The main reason I like it is beacause after it is "seasoned", or after some regular use, it has a lot of the qualities of non-stick yet has none of the chemical coating.
A. it's a layer of burned, polymerized cooking oil. It is in fact a plastic. It is not particularly better for you. It's only non-stick in a weird sense that anything else that hasn't been cleaned is non-stick.
B. it does not really prevent rust - if it did, we would use this instead of rust protectants :)
C. Cast iron, unlike steel, generates mostly dust when it abrades. It is often machined dry with vacuum because it otherwise clogs up coolant systems (it makes a sort of mud).
The dust is very bad for you.
So everytime you scrape through that coating and abrade it, or microabrade it, you are probably getting cast iron dust in the air/lungs.
I'm sure this will end up studied post PFAS and will be discovered to have been a similarly bad idea.
Use steel - it "seasons" just fine (it turns out burned cooking oil will happily stick to lots of things), and doesn't have this issue.
Hmmm. I'd like to reconsider my cast iron pans if that's necessary. But first, I don't abrade them. Second, they don't seem to be rusting. And third, if you're going to season your carbon steel, then it seems like it should be fine to season your cast iron, too. Do I don't really understand what you're getting at.
You don't want to breathe a bunch of iron/rust dust, but that doesn't happen with iron cookware since it's never a dry-abrading situation.
I once rented an old house with some old iron pipes... While it was a problem for doing laundry without turning clothes orange, when I investigated the health risks it wasn't a problem unless you consumed huge enough amounts to get iron poisoning. Iron is an essential nutrient after all...
