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.
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.
( 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.
Offtopic, but wow, I looked at some photos of Wheatbelt, and, amazingly, Australia can be intensely emerald-green all over! Before that, basically every photo of Australia outside cities I've seen showed scant khaki-colored vegetation at best, and Mars-like red and orange soils.
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 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.
Is the iron that leaches from pan even bio-available? Aren't supplements very specific compounds? I can admit that it might be toxic, but that toxicity is not due to something like over production of haemoglobin...
A pan is about 1 kg (a good cast iron one could be much heavier). That's enough for 200,000 bowls of cereal.
Even if you reckon the pan is degraded enough to be obviously useless after losing 5% of its weight, that would require you to use it every day for 30 years, not "a handful of cooks".
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.
I don't understand the issue with cast iron pots after reading that either.
My understanding is that to get iron overload, your body would need to absorb excess iron and store it. This happens with haemochromatosis over a long time (30+ years), but it can also happen if you consume way too much iron by, for example, taking too many iron supplements when you don't need them. In normal circumstances and with a standard diet, the body will regulate it's iron intake so that too much doesn't get stored and so there's no iron oberload.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this leaves me a little confused about what the commenter meant. If you have a normal diet and don't have haemochromatosis or some other confounding factor, I don't see how enough iron could be leached from a cast iron pot to cause iron overload.
If you cook acidic things like tomatoes, apparently it can leech a significant amount of iron - apparently in some cases exceeding what you'd get from food.
Yeah, the main problem for men isn't full blown iron overload but rather subclinical iron excess which mostly comes from dietary heme iron since it bypasses the body's iron intake regulator compared to non-heme iron.
It makes no sense to fixate on elemental iron residue from your cast iron pan, especially if you're still getting heme iron infusions from red meat.
Anyone who doesn't lose blood somehow - for modern humans that usually means either menstruation or blood donation - should be careful of sources of excess iron in their diet. It's one reason why multivitamin supplements are often labelled as "for men" or "for women". The women's one will have iron.
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.
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.
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?
This is directly related to the topic. You cant have an indepth discussion about why we use these type of utensils without a discussion of non-stick as one of hte main reasons we use them is they don't scratch nonstick. Or you can collapse the thread and move on to the discussion you are interested in, or just downvote. But complaining that one of the current points of discussion doesnt do it for ya is a pretty lame method of trying to control a topic that you dont even have interest in.
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.