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Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

theatlantic.com

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Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#161

Post by nemo44x »

tomtheelder wrote: post #44
JohnFen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still have a cast iron skillet, but I mostly stopped using it once I got some carbon steel pans. In my experience they beat cast iron in nearly every way. I only use my cast iron now if I need a huge amount of thermal capacity (like pre-heating it to make pizza on or something) or for the presentation value.

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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#162

Post by metalman »

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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#163

Post by usrnm »

mattdesl wrote: post #152
onli wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really do not need to re-season them every time! Just using the pan with some oil is enough. If you clean it later with water, you can add a little oil afterwards and clean it with a paper towel, that's enough. Takes almost no time. But I have to agree that non-stick pans are even more non-stick. That's why it took some convincing here to not buy new ones in my home.

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.

You can dry your pan on the stove, this is what I do. No paper towel needed

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#164

Post by mattdesl »

usrnm wrote: post #163
mattdesl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can dry your pan on the stove, this is what I do. No paper towel needed

Good idea – but it will probably take even longer than wiping with a paper towel.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#165

Post by pbmonster »

exmadscientist wrote: post #71

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…

> 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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#166

Post by altacc »

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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#167

Post by amanda99 »

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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#168

Post by 0xEF »

verisimi wrote: post #114
kazinator wrote: post #65

How about, don't fry with any color plastic spatulas.

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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#169

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

shiroiushi wrote: post #106
kazinator wrote: post #65

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...

> 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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#170

Post by pbmonster »

arnejenssen wrote: post #135
andy_ppp wrote: post #94

Oh dear my kettle is made from black plastic…

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.

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