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Have you even lived until you've folded a spoon trying to scoop ice cream with it? Woah, I guess I don't know my own strength!

fc417fc802 1y ago
Chunky stainless steel flatware is the best. Being able to get the same thing in copper without significant loss of strength would be awesome.
- amluto 1y ago
  You are welcome to eat with copper flatware and get sick if you eat something acidic or otherwise corrosive to copper. I’ll pass. There’s a reason that people tin-plate the food-contact surfaces of copper cookware.
  - kragen 1y ago
    It's not how you're imagining. I do in fact have some brass and alpaca "silverware". Because of the nickel, the alpaca stuff doesn't corrode; the brass stuff does, and if I don't keep the corrosion scrubbed off with steel wool, not only does it look like shit, acidic foods like yogurt taste bad. But I haven't gotten sick from it. It's probably not impossible to get sick that way, but it's challenging because of the short contact time, the low temperature, the small contact area, and the nasty taste. Boiling tomato sauce down in a copper pot for a couple of hours is a different situation, and I wonder if this may have contributed to the early modern belief that tomatoes were poisonous. But the toxicity of copper acetate from vinegar (verdigris, used as a pigment) was already well-known. Unplated copper pots have been commonplace for centuries and in use for millennia, and the most common way to get poisoned by them is to neglect to scrub off the blue-green basic copper carbonate that forms eventually from exposing wet copper to air. The carbonate is enormously more reactive to acids than the bare metal. My father-in-law related an incident from his childhood where a girl in his village got in a lot of trouble by poisoning half the village by cooking in unscrubbed copper! Nobody died, though. Heavy metal poisoning from copper is not the same kind of menace as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury. We can tolerate much higher levels, and it doesn't bioaccumulate.
ajuc 1y ago
Bending iron horseshoes was a common party trick historically. Augustus II the Strong (king of PLC and elector of Saxonia) was known for doing it. Sounds impossible if you don't realize the horseshoes weren't steel.

fc417fc802 1y ago

Chunky stainless steel flatware is the best. Being able to get the same thing in copper without significant loss of strength would be awesome.

amluto 1y ago
You are welcome to eat with copper flatware and get sick if you eat something acidic or otherwise corrosive to copper. I’ll pass. There’s a reason that people tin-plate the food-contact surfaces of copper cookware.
- kragen 1y ago
  It's not how you're imagining. I do in fact have some brass and alpaca "silverware". Because of the nickel, the alpaca stuff doesn't corrode; the brass stuff does, and if I don't keep the corrosion scrubbed off with steel wool, not only does it look like shit, acidic foods like yogurt taste bad. But I haven't gotten sick from it. It's probably not impossible to get sick that way, but it's challenging because of the short contact time, the low temperature, the small contact area, and the nasty taste. Boiling tomato sauce down in a copper pot for a couple of hours is a different situation, and I wonder if this may have contributed to the early modern belief that tomatoes were poisonous. But the toxicity of copper acetate from vinegar (verdigris, used as a pigment) was already well-known. Unplated copper pots have been commonplace for centuries and in use for millennia, and the most common way to get poisoned by them is to neglect to scrub off the blue-green basic copper carbonate that forms eventually from exposing wet copper to air. The carbonate is enormously more reactive to acids than the bare metal. My father-in-law related an incident from his childhood where a girl in his village got in a lot of trouble by poisoning half the village by cooking in unscrubbed copper! Nobody died, though. Heavy metal poisoning from copper is not the same kind of menace as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury. We can tolerate much higher levels, and it doesn't bioaccumulate.

ajuc 1y ago

Bending iron horseshoes was a common party trick historically. Augustus II the Strong (king of PLC and elector of Saxonia) was known for doing it. Sounds impossible if you don't realize the horseshoes weren't steel.