They are used in all kinds of products that I personaly use everyday from pans to dental floss. And the replacements are not better, they just dont have studies yet that prove they are toxic...
I feel compelled to back you up on this one. You mention your experience with cast iron, and 20 semi-pro internet chefs jump all over you to gaslight you with "you just didn't season it properly bro"
No. I polymerized it with the grapeseed oil. I tried it with sunflower oil. I polymerized until my apartment swirled with smoke. I wiped it down with nothing besides a paper towel and water. I followed youtube guides.
Nothing worked, and that goddamn pan would lose slickness in the heavily-used center every other day. Plus, I'd leave it unused for a few weeks while traveling, and upon returning, it'd be covered in rust! This happened with at least 3 different pans from 2 different manufacturers.
You almost certainly left way too much oil on it. If your apartment is "swirling with smoke" you're doing it wrong. Most youtube videos and online tutorials fail to make this point clearly (or are outright wrong, debating what kind of oil to incinerate half a bottle of in their pans).
You oil it (with any cooking oil) and then wipe it all off. It needs to look and feel like it hasn't been oiled. Any visible oil or stickiness will burn to black shit that isn't seasoning. There is still oil there. The invisible, microscopic residue is what you want. When you heat it (in the oven around 180C) it will generate a faint smell around the cooker, not fill your home with burning oil smoke. Do the whole thing 3-5 times.
But for a skillet this is just a kick start. It is neither necessary nor sufficient. The real seasoning comes from use and is way better than anything you can do by explicit seasoning. Use it frequently. Fry in it. FREQUENTLY. And when you do use use oil, ffs. While it's
newish, clean it promptly, dry it thoroughly and give it a thin wipe of oil before you put it away to prevent rust and help it season.
(If you're the sort that thinks never letting a single fat molecule enter your digestive system is a virtue, don't buy cast iron. It won't work for you. It'll rust and stick. Use teflon. It's the only thing you'll ever be able make a "fried" egg on. It might give you cancer but at least you won't accidentally ingest some butter. Also, if you cook once every 6 months, don't use cast iron. It needs use. Weekly at least, if not daily.)
One of our four cast skillets spent last night in the sink, full of water (see my other comment). We treat them how we please, scrubbing and washing them with detergent if needed, leaving them dirty if we want. They cook wonderfully, don't stick and will probably survive the death of the sun.
Welp the method that doesn’t slowly poison our environment or kill our parrots is less convenient, guess we have no choice but to layer on the forever Chemicals.
Stainless steel doesn't poison the environment, easily fries sunny-side-up eggs without sticking if you let it get hot first, and can go in the dishwasher.
once cast iron is properly seasoned it maintains very well, and can last for generations! and they are dirt cheap to boot. but yes there is a little learning curve. they are heavy, so use two hands when handling. it must be seasoned (many come preseasoned) and never put it in a dishwasher for example -- but when properly seasoned the nonstick properties are so effective food just rinses off. i encourage everyone who cooks to try one!
You know it is REALLY HARD to figure out if a non-stick coating is free of teflon-and-friends. Lots of things called "ceramic" might not be free of pfoa/pfte/etc
(this is a pain when you have parrots, because one overheated pan, and all birds in the house - big and small - will die)
As one example, I bought some hexclad pans. They had very strong wording about their use of teflon:
A: Our pans are PFOA free but contain some PTFE. PTFE is in over 95% of all nonstick cookware including our ceramic-based nonstick. PTFE is safe and inert. In fact, it is used in surgical matches meshes, dental implants and heart stents which are all implanted in the body. We do not use PFOA chemicals and other chemicals that gave many other nonstick pans a bad name. Why do we use some PTFE? Sadly, non-PTFE nonstick cookware does not work well for long periods of time. In fact, in our tests, the largest non-PTFE nonstick in the world only held up for 45 minutes of consecutive use.
What's especially ridiculous is that the "good" hexclad sets you can get at costco also put this coating on the BOTTOM of the pan, against the flame or burner! High temperature is the achilles heel for these chemicals.
Carbon steel pans aren't as much work as cast iron, but still extremely durable. They're lighter, often come pre-seasoned but are easier to season than cast iron, are naturally non-stick, heats very quickly, and cleans easy.
The only downside is that you have to wash them right away, dry them thoroughly. Cooking with a lot of acidic sauces will mean you'll likely have season them again.
If you’re cooking pancakes, you just wipe it off with some soap and rinse while it’s still warm, and don’t need to do anything else. For other cooking you sometimes need a quick pass with a nylon scraper or something, but it’s still pretty quick and easy.
People mostly really get into trouble when they try to stew tomatoes or something like that (I just keep a steel pan around for really acidic stuff).
Cast iron skillets just take a bit of getting used and are then zero maintenance and last for ever. The problems people have with them are usually due to trying to season them and doing it so badly (due to abundant online misinformation) they'd have been better off not doing it at all.
The typical cooking uses to which a skillet is put season it automatically, because it spends its life being oily. The polymer coating known as "seasoning" forms naturally from long contact with oil (even without heat). So the idea of seasoning being something you have to put on the pan and then maintain is wrong. You can explicitly "season the pan" as a sort of bootstrapping to get that layer started off quicker and protect it from rust in the early days, but it's optional and doesn't need maintaining afterwards. An alternative to protect it from rust (and encourage the formation of the polymer) when it's new is to brush it with oil before putting it away. Once it's broken in (you'll know) it doesn't require special care. You can scrub it, use washing up liquid, whatever.
If you do season the pan, the most important thing is to wipe off all the oil after applying it. You brush the oil on and then wipe it completely dry. It should be dry to the touch and matt, not shiny. You should not be able to see ANY oil. The microscopic invisible bit of oil left is all you want. Only then do you heat it. The temperature doesn't matter much. 180 C or so in an oven is what I've used. The kind of oil used also doesn't matter. For best results do the whole thing 3 or more times. If you bake a visible layer of oil onto your pan you're not seasoning it, you're just covering it in burnt crap.
And it's optional!
Note that the above is for skillets, which self-season because they're used for frying. (Hence "seasoning" - i.e. using them for a while.) The story is very different for some other things. For example, we have a dutch oven used for baking bread, which is not an oily process. For that you really do have to season. Ours came pre-seasoned but it rusted after an unfortunate baking mishap and I had to electrolyse it and then give it 5 rounds of oven seasoning (as described above), after which it has been a zero-maintenance workhorse.
Griddles are absolute fucking bastards and will ruin your life.
If you ever do electrolyse any cast iron (it's great fun and will restore anything), A) pay a few quid for graphite electrodes (overgrown pencil leads, available on Amazon), rather than using an old stainless steel knife and producing hexavalent chromium (Erin Brockovich's favourite chemical) and B) use a bench power supply because nobody sells the kind of car battery charger all the online tutorials tell you to use any more (they're all pulsed ones now, completely useless for electrolysis).
I have several now in various sizes that are in a great place now, seasoning-wise. After each use, I rinse the pan with warm water and a small amount of soap. I use a Lodge scrubbing tool if there are things stuck on.
I then dry it with a towel, heat up the pan with Avocado or Bacon grease until it almost starts smoking. I then use a paper towel to wipe out the pan and it stays on the stove until the next use.
Of the pans I have now (bought over the past 2 years), 3 are seasoned well enough that they’re effectively non-stick.
Literally just cook with it. The main thing with everything except for teflon pans is you need to bring them up to temp before cooking, and you need to use some fat of some kind (olive oil, butter, whatever). The oil itself will provide the "non stick" until it's seasoned, and it'll also do the seasoning. You can waste a bunch of time doing seasoning as a separate step (light coating of oil, bring up to smoke point, let cool, repeat) but this is mostly just a giant waste of time. Just cook on the dang thing, and don't be afraid to toss in a chunk of butter or some oil. It won't kill ya :-)
Lmao. Hapless beginner follows your advice, decides to scramble some eggs on day 1 with his badly-factory-seasoned Lodge pan. Egg glue now encrusts his shiny new pan. What do? Wash with soap? BAD NOOB - that's bad for the seasoning. Scrape it off with steel wool? BAD NOOB - that's even worse for the seasoning.
(If you do this, fellow noob, I think oil + a scrubber sponge got me out of the predicament)
Sigh... I don't know how the internet has convinced people this shit requires some magic incantation to cook eggs. I promise you I can cook eggs in any brand new lodge pan you hand me without issue. In fact if you sand blast the factory seasoning off it first and give it to me shiny I can still do it. And so can you. It requires the exact same skills as cooking with stainless steel which won't take a season no matter how hard you try. Step 1: Bring it up to temp (confirm by tossing some flecks of water in it, if they bead, it's up to temp). Step 2, throw a knob of butter in it and coat the damn pan. Fat is your friend, don't be shy with it. Step 3: Cook the eggs. If a little bit sticks that's fine. You probably should have used more butter - but no worries - just go wash it off in the sink the same way you'd wash anything else. It's a giant piece of iron - you aren't going to hurt it with a little soap, water and elbow grease. When you are done dry it off on the stove and hit it with a little grease/oil/fat to keep it from rusting. If you forget and it rusts... still no big deal - scrub off the rust, give it a little grease and bobs your uncle. This shit is only hard if you decide it is.
Source: Been cooking exclusively on carbon steel, cast iron and stainless for years.
Yes, scrambled eggs works wonderfully in a cast iron skillet but it needs to be well worn in. On a new pan you'll end up with an awful mess. But feel free to go to town on that with washing up liquid, steel wool and a sandblaster if you want. There isn't some magical pixie dust on it you need to worry about rubbing off. Just dry it properly after and oil it before you put it away. Keep frying in it regularly and it'll be fine. A brief hiccup in your skillet's breaking-in process.
Edit: In fact we had scrambled eggs as part of dinner this evening (with rice, chilli crisp, garlic mushrooms and bak choi) and the pan is currently in the sink full of water, where it will remain until tomorrow morning because it's Friday night, dammit, and it will be fine.
Thinking about buying one. Would I be wrong in assuming it was just a matter of the order: (really) heat the pan, add the oil, and then whatever you need to cook?
Care is a big component as well. The real power of cast iron is that you can renew the coating when it wears off by re-seasoning the pan. Using a drying oil like flax, you coat the pan and heat the oil until it starts smoking, then wait for it to stop smoking. Repeat this process a couple of times and you have a durable non-stick surface again.
If you ever have the surface roughen up you can also strip the old seasoning by covering it in oven cleaner and heating it to cleaning temperature. The easiest way to do this is to stick it in an oven on high.
I’ve had the same frying pan for 10 years now and this is how I keep it non-stick.
It's kind of funny that heating up the oil to the point of smoking is considered a healthy alternative to teflon coated pans. When oil is heated up to the point of smoking it produces carcinogenic compounds.
Comparing the misc acrylamide and other byproducts of seasoning a cast iron skillet to the PFAS and other byproducts of teflon production is nonsense.
Yes, complex hydrocarbons are not good for you, but PFOAs and their ilk are really really really bad for you and the environment. It's like comparing spent nuclear rods with brazil nuts. Yes, both are radioactive, but there is zero equivalence.
Not significant. You aren't burning the oil or keeping it at high temp for a long time, you are just getting hot enough to smoke, then you cut the heat. That polymerizes the oil into a non-polar coating. Can't get non-stick without some kind of polymer that things don't stick to.
Consider butter instead of oil for pancakes. The water content of the butter boils between the pancake and the pan. The escaping water vapor pushes them apart, which helps prevent the pancake from sticking.
Don't overthink it. Look up America's Test Kitchen videos on cast iron pans. They probably have one to recommend the best one for the $$ and how to take care of it.
I have an old school cast iron skillet and pot. I wish I'd watched videos because newer types of cast iron apparently has a smooth finish and is thinner and lighter. When new, I washed it with soap and water, dried it, added a nice and thin layer of olive oil all around wiped it with a kitchen towel to take off the excess, then baked it for half an hour. Let it cool. Repeated that once or twice. You can even just heat it on a stove top.
Once I'm done cooking something, I rinse scrub and rinse with warm water to get all the food off and add a touch of oil. A little goes a long way.
That's all, really. It isn't complicated or particularly laborious. It just weighs a fair bit - it'll take your hands a couple of weeks to get stronger and then you won't care.
You don't want to get it super hot (the oil/butter should not smoke). Medium heat is fine. They do take a long time to warm up to a uniform steady state temperature though (this is both an advantage and a disadvantage, since it means the temperature stays stable as you cook).
For instance, when making pancakes, my first step is putting the griddle on the range. Next, I start making the batter.
Of course, you can set the range to high and heat it up really fast, but then you end up risking overheating it.
Animal fats. Not vegetable oils. Vegetable oils polymerize to a sticky substance. Animal fats carbonize and protect the metal. Also using a metal spatula is a must in cast iron. The metal spatula keeps the surface smooth which enhances the non-stick property. Also wash after use and spread a little fat in it to prevent rusting. Don't scour. Just wash with soap and water.
You can use vegetable oils but it will be difficult to clean. Deglazing doesn't work well on polymerized oil. Baking soda will dissolve the sticky goo.
I switched to carbon steel a few years ago. There's a definite learning curve when it comes to getting them seasoned properly and a lot of people give up. But once they are seasoned, nothing sticks to them, and they need almost no maintenance. I'm never giving them up!
Honest question: Why do you try to replace Tupperware?
Plastic has a bad reputation because of its longevity, but that also makes it a good material for containers. That - in turn - makes it bad for throwaway packaging of course. I might have missed something, that's why I ask.
There's definite leaching of plastic compounds into food, which gets exacerbated when heated. My concern is the number of unknown unknowns. BPA became a big part of the consciousness a few years ago, and now it's PFAs, but what else?
My general view is that glass is super-durable, microwave-safe (I would never microwave Tupperware), and the cost tradeoff is minor, so it seems worthwhile. That said, if I order takeout and it comes in a plastic container that's hot ... I still eat it :).
> There's definite leaching of plastic compounds into food, which gets exacerbated when heated. My concern is the number of unknown unknowns. BPA became a big part of the consciousness a few years ago, and now it's PFAs, but what else?
PFAS and BPA are not used for (multi-use) food containers I think. Don't get me wrong! Avoiding throwaway packaging, where possible, absolutely makes sense. I specifically mean to find the culprit with Tupperware (or multi-use plastic food containers in general).
> My general view is that glass is super-durable, microwave-safe (I would never microwave Tupperware), and the cost tradeoff is minor, so it seems worthwhile.
Glass breaks faster than plastic containers (usually). I still use glass containers, but I am always aware that they break relatively easily.
Regarding microwave-use I am with you. Not a fan of microwaving plastic, even if it is safe for many plastic materials (the term plastic is vague I admit).
> Glass breaks faster than plastic containers (usually). I still use glass containers, but I am always aware that they break relatively easily.
I have maybe 60-70 or so glass food containers that get very regular use from being used for leftovers, to being put in the deep freezer for 6mo and then warmed up.
We handle at least half a dozen of these a day on average from filling/cleaning/removing portions and putting back into the fridge.
I've broken dozens of the plastic lids for them. I can't remember a single case (although I'm sure it's happened) of breaking a glass container in the past decade. They have survived more than a few rather large drops. These are the Pyrex brand glassware with the new glass that is more drop but less heat shock resistant.
Luckily Snapware also sells lids, since the glass containers far outlast the plastic lids and we end up replacing 3-4 of those a year as wear items. That doesn't bother me much since very little food gets in contact with them.
I expect my Snapware/Pyrex food storage sets to largely outlast my lifetime, but without lids to match once they stop manufacturing them.
> Glass breaks faster than plastic containers (usually)
The plastic lids always break way more quickly than the glass containers IME. Can't remember the last time I broke a glass one, actually. Plus, they actually stay in good condition. An abused plastic container will cloud, warp, gouge, and release god knows what into your food the whole time.
Also, "microwave safe" does not mean it's safe for people... it only means the container won't melt in the microwave. If you're going to reheat leftovers, definitely don't keep it inside a plastic container.
I also switched to glass containers and stainless steel everything, about 20 years ago, out of distrust for reasons like in this article.
Same here, additionally reducing plastic packaging in our food purchases has been a constant effort. Glass milk jugs, baby bottles, etc. It's probably only touching the margins, but we're trying.
Dental floss is easy - the widely available/cheap waxed Reach floss tested negative for PFAs[1], and it does a better job of cleaning too. The non-stick flosses miss stuff for me.
Oh thank goodness. When I started looking at the prices of the silk flosses and whatnot, I thought I'd had to take a second mortgage. I've been using Reach for years, due to the price, but also because it works so well for me. Thanks for posting this!
There are plenty of pans you can use that don't have these chemicals -- cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel, clay, etc. I agree about the floss and other plastics though. I just try to use other types of materials whenever possible.
I'm not sure why people keep talking about teflon pans and dental floss. There are PFAS in products that necessarily release them into human bodies and the environment, in dispersed form rather than flakes that would usually pass the digestive system.
A few examples:
- food containers coated with PFAS (usually single use, often cardboard)
- water-repellent PFAS spray for clothes, shoes, cars/whatever
- surface PFAS treatment of clothes/shoes/whatever (better but still rubs off)
- PFAS bike-chain lube
Why are any of these things legal? They cause much more exposure, by design cannot be contained and spread PFAS everywhere you go. They are the reason there are PFAS in snow on Mt. Everest.
Pans, medical tubes and maybe even inner layers in clothes can at least theoretically be responsibly disposed of, e.g. by reasonably contained incineration. I don't want to support unneeded PFAS, but pans seem a whole different category than spray-on PFAS for "weather-proofing" that people use because shrug "it helps I get less wet".
You are referring to Teflon, there's some confusion with the differences in toxicity between the chemical used in the final products (today at least) and the chemical used in manufacturing. Although the human impact is only subtly different (that in theory it makes no personal difference whether or not you buy such products, which is a worse position to be in than it sounds)...
As a non-chemist I don't claim to have a comprehensive understanding, but as far as I can tell: PTFE (Teflon) is found in consumer products today, and has not been directly linked to cancer yet, i.e if you eat teflon (and you have) it will supposedly just pass through your gut in an inert fashion. PFOA and more generally PFAS are used to manufacture PTFE, these are known carcinogens according to independent studies and (allegedly) internally by 3Ms own research, unfortunately PFOA is also in your blood and my blood, not because you ate teflon from a frying pan, but because once it's in the environment it doesn't get broken down, and so inevitably we end up ingesting it.
The reason we have to generalise to the group of chemicals "PFAS", is because once PFOA specifically was found to be problematic companies looked for similar alternatives, but these have also found to cause similar issues.
To complicate matters the PTFE in your non-stick frying pan can also releases PFOA if heated high enough, supposedly the threshold is around 300 degrees C, however it has been found that this threshold varies between products and can be realistically reached under in "normal" cooking scenarios, but usually when someone accidentally dry heated a frying pan too much, or is just plain cooking on too high a temperature. The side effects of being exposed to PFOA in this way are supposed to feel similar to catching a cold that disappears fairly quickly, and is often mistaken as such, I presume this is because it's vaporised.
Even knowing all this (that provided you don't nuke your cookware it likely makes no personal difference) I've still decided to personally go down the stainless steel route, it's not very scientific, but the relationship between PTFE and PFOAs is close enough, and it flakes off my frying pans frequently enough that I've decided I don't want to keep on ingesting it only to find out later that it's also a problem. Although stainless is not hazard free, because you can get problems with metals leaching into the food and have to be careful with acidity, and also make sure you buy high quality pans. They also require more skill to cook with without destroying them, but ultimately last indefinitely if you can take care of them.
The main problem with continuing to use PTFE in products is the indirect cost to the environment and human health through the "externalities" of manufacturing.
The difference between teflon and PFAS is in the hydrophilic "head".
Basically, teflon consists just of long chains of carbon atoms saturated with fluorine. They are extremely chemically resistant, and they appear to be biologically inert. Even if you heat the teflon past its decomposition temperature, you simply get pieces of the hydrocarbon chain as a result. They are nasty, but they are not persistent pollutants.
PFAS are different. They also consist of a chain of carbons with fluorine atoms attached to them. But they also have a hydrophilic "head" attached to them at the beginning of the chain. This hydrophilic head allows PFAS to function as surfactants, and it also makes them biologically active. The body can't do anything with the hydrocarbons saturated with fluorine, but the head provides a "handle" that can be used to absorb the PFAS into cell membranes where it can stay and cause all kinds of issues.
I am also a big fan of carbon steel cookware, I've replaced everything with cast iron where that is necessary or carbon steel everywhere else. It really is a minor adjustment to workflow, non stick coatings can be pretty easily avoided.
What does "toxic" mean in this case. AFAIK "toxic" can mean that you will get a headache if you eat a gram, but it can also mean that it will kill you if it touches your skin.
For example I do not mind drinking a beer or two, which includes 5% of toxic ethanol, but I prefer not having lead in my drinking water.
That's a pretty shitty response to an actual problem.
Companies don't need to prove the safety of things like this.
Look at bpa free. Most people don't even know that bpa free plastic tends to be just as bad, or potentially worse than bpa. The press doesn't give a shit I guess. Society went through its giant bpa panic and now it's tired of dealing with this so let's just ignore it and move onto the next thing. Ignorance is bliss.
You're okay with companies not being responsible, but you want the press to help you out here? I feel the opposite. Companies should be responsible for poisoning us, and the press has zero to do with it.
I don’t think that the problem some posters are alluding to is the kind where we should be placing blame.
The problem is:
- Humans invent something useful and cool.
- Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem. Often, we only find out about the toxicity as a result of the cool chemical becoming hella widespread.
- Humans invent alternatives that are different enough to obviously not have the same exact problem.
But: what toxic nonsense or buttcancer risks will we discover about the alternatives? No way to know immediately since it takes years to find out. And it’s only when the alternatives become widespread that we can even do the science to figure out what’s up. And by the time they become widespread, some folks got buttcancer.
That’s the problem: just because there’s an alternative that is different from the thing we found out to be toxic doesn’t meant that the alternative isn’t toxic. And we find out it’s toxic because people get hurt.
It’s not that the press is bad… it’s just a fundamental problem in science and engineering. You need scale to discover the really bad issues.
- Humans who discovered the toxicity lie, bribe, bully, and cheat to stop anyone else from finding out. The solution is delayed by decades and deaths go through the roof.
But we have seen that movie many times, haven’t we? It’s a given that if someone builds a business on a thing and that thing turns out to cause buttcancer, they gonna cover that shit up.
Sometimes covering it up is easy if you just rely on scientific ground truths, like “the dose is the poison”. Even water is a poison if you chug too much of it, so just the discovery that something is poisonous at some dose is almost like tautological. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the “cover up” was based on that kind of science.
Basically, if there’s utility to something, then there’s money to be made, careers to be made, legacies at stake, etc - and that will bias folks towards covering shit up.
I bet you the folks involved in the cover up were good people who just failed to check their biases.
> Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem.
There's no reason for there to be years between discovery and action. It doesn't matter how quickly the discovery ripples through lay society. Once it's known that something is harming and/or killing people, it should be stopped.
What if the alternatives are the kind of thing that could possibly be worse but we don’t have enough experience with them yet to know that they are worse?
Often the known bad thing is better than the thing you don’t know to be bad yet.
Greed is always part of it. It’s a part of everything.
Thats why I don’t usually use greed as an explanation for stuff. Of course greed is part of the system and sometimes it causes bad things to happen. Sometimes it also causes good things to happen. So, if you want to prevent the bad, it’s useful to look for some explanation that isn’t just “greed”.
Case in point: new refrigerants with lower global-warming-potential were adopted after the hue-and-cry about CFCs. Many of the new refrigerants are now also source of concern due to PFAS. The CFC refrigerants themselves were introduced as superior and safer alternatives to things like ammonia and chloromethane.
Genuinely curious, would any money be extracted from the personal accounts of any executive employee that made these decisions, current or past, from any of these thousands of lawsuits?
Unless the decision-making folks have their personal wealth destroyed, they really haven’t anything to lose. I would expect the worst-case scenario is that their stock portfolios will need to be adjusted, by tax-loss harvesting their losses in 3m stocks as an opportunity to divest and rebalance their portfolios.
Considering Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family has so far had to pay out $10.5 billion (estimates of their net worth including those settlements have it dropping $8b during this time period) and despite trying quite hard have not managed to gain legal immunity or protection regarding civil and criminal liability. That means they'll very likely be hit with more lawsuits going forward and possibly even criminal charges.
Looking at it, I think thats pretty good and hope the possibility for future lawsuits means they continue to pay, but knowing that case is an unusual outlier and that none of the other people involved like the CEO or other executives have had any consequences makes it feel a little underwhelming.
I'm glad government is going after bad companies more and I hope they continue, but it does seem like our legal system is just not equipped to correctly hold people responsible in these cases.
The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too.
Who are you people who feel compelled to defend mega corporations that screw people over? What is your psychology? What do you value in life? My goodness.
> The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too.
DuPont, while removed from the threat of this lawsuit, is guilty on plenty of counts of the same behavior with other chemicals.
I believe I've read articles about GE and Monsanto also knowing the health risks to their own employees and doing nothing about it. Let alone the dumping into public waterways.
$143 billion is hopefully the judgement which is levied, and hopefully the first of many.
There are millions of people all over the earth that genuinely believe "might makes right", or "greed is good", or "capitalism inherently results in meritocratic and technocratic allocation of resources so nothing that happens under capitalism can possibly be bad".
That's not even the least liberal worldviews widely held. Love thy neighbor and the golden rule and accountability are not universal
I would say that billions of people believe that "might makes right".
Its been seen across the centuries and countries alike. Colonialism, MegaCorps, Hague Invasion Act and countless examples that prove that morals matter very less in the long run.
or mabye we should be more honest and consider that maybe this is a way for the USA government to fill its coffers back up?
(rapping on another comment saying that there's a chance this is a way for the USA government to sell the 'manufacture capacity' that 3M is to other "greener" owners)
now that I type this out, I realize that this is perfectly consistent with the behavior of empires. the realization that the alleged 'pax romana' (stability and 'peace' for the roman empire) was built on stealing from 'barbaric' tribes and selling stuff to more 'civilized' owners in Rome.
As long as the laws and their enforcement are just, a theoretical government profit motive doesn't seem like a bad thing.
But it's hard to see how the particular people who brought this case to bear would be motivated by the small slice of the increase in federal funding that would redound to them. And it's not consistent with most of the government's behavior -- it doesn't spend as many resources extracting judgments from big corporations as would be likely if its profit motive loomed large.
no, you gotta be much more deep in your reasoning this "high" up
philosophically, at this height, the principle of "justice" is to not so simple... what does it even mean "to be just"? may as well say "be good" but the point is that the issue is good for whom?
the concept is "Empire"... USA government is the empire? aside question: can there ever exist multiple "empires"? monotheistic~ally speaking?
uff... My English prose is answering its own questions... I am no longer deeply disturbed by this phenomenon... but it's not something scientifically real so it still shakes me.
Philosophers seem to delight in the idea that the common good is hard to define. I'm an economist. I don't see much wiggle room. The wiggle room that exists is:
(1) How much do you care about whom? In particular, do you care equally about everyone, or are you a jerk?
(2) How do you weight the relative value of things like money, health, longevity, entertainment?
(3) At what rate does the marginal utility of such things diminish?
Okay maybe that's a lot of wiggle room. Still, under any reasonable set of weights, making millions of people sick is not worth the money 3M made.
It is imperative to control material incentives for all entities, both individuals and organizations. Entities will pursue incentives; money is no exception. Therefore, if we have designed a government so that it profits from protecting citizens from the ravages of corporate greed... that still counts as a good system.
If the government were somehow able to capture the entire market cap of 3M (without any execution slippage, which is obviously an unrealistic assumption), it would be enough to run the federal government for a little over 3 days...
