:
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 upgrade Tevolo pick they list is worth the upgrade, and I’ve been gradually discarding the cheaper turners in favor of it.
The black one makes an acceptable bowl scraper, but it seems to not appreciate dishwasher life as well as a typical rubber scraper would.
I was a professional cook for a long time so dexter 6.5 fish spat 4 lyfe.
OXO makes a flat silicone spatula too (I think they call it a turner or something), I've got one and it's been a great upgrade from the black plastic kind.
Plus it won't scratch anything enameled or nonstick etc.
Why would GP suggest that spatula if it was the one they're saying is bad in the article?
in english in america, can't speak for other lanuguage/locales and too lazy to look, the word spatula is used for two different tools:
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
We have the same word for both in France, like you.
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.
In British the former is sometimes called a fish slice. But of a silly name so most people now also use spatula for both.
Got it, thanks for the explanation!
As mentioned, the article is talking about plastic flippers, not silicone spatulas, but either way, I would recommend this [1] spatula set instead.
Who uses a black plastic spatula when you can use a wooden one?
What about black rubber spatulas?
These days "rubber" could just be some synthetic plastic like in car tires. It's less likely to be natural rubber.
Most modern spatulas are silicone, those aren't typically recycled.
...and take the opportunity to ditch the teflon pans while you're at it. They're toxic.
https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/teflon-polytetrafluor...
> They're toxic
* 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)
When you scratch them, and bits PTFE come loose, and you eat those bits, will they simply bee excreted, or will your body absorb (some of) it and never excrete it?
It'll slide through your intestines smoother than basically anything else you could possibly swallow :-)
Many medical implants are made of PTFE because of how inert it is.
This myth needs to die. Teflon is only an issue at temperatures you're just not going to encounter in a kitchen.
And if you did encounter such temperature, and you had oil on the pan - well you've poisoned yourself more than the Teflon would!
Most consumer PTFE coatings are declared to be safe up to 450°F. It is trivially easy to heat a pan beyond that temperature on modern gas, electric, and induction ranges in less than ten minutes. The margin of safety is demonstrably nonexistent and it’s wild to me that we just accept this risk constantly, everywhere, anytime we eat food (whether at home or from a restaurant).
It's easy to learn how your cooking setup responds using a cheap IR thermometer. You can check it's working correctly by boiling water in the pan and confirming the temperature is close enough to the expected boiling point for your local air pressure. The risk depends greatly on both the construction of the pan (poor heat conductivity means hot spots from uneven heating) and cooking technique. Using high heat, heating empty pans, and neglecting stirring are all dangerous. Leaving heated pans unattended is especially dangerous, and anecdotally appears to be responsible for most severe overheating events. With correct technique I believe the risk is negligible and well worth the greater convenience of non-stick pans. But I don't trust third parties to use correct technique.
So you replace the Teflon with oil, and now your risk is even higher. What did you accomplish?
Searing food in a PTFE pan almost certainly involves overheating it. Depending on what you're cooking you don't necessarily need oil (e.g. you don't need it for cooking eggs), although you might want to use some at moderate temperature for flavor. And for some foods oil is necessary to avoid overheating the pan, because it improves heat transfer from the pan to the food. Check with an IR thermometer every time you cook something new.
Source?
Unfortunately it's quite easy to overheat a teflon pan on an induction stove.
The question is not the temperature if you forget the pan on the fire, the question is which is worse: High Temperature Teflon, or High Temperature Oil?
The answer is that Teflon is safer.
At too high a temperature oil will smoke and burn, leaving toxic components in both the oil and in the air.
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.
The risks of both high temperature PTFE and high temperature cooking oils are poorly understood. I wouldn't say with confidence either is safer. I personally avoid both.
IJS no harm comes from isolating hot food from plastics altogether.
'Researchers from Harvard Chan School found that three types of flame retardants, called TDCIPP, TPHP, and mono-ITP, can have a major impact on pregnancies. The study followed 211 women undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF), and found that 80% of them showed evidence of the chemicals in their urine. Women with the highest levels of exposure fared the worst, with a wide range of effects:10% lower chance of a successful fertilization31% lower chance of the embryo implanting in the uterus41% fewer clinical pregnancies (where fetal heartbeat is confirmed by ultrasound)38% fewer live births https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/subtopics/flame-retard...
poop i use a black plastic as my primary spatula
[dead]
[dead]
Another reason to avoid The Atlantic.
friend then later girlfriend got sick,bad. Before that she was jammin along through life,A listed and having lunch with our now PM,dustin? bustin? anyway she was sick and I put it upon myself to do what I could,she was in a bad way,couch bound,out of breath when walking,bad.So I started researching everything she was eating and drinking and bieng medicated with, and researched all of the indivual ingrediants and "additives", hundreds of substences, and of all of those additives and substances,not one was written up anywhere,ever as HEY WOW THIS STUFFF is so great,the best thing for humanity.....no it was all dry ,often void of any actual descriptive reason for bieng in food. So we got rid of all that,and started eating food and her change in health for the better was dramatic. Along side the additive free diet,a plastic ban was implimented,*nonplastic touches humans internaly or externaly,as long as a.viable alternative exists(feed packaging which is removed) The reversal of symptoms was dramatic.This was an A list'r with very extensive medical access,and she was planning her own palitive care when I interviened with my simple method,of removing things where there can be no (health/physiological) down side.It was a huge effort to research the bad and inexplicable additives and find viable implimentable alternatives,ongoing. But there is no write up/study anywhere that lauds the benifits of plastic touching humans food or bodys.Its all bad, or they would brag.Simple as that.
> when I interviened with my simple method,of removing things where there can be no (health/physiological) down side.
Removing spaces after punctuation has the physiological downside of making my eye twitch.
ah do pologize fer that, havin as were my own twitch inducing triggers, hate to think of doing that to someone else
That's true of nearly everything in this space. You'll find lots and lots of comments below about PFAS and Teflon pans, for example, ranging from factual-but-misleading (e.g. "Teflon pans can emit harmful gases when overheated") to bald assertions (multiple variations on "Teflon pans are harmful to your health") with no context or specificity to the claim.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I was an academic in a past life. I left before I made it a profession, but I spent long enough there to see what I'm talking about. The people with the most successful careers get there by getting press, which doesn't usually correlate with academic rigor.
That said, I grant your broader point about selection bias.
> If you want to find an incentive to get undeserved attention
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.
> such as HN comments that shoot down almost every OP without fail
If the OP can't handle criticism it's hard to argue that the attention is deserved
Agreed. So much hyperventilating about risks that, in context (e.g., driving, open water swimming, alcohol, tylenol), are infinitesimally small. Risk is a difficult subject for lay people to understand, and there are many professions built entirely on that human weakness.
An overheating Teflon pan nearly killed my pet birds. I don't see how that's a factual but misleading statement.
Chocolate nearly killed my pet dog. Factual, but misleading in an article about health risks to humans.
They aren’t very toxic to humans either.
Candles and incense also kill birds. I think they are also sensitive to air fresheners. Too bad most birds can’t smell very well.
It’s misleading because “harmful” in this context usually means to humans not to birds.
Canary in the coal mine!
Canary in an kitchen with an overheated Teflon pan.
(1) https://www.buffalobirdnerd.com/storage/app/media/Teflon.pdf
Teflon pans are shit even if they don't poison you because they are too easy to break and even if you treat them carefully they never last very long.
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.
It’s similar to climate scares, a decade ago people were saying that various coastal cities would be underwater by now and they aren’t even close. It’s alarmist propaganda from bored people. Sure, the climate is important, just as PFAS and mad cow all are, but pushing what amounts to conspiracy theories doesn’t solve it. And, personally, “climate change” isn’t even the big issue when we have unimaginably large trash islands in the ocean. First we have to solve multinational corporate pollution before we can worry about terraforming our planet.
> irresponsible claims
Worst case scenario here is people throw out their relatively harmless spatulas and buy new ones. Big whoop.
After careful research, it turns out this conspiracy was actually started as a sales promotion by Spatula City! I have just as much evidence of this as most other theories
And who do you think owns Spatula City?
It’s kind of funny to watch the following conversations both recur regularly here on HN:
- 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.
To be fair to people, it is INCREDIBLY difficult to cope with the fact that a plurality or even most papers that come out may be found to be completely un-reproducible. For low stakes things like getting rid of a plastic spatula or cutting board, there is a sub-$20 cost to get rid of them and believe it is right (even if it ends up being wrong), while the cost of not believing and the paper being right is a massively increased chance of cancer. Science will likely never have its reckoning with reality, people will just believe in it less and less until it becomes background noise like everything else.
> there is a sub-$20 cost
Plus the risk of the alternative you pick being much worse than the original option.
There's a risk for wooden ones that are glued, specifically bamboo, or finished with something toxic. You should probably stick to ones made from a single piece of hardwood and are unfinished.
There's also a risk that any cracks will fill with bacteria.
Wooden cooking tools can harbour bacteria.
Why?
It's actually very easy to cope. Imagine that all your biases and intuitions are more correct than any given study, but why imagine it when it's already true.
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?
This is so true. Trying to explain to lay people how garbage peer review is (I show them my accepted NeurIPS paper reviews as evidence of how bad it is) tough. Most people imagine that (especially at the highest levels) that folks are independently reproducing results or at least doing something more than running ChatGPT on the paper. It's exactly the opposite - peer review is a joke.
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.
The idea that those who engage is a "dialectical" fashion of academic style education are more "correct" or "see reality for how it is" compared to others.
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"
> 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!
That is not how it works. You should ask if being for or against is more socially accepted. If everyone cooks in teflon it must be double plus good for your health.
Surely by "everyone" you mean "demographics I identify with".
It would be funny if it was done by same people but are we sure it is the case? Is 'HN' homogeneous crowd?
At some point a behavior or pattern becomes so reliable or so frequent that it's a valid criticism of the community as a whole.
What you're quoting is satire of serious commentary. Few people unironically take it to such an extreme. But the undertone it's mocking is absolutely real and persistent.
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?
Gell-Man amnesia effect! (Or very similar ...)
But why take the chance? Just buy a metal spatula next time and there’s nothing to worry about if it turns out to be true
Metal spatulas cause damage to frying pans. How do I know which is worse, the plastic melting off my black spatula or the non-stick coating scraping off my frying pan?
I suppose I could go cast iron, but I'm sure I can find a study saying those are terrible too.
I recently learned how to cook non-stick with my stainless steel pan [1]. Needless to say it's a bit more involved, but I felt more accomplished when I figured out how to cook with it.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAtNfS7KeE0
Fear of fat has completely killed this country's health. Fat is a necessary part of food. Fat doesn't make you fat, refined sugar does.
You need fat on 'nonstick' too. This is another common myth.
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.
cast iron is so slow and its seasoning is so tedious to build and maintain. I can only really see good reason to use if you cook a LOT of steak or similar. I exclusively use SS, but am I wrong? What am I missing from CI?
You don't have to get cast-iron necessarily. Try carbon-steel. My mother doesn't like cast iron because of the maintenance required, and we don't use non-stick for the alleged health issues.
Got a bunch of carbon-steel cookware and she loves it.
Yes, you need to. I have a couple from IKEA and they come with seasoning directions inside.
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.
Isn’t carbon steel more maintenance heavy than cast iron? I was always told that you always need to coat carbon steel after use otherwise it will oxidize, while cast iron has a protective polymerized coating that helps it to resist that naturally, and in my experience this has held true where CS equipment oxidizes readily (and stains from acids) while cast iron has more leeway due to the initial coating.
The lighter weight makes maintenance much easier in practice.
All non-stick frying pans die within a year or so. We recently took the plunge and invested in a stainless steel one. Yes, it takes some (very little) time to adjust your cooking style, but that thing comes with a lifetime guarantee and you don't have to worry about accidentally scratching the surface. Win-win.
Stainless steel can and will stick to some food, but a good one can hold very high amounts of heat and will heat up very evenly.
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 could definitely picture achieving it with a metal spatula.
cast iron pans contain two materials, the seasoning (oxidized and polymerized food oils, occasionally oxidized iron) and the pan itself (an iron-carbon-silicon alloy, potentially with impurities).
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
> Metal spatulas cause damage to frying pans.
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.
Seriously lol, the effort vs risk ratio is insanely in favor of getting rid getting rid of plastic spatulas. Though, it should be pretty obvious even before this study that plastic, heat, and ingesting the result do not go together.
you're only focusing on the immediate, literal replacement cost though; what if (and there are as credible papers as this one, stating so) using a metal spatula on my teflon pan causes it to get into my food and that's what will kill me? Or various metals are an even bigger health risk?
>> 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.
If you are using teflon pans, then metal spatulas are probably worse for you. But you should not be using teflon pans on the first place!
Also wood spatulas exist as a very good replacement for plastic spatulas for teflon pans anyway.
Metal spatulas are also just better. Plastic or silicone ones are like safety scissors, so of course you need non-stick pans. I don't run into sticking with cast iron and a metal spatula.
You are using them for the wrong purpose... Plastic spatulas are useful for sauces, batter, anything of that consistency. Of course, if you are already holding it in your hand and you need to flip a pancake, there's nothing wrong with it...
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.
metal spatulas scrape. there's non-stick dishes to worry about.
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.
At the very least, there’s about a 100% chance of microplastics getting into your food when using these things under heat. You can argue about the risks all day, but I imagine most people would want to avoid this bioaccumulation if possible.
This is my take as well. Can I avoid microplastics? No. Can I make simple household decisions that minimize my intake? Yes. Stainless pots and pans, stainless or wooden tools, stainless silverware, ceramic plates and bowls.
Yes, it takes slightly longer to clean some stuff up, but at least I'm not eating as much plastic/PTFE.
Why not wood?
I can’t believe how many people are commenting like metal is the only option when wood and silicon are perfectly plentiful and cheap.
Only if you don't care about not ruining your non-stick pans (or don't use any).
The non-stick pans that release all sorts of concerning-at-even-1ppb fluorine compounds?
Try out carbon steel if you haven't. Season it once and it's essentially non-stick -- all I do is give mine a light rinse for a few seconds and then towel dry.
Stainless steel on the stovetop. Glass in the microwave. A mix of those in the oven. Occasionally well-seasoned cast iron.
It's important to understand that coloring plastics change their characteristics, though (I'll add the link if I can find it again).
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.
Why do you trust gidmkhealthnerd, a psuedonym who likely knows nothing about it and offers nothing but a personal opinion, over the post of someone who studied it and gathered actual experimental evidence?
it's a weird hill to die on when you can get an almost-exact item made from silicone instead of that gross plastic
...until next week, when the prestigious scientific journal "The Atlantic" publishes a hot take on the dangers of silicone!
I mean there are nasty compounds in silicone that can leak into food especially with heat and wear and tear, it’s probably not ideal to cook on.
Stupidity has always bothered me. Strident pseudo-intellectual stupidity bothers me almost more than cruel ignorant stupidity.
At least now I'm angry in a constructive way.
How do you know which person is the pseudo-intellectual. At least one gained professional expertise in chemistry and did an actual scientific experiment. The other posted their 'opinion' on Threads saying it is all wrong.
Yes, that's my point. I'm complaining about the one idiot pointing to the other idiot crapping on science and boasting about eating toxins being top comment on this fractally appalling story.
Happy Halloween
"I don't find the data personally convincing" is a poor retort. And that's all he says, without any further information.
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.