Avoiding this exposure will be easy for me, because I was never very comfortable microwaving plastic. I've seen companies lie about their stuff being "microwave safe" too many times.

I thought cast iron would be too much work and got a decent carbon steel pan to replace the non-stick crap I was always replacing, and I don't mind the extra care. I'm not sure that cast iron would take any more effort than what I'm doing now.

Most of the foods I cook are basic meats and veggies so it's usually quite easy to clean for those.

Just apply a little heat, then use a bamboo/wood spatula to scrape the stuck food, then rinse (if needed) and wipe clean.

For me, the biggest problem with Cast iron is the weight. I’m a big guy, with physical strength commensurate to my size, and cast iron pans are cumbersome to deal with. I have a 9” pan that I leave on the stove for daily use, but I don’t want to have cast iron cookware exclusively.

Seek out better cast iron cookware. For example, Lodge brand stuff is very heavy and poorly balanced. Compare to a Wagner cast iron pan of similar size made a century ago: it is significantly lighter, and well-balanced. I'm sure there must be modern cast iron cookware that can offer the same experience, but probably not new for $30.

I have problems with my hands and those heavy Lodge pans are annoying (good value though). My old Wagner stuff is no more cumbersome than my nice stainless steel pans, and, for meats at least, is a pleasure to cook with.

You can definitely damage a pan leaving it wet, so of course make sure to heat it up on the stove after washing and drying to cook off any remnants of water. I'll usually put on a very thin layer of Crisco if I've used soap.

Maybe this specific one, but microplastics are in everything you eat and drink, the presented article merely points out that this specific use case produces lost of micro plastics which are ingested by children.

Can you elaborate? Like is it somehow worse to buy a bottle of water and refill it periodically over the course of a year, than to let the original contents sit in my house for a year and then drink it? If so, I'm guessing the extra handling (squishing, crunching) is the main culprit? Or does leeching occur more readily when the contents are refreshed, as opposed to static contents that already reached equilibrium? Or is the pH (or other characteristics) of the original contents less likely to cause leeching than arbitrary contents?

The better wording of 'stop reusing bottled water bottles' to avoid plastics would be 'use glass or metal water bottles'.

I do drink a lot of bottled water, and while I don't reuse bottles I'm still considering how much just pouring the water from the bottles into a glass would help.

I good think to know is that any surface that get hot enough will release a bit into the food. Cast iron generally leech iron, stainless steel leech iron, nickel, and chromium, and ceramic leech whatever coating it has similar to non-stick. There has actually been studies done on cast iron on people with iron deficiencies, with gains in haemoglobin concentration.

Are they?

The article points out that effects of nanoplastics on humans are still unclear.

They're inert long chain polymers, and amongst other things you need to show bioavailability in the area t you propose would cause damage at sufficient concentrations.

In the current case: how efficiently do nanoplastics cross from the digestive system to the blood stream, how long do they persist before being filtered out by the kidneys, do they retain their structure in the blood stream unchanged, is their a lower limit on toxicity.

i.e. injecting someone with enough pure water will also damage their organs, exposing kidney cells to silica dust in solution in huge concentration would also kill them but there's no way for it to get there.

So the issue here is we're not really talking about a unique threat, just a vector of an existing one. In terms of bioactive compounds which could find their way to the placenta, metals and carbonaceous soot are going to be a lot worse then inert plastics (of note: the paper involved notes that the primary possible mechanism is the microplastic acting as a carrier delivering bioactive molecule - not the material itself).

It is also worth noting that in the same study, 2 of the studied placental samples showed no microplastic contamination. Which is to say, given the transport mechanism proposed - inhalation of particles - it's quite likely that the medium is not things ingested in the GI tract, but rather airborne contaminants.

Which would make a lot more sense, seeing as how if micro or nanoparticles were routingly migrating through the gut, we'd suffer serious problems with bacterial infection, or just dealing with something like soluble fiber (which is essentially a plastic - long chain cellulose - that isn't digested).

So the question isn't "why not avoid it?" it's, "are you even avoiding it?" The GI tract is a relatively robust system that's very good at rejecting the external world from it. Whereas your lungs are pretty much a direct link to the blood from the atmosphere.

[1] https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2020/smd/air-pollution-par...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

Or you could just not buy that lead testing kit or Geiger counter and live in ignorant bliss. People lived without them for quite some time.

Just as a single data point, all our kitchenware today is:

glass, borosilicate glass, pyrex(the US made ones are not borosilicate),

stainless, titanium, cast iron (that we season ourselves),

wood (but not bamboo -- too much glue in there), silicone (for mats and mittens).

Almost no plastic anywhere.

Also silicone products are commonly mixed with plastic fillers that have the same issues as normal plastics. Pure platinum cured silicone products are premium products and somewhat rare.

Our cutlery and cooking utensils are stainless, but when possible we use plain wood spoons (not the kind that is glued).

Is there a good alternative to stainless for these things? let me know.

I am aware of silicone issues, it's usually not in contact with our food.

I can't imagine a stock pot size would be cheap.