Teflon itself is safe to use as long as you don’t heat it too much
The problem is, people make mistakes. All it takes is a crying child, a burned pot, a mistake in cooking (not thinking about it), and you've hit the wrong temp.
And then the pan is dangerous, leeching, trouble.
The whole thought about the approval was "Well, people can be trusted to not let a pot get too hot! And to know 100% to throw it away if it does!".
Right. Trusted. In a country with warning labels like 'coffee is hot' and 'water is wet'.
Edit: my point is, the above means "teflon isn't safe for home use". Engineers know, also, to have safety tolerances. For something like this, I'd expect the 'danger zone' to be 2x the max possible heat a consumer could apply by accident.
As burners can get crazy hot, that probably means I'd call teflon unsafe, unless it broke down at 2000F.
This is how we can approve things safe or not. Not "trust people will constantly monitor how hot their pan got".
Just as an aside, I was at a hotel the other day, and someone was trying to put buttered toast in the hotel toaster!
Nothing is safe in that range - that's why it's unrealistic. The cast iron would decompose, shatter, and light a commercial kitchen on fire, let alone a residential tinder box.
You all may be arguing against a strawman. A completely hypothetical one, at that.
The actual danger temp, 260c / 500f, is trivially achievable on most home cooking equipment.
And even if the danger temp were 2,000 degrees, there would still be the major dangers from manufacturing and the associated pollution, as has been noted.
Kilns work because they lose far slower than then generate it. You could conceivably reach very high temps due to the heat source being in direct contact whereas the pan must lose heat through convection. I doubt it would ever reach 2000° but 600-700° seems easy enough.
TikTok challenge...shave off some Teflon, burn it, and consume.
> The problem is, people make mistakes. All it takes is a crying child, a burned pot, a mistake in cooking (not thinking about it), and you've hit the wrong temp.
Then you turn off the cooking pot, and air the room. Burning teflon releases nasty stuff, but not much worse than burning oil. Unless you heat it up all the way until its thermal decomposition (your pan will be visibly glowing red at that temperature).
Also, it's time to switch from natural gas burners to electric stoves that can have automatic protection.
The problem is, people make mistakes. All it takes is a crying child, a burned pot, a mistake in cooking (not thinking about it), and you've hit the wrong temp.
And then the pan is dangerous, leeching, trouble.
The whole thought about the approval was "Well, people can be trusted to not let a pot get too hot! And to know 100% to throw it away if it does!".
Right. Trusted. In a country with warning labels like 'coffee is hot' and 'water is wet'.
Edit: my point is, the above means "teflon isn't safe for home use". Engineers know, also, to have safety tolerances. For something like this, I'd expect the 'danger zone' to be 2x the max possible heat a consumer could apply by accident.
As burners can get crazy hot, that probably means I'd call teflon unsafe, unless it broke down at 2000F.
This is how we can approve things safe or not. Not "trust people will constantly monitor how hot their pan got".
Just as an aside, I was at a hotel the other day, and someone was trying to put buttered toast in the hotel toaster!