Where to begin: the swaps that matter most, ranked.
Short answer: yes, an intact Stanley is safe to drink from. The lead is real — Stanley says so — but it’s a sealing pellet at the bottom of the vacuum chamber, under a stainless steel cap, on the outside of the inner wall, and it never touches what you’re drinking. The only way it becomes a problem
Short answer: a wooden spoon and a stainless steel spatula are the two safest tools in any kitchen, and they always were. Good silicone is a 4 and the right choice for a coated pan. Bamboo is a 3, because most of it is glued. Nylon, melamine, and the black plastic spatula that came free with a pan s
Short answer: it depends entirely on which All-Clad. The bonded stainless steel lines the brand is famous for — D3, D5, Copper Core, G5, D7 — put bare 18/10 stainless against your food and score a 5, the top of our scale. The nonstick lines that carry the same logo — HA1, HA1 Expert, Essentials, NS
Short answer: a Le Creuset Dutch oven is a 4 on our scale, and a good one. The surface your food touches is vitreous enamel — powdered glass melted onto cast iron — in sand, white, or black, and glass is one of the few materials we never worry about. The reasons it isn’t a 5 are worth ten minutes of
The motor doesn’t matter and the container does. Nearly every blender jar is Tritan plastic — fine for a cold smoothie, a problem for hot soup. The glass-jar blender that never went away, Vitamix’s stainless container, and the immersion blender that fixes the rest. Scored 1–5.
Bare stainless steel is the safest cookware you can buy, and the numbers on the box mostly describe corrosion resistance, not safety. What 18/10, 18/8, 316 and 18/0 mean, whether nickel leaches, why clad beats disc-bottom, and the pans we’d buy.
With any countertop cooker, the only part that matters is the pot the food sits in. Most rice cookers hide a Teflon bowl, most slow cookers hide a glaze question, and the Instant Pot’s stainless liner is already a 5. Inner pots, scored 1–5.
The plate is rarely the problem; the glaze sometimes is. Why “lead-free” means two different things, what to do with pre-2005 Corelle and vintage Fiesta, and the glass, porcelain and stainless we’d eat off — scored 1–5.
The dark grey nonstick bakeware in most kitchens is Teflon at 425°F with a metal spatula on it. What to bake on instead — stainless, cast iron, glass, stoneware, aluminum with parchment — scored 1–5, pan by pan.
Put leftovers in glass and stop microwaving in plastic. Pyrex vs borosilicate, which lids to trust, the freezer and microwave rules that keep glass from cracking, and our 1–5 scores for every kind of container.
A water filter pitcher is two questions: does the filter actually remove lead and PFAS (and can it prove it), and what does the water sit in afterward? Which pitchers are certified, which are glass, and our 1–5 scores.
Most air fryer baskets are Teflon on aluminum, blasted at 400°F for twenty minutes. Which machines cook on steel or glass instead, the cheap insert that fixes the one you already own, and our 1–5 scores.
There are three pans called the Always Pan — ceramic, titanium, and cast iron — and they don’t score the same. What each is made of, what Our Place does and doesn’t publish, and our honest 1–5 scores.
HexClad settled a $2.5 million lawsuit over “PFAS-free” pans that contained PTFE, then switched to a ceramic coating called TerraBond. What’s in the pan now, how to tell which version you’re buying, and our honest 1–5 score.
A plastic cutting board sheds up to 50 grams of microplastics a year. Every board material scored 1 to 5 — wood, bamboo, rubber, composite, titanium — plus the boards we’d actually buy.
Short answer: yes, it’s safe to cook on. It’s a 3 on our scale — the same 3 we gave GreenPan — and if you want a Caraway that scores a 5, the company makes one. Just not the one in the ads.
Short answer: yes, keep using it. Longer answer: it’s a 3 on our scale, and the reasons it isn’t a 5 are worth five minutes.
You don’t need to replace your whole kitchen. You need to replace about ten things, in the right order, and most of them cost less than dinner out.