My letter to the editor:
So we shouldn't cook food (or use easily-cleanable pots!) because we MIGHT release A LITTLE BIT of (maybe NOT EVEN TOXIC) chemicals into the food?
SO we should vent (expensive already heated or air conditioned and humidified indoors air) from the kitchen (wasting BILLIONS in heating oil, gas, and electrically generated BTU's ...
All because a COMMON chemical found worldwide is merely SUSPECTED of being linked to worldwide rates of exposure.
A practical question from this engineer:
If the chemical is found in trace amounts in humans worldwide,
and US-built coated pots ARE NOT capable of contaminating
(1) people worldwide who don't use coated American pots, and
(2) people worldwide who can't afford US pots (the vast majority)
(3) people worldwide and in the US clean their pots BETTER (yielding less food poisoning from cleaner pots that are less scarred by scraping and dirt!)
... then WHY are our US companies being forced to abandon a proven helpful chemical?
The results of this ruling are dirtier pots and MORE deaths from food poisoning, millions in development and research wasted, more millions is changing chemicals that produce a worse job of protecting the pots from scarring, billions more wasted as consumer replace torn up pots not well protected by the new chemicals. And NO GOOD.
Crap! PTFE is polytetrafluoroethylene and is called Teflon....it only starts to degrade at 700 F and that is the non heat stabilized form.....and when it degrades under heat,
it outgasses a harmless gas that you would have to breathe for 10,000 years at 500,000 ppm to do you harm....