Preparing for your Thanksgiving meal? Here are a few ways that metals might show up at your Thanksgiving dinner.
- Will your vegetables, cranberry sauce, or pumpkin mash come from a can? Almost 200 billion food cans are produced from steel each year.
Read INFOGRAPIC: 5 Industries Where Steel is the Star - Most of the foil and sheet used in aluminum foil containers is produced from continuous cast metal. When producing foil, the pure metal is alloyed to meet desired foil specifications and cast into sheet metal that may be from 0.2” to 0.4”, depending upon the producer. This sheet is cold rolled to the appropriate re-roll stock gauge and shipped to a foil plant.
Read more about aluminum pie plates and foil containers in this blog article: The Aluminum Pie Plate – a Modern Staple at Thanksgiving - Do you have heirloom gold-plated cutlery? If you open your cutlery box and find the utensils are covered in a layer of white substance, don’t worry. Here are some reasons it could happen.
Read What is this White Substance on my Gold-Plated Cutlery? - How old is your heirloom cutlery? Aluminum was classified as a precious metal during the mid-19th century. Napoleon III gave aluminum cutlery to his most distinguished guests; all the other guests had to eat with gold cutlery.
Read more fun aluminum facts in INFOGRAPHIC: Can You Identify this Metal We Use At Dinner Time? - Many chefs like to cook with copper pots. Because of its excellent heat conductivity, copper makes a perfect base material for pots and pans. If you are sauteeing, saucing, or stewing with copper pots and pans, you might be interested in our series on copper.
Read Copper Compendium: The Whole Story - Will your desserts be served on colorful glass dishware? Will you have a beautiful vase of flowers on the table? Glass can be colored by the addition of various metal oxides. In-depth coloring is obtained by adding various metallic oxides, sulfide, or other compound of that metal to molten glass. Metals used to impart color include cadmium sulfide for yellow, gold chloride for red, nickel oxide for violet, and cobalt oxide for blue.
Read more in XRF Detects Metallic Oxides in Glasses. - Martensitic steel is used to make carving knives. Martensite stainless steels contain high amounts of chromium but very little nickel or other alloying metal, and are strong but brittle.
Read more in INFOGRAPHIC: Martensitic Stainless Steels - Stainless steel can line dishwashers inside and out. Stainless steel is different from other steels because of the addition of chromium (Cr) and other alloying elements such as nickel (Ni) to create a corrosion-resistant product. If any appliance needs to be corrosion-resistant, it’s a dishwasher.
Read more about stainless steel in What Is Stainless Steel? Part I
Now, the one time you don’t want metal to show up at your meal is in your food, but that’s a story from our sister blog, Examining Food. (Read Iron May Be Part Of A Healthy Diet, But Metal Is Not.)
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