Food Plastics = Estrogens in Your Body

I promise that I'll have something fun and dopey for next week. We've been on a run of pretty heavy content mostly telling us that polymers are killing us.

I'm going to go outside and watch some butterflies.

PFAS roundup

Bunch of videos about PFAS because I can't bring myself to write the dozen of separate posts that these should all be posted as.

Watch one...take a break...come back and watch another. Don't run them all through at once. 

It's not cheery stuff, folks.

Does Pressure Melt Ice?

Yes, you can.

I am SO done with Teflon

My wife and I have been longtime purchasers and users of the Oxo Good Grips nonstick pans.

We would use the heck out of the 10" skillet and buy a new one when the surface got marred or started to stick - usually after a year and a half or two years. When we recently went looking, we found that it looks like Oxo is phasing out their nonstick skillet in favor of ceramic 'nonstick' skillets.

The reviews of the ceramic 'nonstick' skillets say that the ceramic layer is surprisingly close in performance to the teflon (or similar coating) that most nonstick skillets use but that the ceramic coating doesn't even last as long as the teflon coating meaning that we would have to buy replacement ceramic nonstick pans even more frequently than we're buying the teflon pans.

So we've gone looking for other nonstick replacements and have found that the list of possible replacements is fairly short: ceramic nonstick, cast iron, carbon steel, and stainless steel. Currently we're working on using our two fairly well seasons cast iron skillets more frequently. We'll see how that goes. 

More links to reviews of various alternatives to PFAS nonstick...

• Pots and Pans India
• Prudent Reviews
• Wired
• The Good Life designs
• Sprouting Fam
• The Kitchen Witches

"Forever Chemicals" Are Surprisingly Confusing

Man-made polymers are bad for us. 

Straight up, no qualifications to that statement from what I continue to read and learn.

PFAS and PFOS might just be the worst of them, and they are pretty well everywhere in the world around us, including inside most of us.

Better living through chemistry, eh?

The Engineer Comedian - Don McMillan comedy (due to request)

Just let the comedy wash over you.

They're all funny, but I really enjoy the third joke. I'm in the really small overlap area, apparently.

Can you GROW Opals?

Opals are pretty.

Full stop

And they are incredibly rare and labor intensive to mine.

So why not just make them at home?

All it takes is seven or so months, a fume hood, some ethyl alcohol (purer is better), tetraethyl othosilicate, ammonium hydroxide, a stirrer, water bath, hot plate, resin, a vacuum chamber, and apparently infinite patience.

I looked into buying them, and even the synthetic ones aren't terribly cheap.