24 minutes ago, Kim Shook said:Another question has occurred to me. I started cooking with my grandmother's cast aluminum many years ago. Certainly before I knew about any problem with acidic foods and aluminum. I just realized that I routinely cook spaghetti sauce, vegetable soup with tomatoes and chili in this pot. Am I slowly killing myself and my family????
LOL, no, of course not. IMO, there isn't a health concern, no matter what you cook or or how long. The concerns are taste and color, and I don't even credit those very much. Can 80% of restaurants worldwide be wrong?
Let's take a peek down the rabbithole, shall we? Aluminum has a semi-unique property whereby it (and its alloys used in bare cookware) doesn't stay bare. It oxidizes or "passivates" very quickly in the presence of oxygen. How quickly? About the time it takes for you to wash, dry and put away your pan. What you're actually cooking on is aluminum oxide, which is harder and less reactive than pure aluminum. You can think of aluminum pans as being self-healing. That's all hard anodizing is, BTW, except that HA creates a much thicker oxide layer. Aluminum's astonishingly fast oxidation is the reason why there is virtually no metallic aluminum to be found in nature, despite the fact that it's the third most common element on Earth.
