Have you ever asked yourself: what are you cooking on?

I just want to know if you’ve ever asked the question.

Do you select your pans based on what you’re going to cook? Do you choose cast iron because you’re going to fry some cheese, or a huge stainless pot because you want to cook the onions slowly to make gooey French onion soup? If you make fancy sauce, do you try to find silver or tin lined copper cookware?

We are all completely obsessed with our food: what it ate before we eat it, what it drank, what hormones (if any) were pumped into it before it was butchered. We might pride ourselves on the fact that we understand how closely local the beef was raised, or how humanely the chickens were treated. It’s something we look for on labels in the same way we may check for the organic certification.

But there’s not enough conversation and chatter about what we’re cooking food in. We aren’t discussing, seriously and as a whole, the method to our madness in the kitchen.

Kitchen tools exist for reasons – and I’m not really talking the super specialty ones like lime squeezers and different shaped zesters that all do the same job. I’m talking about the science behind the cookware itself. Why do you think certain smiths made items out of tin, copper or pewter for certain uses? Why do you think chefs have special pots for careful sauces or ‘workhorses’ that can be anything from big woks to gigantic cast steel frying pans?

There used to be a very particular reason for every piece of ware in the kitchen. Copper cookware was used for delicate dishes. Cast iron was used for every day use, or tin corn boilers were preferred over cast iron if one was traveling by horse over the mountains (it was light weight).

Somewhere between WWI and today, our kitchen tools and cooking reasons became all about ease and not about truth. We shunned pure metal cookware in favor of fast care and smooth promises of glass, painted, and ceramic cookware. Teflon and aluminum cookware replaced tin-lined copper or cast iron skillets. We wanted inexpensive cooking tools. We stopped focusing on the reason some metals were used for certain pots. What conducts heat? What’s pure metal? What’s really going back to basics in your kitchen?

We’ve come full circle by caring deeply what we are cooking and how it’s raised or grown. We have created dialogue and words for local items and given prestige to crops that have not been sprayed by the chemicals that were prized only a few decades ago.

It is my hope that we all take the conversation one step further and a half-step lower and talk about the pots we’re using. Let’s know why they’re made with certain materials, and what they’re used for. Let’s discuss the merits of the cookware and the tools we use. Let’s be aware of what we’re cooking on on a visceral level that is multi-layered. It will only add depth to the food conversation already cooking on the trend radar today.