I Hate This Fucking Pan

We are back from our holiday break, before our next holiday break, to bring you some opinions relevant to this, the season of “doing a lot of cooking.”

I confess that I’ve not, myself, ever owned one of those trendy hyper-aesthetic ceramic-finish pans. But there was an Our Place “Always” pan in our rental this spring, in its signature salmon terracotta. During its first flurry of popularity, this pan cost one hundred and forty five American dollars, and was successful largely off the back of dog-whistle marketing about ceramic coatings versus nonstick ones: “The interior has a ceramic coating made without bad things like PFOAs and PTFEs,” as a 2020 Fatherly blog post asserted about the ceramic Always pan (emphasis mine).

I was excited to try this pan, Her of the Many Interstitial Instagram Ads. I’d jealously watched all the ceramic-finish-pan infomercials where the burnt cheese just slides off, and hotly anticipated the day when my food prep life became no-muss, no-fuss. I was ready to live my Instagram-friendly cooking dream.

Imagine my surprise when I tried to use this pan and every single food clung on for dear goddamn life. Fond from browning meats and onions never made it through a deglaze, unless I could stand there for 10 whole minutes running a wooden utensil over and over and over the surface; I couldn’t scrape up the crispy edges of eggs. The pan shredded vegetables to pieces, gluing the tasty browned bits to the surface, leaving me only steamed mush to scrape onto my plate. It literally took everything good about food and turned it, literally again, to ash.

Never mind when it came time to clean it, when there was no tool that was technically up to the task of both removing the glued-on layer of now-burnt food and not damaging the surface even more. This pan was not only mediocre; it was a criminally overpriced nightmare piece of garbage.

I’m learning this is a mundane experience with this general type of pan, of which there are many brands percolating through the spaces where millennials see stylish ads. The coating works as promised for a few months, but once it’s been cleaned a few times, the nonstick promises fade into extremely sticky hell. I’ve been through many nonstick pans in my day, and while they have their own utensil and cleaning and temperature needs, their fade from glory is never this fast.

What’s truly wild in all of this is that the real enemy that any nonstick pan is shadowboxing is the long-standing human tradition of “cooking things in fat.” Fats, be they butter or oil, are nature’s nonstick substance. Nothing “nonsticks” like a generous layer of olive oil under a fried egg, or butter under a thawed Trader Joe’s mahi mahi filet, regardless of the pan you are talking about.

Though it feels like the history has mostly been forgotten, the rise of Teflon pans corresponded with the rise in fears about “fatty” foods. The first Teflon pan, the “Happy Pan,” came out in 1961. The pans reached NY Times-level notoriety in 1986.[1] The first “food guide” from the U.S. government that urged “caution” around fats, the “Hassle Free Food Guide,” came out in 1977. It was followed by the “Food Wheel” in 1984, which was the precursor to the famous 1992 Food Pyramid that recommended using fats “sparingly.” (Previously, the “Basic Seven” food guide in use from 1943 to 1955 characterized butter as its own food group, of which people were to eat “two or more tablespoons daily.”)

While we don’t need to pivot to deep-frying everything, cultivating fears about cooking otherwise sticky foods in oil has never struck me as the most humane use of anyone’s marketing budget. Even if we play by the stringent rules of food tracking, the third-of-a-tablespoon of olive oil that can cling to a fried egg is equal to one-sixth of a Chips Ahoy cookie. This is the definition of "getting carried away."

I wouldn’t be writing about all this except that I saw the Always Pan and some of its ilk in gift guides and lists in the past couple weeks. I got incensed, as I do, that people are still pushing trendy and overpriced kitchen products without ever articulating their shortcomings. The Always (lmao) Pan’s price has, curiously, been reduced since its launch, from $145 to $99. A T-fal nonstick pan of the same size is $20. A Lodge cast iron is a blessed $19.90, as yet untouched by inflation. They don’t make beautiful gifts, maybe. But knowing what I know now, I would only give a ceramic pan to someone I wanted to truly suffer.

Eat

Speaking of eating, permit me to yell:

I AM WRITING A BOOK!!!!

Technically, I have been writing this book; I no longer remember a time before I was writing this book. But I’ve only ever been doing it with this goal of making something maximally helpful to the maximum number of people when I had something to say that could not be contained by the length limit of what I can send to your inboxes (and if we are being honest, I’ve been crossing that line repeatedly for some time now).

I wouldn’t be doing this without your all’s support, and it means the whole world that you read my writing and talk to me about it in comments and the Liftcord and your emails. This is the best community that there is, and you have truly helped make the larger Swole Woman ecosystem what it is and will be; don’t forget it!!! You are already in the best place to get all the updates about this book, so thank you for being On It and prepare to stay long-term tuned. Dead trees here we come!!!

~Discord Pick of the Week: Defector: Where is all this World Cup stoppage time coming from? I’ve been enjoying the recently renamed #the-big-game channel as a place to catch Liftcord discourse about all the World Cup matches. I have struggled to not park myself in front of the TV from the moment I wake up until the day is essentially over.~

Billie Eilish Swole Woman?? She said this in her Year Six Vanity Fair interview:

I’ve had a very big transformation this year with my fitness lifestyle and it’s been a really insane process and been…I feel better about myself than I ever have, which makes me feel proud. I worked really hard on it. And I just wanna get really fuckin’ buff. I just wanna be buff. Yeah so hopefully by next year I will be ripped.

Once again calling upon a magazine editor to send me to work out with a legend!

Incredible Maggie Smith poem: my body hasn’t traveled with me.I’ve traveled inside it. Do I wear it, or does it carry me? Is the body a suitor a suitcase?

The myth of the 25-year-old brain.

How South Korea does zero food waste.

Does kindness get in the way of success? I have about 1 million more thoughts than usual, even, since finishing The Dawn of Everything, but let me offer a classic science trope to sum it up: depends how you define success!!!

Matt Healy of The 1975 casually banging out some pushups mid-show.

I lift for my kitty so I can protect him from danger.

Drink

It brings me no pleasure to have to address this, but: a leaked email about the Liver King’s performance-enhancing drugs regimen led to him admitting his use of PEDs, to the tune of $11,000 per month. I’m inclined to say “finally” except that every minute spent in earnest contemplation of any of his obvious lies over the last couple years, including the possibility that someone as red and veined as the Liver King is not taking an absolute avalanche of PEDs, is a minute set on fire, crushed under a semi truck, and had its broken bones launched into space.

Scientists don’t agree on what causes obesity, but they know what doesn’t (crowd chimes in enthusiastically in unison, “a lack of personal fortitude and/or conviction!”). As a She’s A Beast Twitter follower responded to my tweet of this link, obesity-as-a-problem is still an overall facile assumption to begin from. Still!: I’ll take any slap across the face to doctors and redditors who tell everyone to “just eat less” to solve all their health issues.

I hate the “you wouldn’t download a car” format of this headline but am forced to agree: Don’t serve disordered eating to your teens (or anyone!) this holiday season.

Rest

Delightful profile of the Childhood Delusions Film Festival.

We watched Jonah Hill’s documentary about his therapist, Stutz, and enjoyed it immensely. You know I was immediately on board with one of Stutz’s little hand-drawn graphics with bodies being the base of the pyramid around which we orient our lives (meaning, are we taking physical care of ourselves, cultivating a good home for ourselves).

In other Netflix news, we’ve also started to randomly fire up a few rounds of its inexplicably spartan and ominous trivia game, Triviaverse, which features a nameless disembodied mouth and eyes. This is not a complaint! Change nothing about this!

Okay, one more: for any Love Is Blind-heads, I loved this breakdown of Zanab and Cole’s relationship from a professional “conflict coach.”

That’s all for this week! I love you for reading, thank you, let’s go—

1. By 2004, DuPont of Teflon fame was in trouble for filling the environment with plastics and production byproducts that caused bad health problems. Not to absolve any corporation of its crimes, but for getting-through-the-day purposes, nonstick has since been reformulated with materials that don’t have these same issues, and health concerns about nonstick based on the idea that they emit fumes have always been overblown; at worst, heating them to 500-degree, steak-searing, pizza-crust-browning temperatures is when the fumes can cause flu-like symptoms, which is not what nonstick pans are for anyway. Update: Per a reader email, perhaps all plastic is bad. Use cast iron and cook in fat, in that case!