This last article is pretty much the kind of thing people should be ashamed of.
First, off, and this makes me laugh, when did non-stick, which used to be pretty high-tech not too long ago, became "conventional" anything?
Second, one of the major characteristics of fluoropolymers is that they are extremely stable. That can be good and bad at the same time. Compounds that manage to not degrade and then reach the upper layer of our atmosphere, like Freon, can then degrade up there due to intense ultraviolet radiation and lightning, for example. But making fluoropolymers degrade is not easy at all.
To the point that Teflon (PTFE) and similar compounds are used in all kinds of tough situations. They are used in nuclear plants, for example, to coat ducts that deal with very corrosive chemicals under high pressure and high heat. There aren't too many materials that can be used to implant in the human body either, and the few that can, like surgical stainless steel, titanium, some ceramics, some silicones and teflon are unique in that they do not degrade or change in contact with our fluids or body.
People are all bent out of shape about personal responsibility and being grown up and all kinds of shit, and then they fail to read the directions that come with their stuff and do pretty weird shit that they should not do at all.
Like casually taking what they think is "heatproof" glass baking dish from the hot oven and putting it on the first place they find, just to find out that the place was moist or wet and see the dish explode. They tell you not to do that in the directions. People do it once or twice, the situation is slightly different, or the glass weakens from that, then the next time they do it, poof, ex-dish.
Same thing with teflon. They warn people (for over 3 decades now) to throughly wash, rinse and dry the dish, then coat it with a thin film of oil and heat it for a couple of minutes before first use. Then they warn people not to leave the dish empty or dry preheating. The first direction is to finish curing the non-stick. The second one is to avoid overheating the coating. The coating can withstand about 450F for hours, and about 500F for a few minutes. It starts degrading *only* if it's exposed to harsher circumstances than that, and, given that food will burn to an unpalatable crispy piece of charcoal above that, *no one* should be cooking at temperatures that degrade teflon, ever.
But people are dumb. They listen to folks who are used to a restaurant workflow, which is completely different from what you and I do at home. A thin piece of aluminum or stainless steel coated with teflon will take *no time* preheating, it will reach proper cooking temperature in less than a minute or two. I see "celebrity chefs" on TV turning the heat to high and waiting a long time until the pot/pan is "ripping hot" and then they put the oil in. There is no need for that. Put the oil in, turn on the pan, as soon as it starts shimmering, before it starts smoking, you're all set to cook.
My teflon pots and pans have lasted for 20 years with no trouble. The *only* thing that makes them fall apart is when some person inadvertently "preheats" them like the TV chefs do.
I have more news for y'all: the "simple" solutions they offer will not help you, me or anyone. "Ceramic" non-stick is not that far from teflon, and, just like no one ever had trouble with teflon (and it was proved safe by the FDA and lots of other places around the globe) until people started overheating the stuff at home, you will all find out in 10-20 years that the "ceramic" coating suffers from exactly the same problem. And it doesn't have to take that long, you know how many people buy ceramic non-stick, put it in the dishwasher and years later it still works just like new, and nothing sticks, and the next person over says "weird, no matter how much I 'baby' it and hand wash etc, 2 months later it's sticking to everything"? Yeah, they are overheating their stuff, that's what slightly melts the coating and makes it fail too.
The article mentions "heatproof glass", without mentioning that they have not sold real borosilicate Pyrex for a long time. Finding Visions or Pyroceram (CorningWare) has been very difficult too. Tempered soda-lime glass is hard to break if it falls, but cannot withstand temperature changes as well as the old Pyrex, so their suggestion is crap, and they know it. The intention of this article is to make people buy "ceramic" non-stick instead by making people afraid.
That brings us to cast iron. First off, it can be washed with hot water and dishwashing detergent just fine, thank you. What you can't do easily without paying the price is soak it for any length of time. Leave it to be washed last thing, take a soft sponge with some detergent, wipe the pot, rinse it immediately, dry it with a cloth or paper towel and maybe put it on the stovetop to warm up for half a minute or so to make sure it's dry. My mom did that her entire life with her cast iron and her carbon-steel frying pans, they worked fine.
Second, the coating on cast iron pans ("seasoning") is polymerized oil. You might want to firmly believe that, because it was edible oil and because we've been using it for centuries, that it's perfectly safe. It's not. It's barely safe enough. You may or may not want to google "nitrosamine" and you don't even have to google "nitrosamine cancer" to be offered a bunch of things about how nitrosamine in food can cause cancer. Nitrosamine is created when certain foods are overheated. Like oil, for example. Because the vegetable oil is never there alone, it's often combined with stuff that has nitrogen, nitrates and nitrites in them.
The polymerized oil has another problem -- it *is* non-stick, but, because it is *not* as stable as Teflon, it degrades at a slightly lower temp and produces similar toxic compounds. You start preheating that cast iron pan, and, because it doesn't transfer heat as readily as copper, aluminum or stainless, the very center where the flame is is overheating while the outer edges are still comparatively cool. You may notice that a high percentage of the times a cast-iron pan loses its seasoning, it's on the very center. Where it's too hot for the polymer to resist. Places that had birds dying "because of the teflon" when they were near the kitchen find out that their birds *keep* getting sick or dying when they switch to cast iron, because what they did not stop doing is overheating their pots and pans.
I'd like to say that, while seeing people cook in cast-iron doesn't gross me out, per se, given that I've been seeing people do that for ages and I also do not have any choice in the matter, if that grosses you out, you can't eat out anywhere, because invariably *something* *will* be cooked in or on cast iron (griddles, for example) in a restaurant setting, I've never just rinsed or wiped them out without washing. Currently I don't have any, but when I did or when I use them, I wash them. I also *never* ever ever use metallic implements like steel-wool, chore girl or abrasives (even salt) not even the blue 3M sponge that is "safe for non-stick". The non-stick film on cast iron is very very easy to scratch off. People usually don't notice because they heat the pan with oil the very next time they use it, so in a sense it "heals" a bit. But those are frequently the folks who need to re-season the pans every few years, or, like a friend of mine, who only used coarse salt, every two weeks. My mother used her seasoned frying pans for over 40 years, washed them everyday, and never needed to re-season them.
That having been said, I'd like to ask anyone here: if it were an aluminum pan or a stainless-steel skillet that had exactly the *same* "seasoned" coating on them, would you barf or would you eat the food? There is *nothing* magical about cast-iron. The very same phenomenon happens to other metals, and I am willing to bet a dollar that many here would snicker and send phone pictures of such pans to others here in the club to tell each other how they are bad home keepers and how nasty their cookware looks. And you don't need to go too far for that: about a century ago, aluminum pots became highly desirable because before then people were using cast-iron or carbon-steel cookware, and they *polished* them to a high shine (with sand, steel wool etc) every time they used the things. Aluminum cookware was much easier to keep clean compared to that.
As for just "wiping clean" with a paper towel, I know plenty of people who do that to Teflon cookware. Does not fill me with warm fuzzies and confidence. For me, things don't necessarily *need* to go to the dishwasher, a quick hand washing is fine with me. But I'd like to see some soap and water there.
Oh, one more thing about that article: if I am to believe their spiel, "conventional" non-stick PTFE cookware is "dangerous" and/or "toxic" because they have fluoropolymers in them. Namely PTFE.
Did you notice how a little further down the article, they mention the alternative is to use "stonewear", which they "helpfully" explain to us, the unwashed ignorant masses (pun intended), that stonewear is similar to ceramic non-stick, and all of a sudden, it's a "non-toxic" "alternative" made with a combination of crushed stone and a polymer? That polymer will degrade and produce very similar fumes to the ones Teflon does. There is a very simple reason for that: they are either *made* with PTFE or with a very similar polymer.
People, please, wake up. Teflon's patents have run out over 20 years ago. So now, people want to sell you on the "new" stuff that has a current patent, but it's not that different.
