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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

#251

Post by user3939382 »

amanda99 wrote: post #167

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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#252

Post by akvadrako »

euroderf wrote: post #183
skyyler wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it possible to skip the seasoning ?

No, then everything will stick to it.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#253

Post by khafra »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #126
ggggggreat wrote: post #25

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 $$$

> 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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#254

Post by vitus »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #205
echoangle wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) that's the issue. It's mainly been phased out of cookware now, so if it's less than 10 years old then you should be okay.

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...

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#255

Post by Kototama »

Jarmsy wrote: post #244
dotancohen wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just started cooking in an iron pan, and I love it. It's actually not significantly more difficult to clean once you learn to leave the seasoning on and get over the cultural conditioning of what clean is essentially. The cooking process it also far better, with the whole pan being uniformly hot and staying that way.

There are a lot of old misconceptions around about cast iron seasoning. It's a layer of bioplastic formed by the polymerization when heating a thin layer of oil on the pan to high temperature - It's not about leaving your pan dirty or 'flavored'. You can clean it with regular dish soap just fine, that isn't strong enough to take the layer off.

Exactly. Even the Lodge manufacturer, for example, indicates on their website that you can use a small amount of soap.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#256

Post by latexr »

InDubioProRubio wrote: post #196
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#257

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #94

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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#258

Post by Kototama »

larsrc wrote: post #228
hnbad wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reason in part is paranoia about "fat" in food which was conveniently used to distract from sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.

And that even when using plenty of fat, a sticky pan can be a bother to clean.

You need to preheat the pan and not cook at a temperature where the oil polymerizes or the ingredients can burn. When you put something sticky in it, you need to wait a bit for the crust to form before moving it.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#259

Post by ahoka »

amanda99 wrote: post #167

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.

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.

Re: Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid

#260

Post by exmadscientist »

pbmonster wrote: post #165
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 sur…

> 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!

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