Coffee Cups and Other Hazards

Photo courtesy Flickr

It’s popular at the moment to buy used dishes. That’s green and wise, but a few precautions are in order.

First, discard a dish that’s cracked or chipped. It can’t be cleaned and leaves you open to legal action.

Back in the day, “ladies” fussed about good dishes, because cheap tableware often had heavy metals in the glaze. Heavy metal gives a glaze a rich color, and, unfortunately, acid foods like coffee and salad dressing leach the contaminant and feed it to the diner. I talked to an environmental solid waste specialist in 1982 about cadmium artist’s colors, and he freaked. He said heavy metals are only slightly less toxic than plutonium and stay lethal for nearly as long, hundreds of thousands of years. Unfortunately, heavy metal colors are the most thrilling and seductive.

If you think a dish is worth having, turn it over the first time you pick it up. Look for a well-printed and designed familiar manufacturer’s name and country of origin. Dab the piece with a lead-testing kit. That might seem pricey for a ten cent mug, but brain damage costs all the life support you’ve consumed so far.

There was a revolution in ceramic technology about fifty years ago. Cheap dishes, and cheap is the word, now last much longer than previously, so the hazards they contain linger, too, and injure over a longer period. Even a long-established and respected name in tableware can get skunked by an off-shore manufacturer and inadvertently market toxic dishes. The manufacturer pictured above revised its glazes when the problem came to light, so recent products can be trusted. We still test new tableware, though, and go over it with a Geiger counter, too.

Consumer education about heavy metals comes and goes. Usually it comes when some horror story about toddlers emerges. On the whole, concerns about glaze make sense of the old practice of choosing one china pattern and sticking to it. It’s OK to have just one set of dishes-chose plain ones and add odds and ends whose body color matches that of the plates. Ordinary home furnishings chains sell inexpensive tableware that outperforms the best of the past. Just test the stuff in the parking lot and take it right back into the store if it fails.

Decide ahead of time how many guests you want to serve at the table, and fill out place settings to that number. If I were buying for six at a big box or discount chain, I’d buy two cartons of six settings to accommodate breakage and losses, and store the back-up units someplace hard to reach. Doubling up in the beginning would guarantee ten times the use. Smart friends choose the same pattern so they can entertain crowds without having to pay party rental fees.

-30-