Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food. But, as Andrew Turner, a biochemist at the University of Plymouth recently told me, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.
In 2018, Turner published one of the earliest papers positing that black plastic products were likely regularly being made from recycled electronic waste. The clue was the plastic’s concerning levels of flame retardants. In some cases, the mix of chemicals matched the profile of those commonly found in computer and television housing, many of which are treated with flame retardants to prevent them from catching fire.
Well, you need food, metal and another metal all touching each other for this to happen. I’ve seen my sister make the mistake IRL so it certainly does happen.
How did she manage to do it? I usually only see people use this example for topping half eaten pots, which means the amount of food in them should be far away from the aluminium foil.
What kind of utter madman both (a) doesn’t have matching lids for his pots and also (b) refuses to take the leftovers out of a pot (which is a vessel for cooking, not storage) and put them into a more appropriate container?
Wait until you find out that I even eat out of the pot!