Lead in cookware.

Heat, acid, and time pull metals out of cookware and into the food. Decorative ceramic dishes leach lead, so do imported aluminum pans and old brass and copper alloys. The cookware your dinner is sitting on right now matters more than the bag of flour you bought.

Why cookware is a lead vector.

Lead gets into food a few ways. It migrates off leaded glazes on ceramic. Acid pulls it out of die-cast aluminum and brass. And it comes off during cooking, right into what you eat. Hotter cooking, more acidic food, and longer contact all push more lead across.

FDA's compliance limit for lead in food-contact ceramic glaze is 0.5 mg/L for cups and 2.0 mg/L for plates as released into a 24-hour acetic acid extraction. That's the U.S. standard. Imported decorative ceramics (especially those marketed for display rather than food use) are routinely tested above these limits and still end up on dinner tables.

Cookware that frequently tests positive.

DetectLead's ceramic database alone has 2,165 dish entries scanned with a Niton XL5 Plus XRF analyzer. These categories show up in the positive results year after year.

• Imported decorative ceramic plates, bowls, and serving dishes
• Mexican-style hand-painted talavera pottery
• Indian and South-Asian decorated dishes used for daily eating
• Vintage Pyrex, Corelle, and CorningWare from before 1980, particularly painted patterns
• Die-cast aluminum cookware imported from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (chapati pans, karahis, tava plates)
• Brass and copper alloy cooking pots, pre-2014
• Antique cast-iron with painted exterior coatings
• Glazed earthenware with cracked or worn surfaces (the crack exposes leaded interior)
• "Decorative use only" pottery used as actual serving plates
• Crockpot and slow-cooker liners from older vintage models

How to test cookware.

1. Test the food-contact surface. The inside of a bowl, the cooking face of a pan, the painted decoration where food touches it. The foot of the dish doesn't matter; the eating surface does.
2. Wash and dry the spot. Soap, rinse, dry. Food residue and detergent both throw off readings.
3. For ceramics, test on the painted decoration first, then the white glaze. The decoration is where lead concentrates. The white background is usually clean.
4. Drop or spray FluoroSpec on the spot. One drop is enough.
5. Wait 30 seconds, then UV. Bright green = lead. The brighter the glow, the more lead.
6. For aluminum or brass cookware, test on a scratch. Use a key to expose fresh metal. Lead inside the alloy doesn't show on the oxide layer.

If a piece tests positive.

A leaded plate doesn't have to leave the house. It can become a display piece. The rule is just that it doesn't touch food. Move it from the kitchen cupboard to a shelf and the exposure pathway is broken. Without acid and heat, nothing migrates into food.

If you have been eating from a confirmed-positive piece daily for years, request a blood lead test. Cookware exposure is cumulative; 5 years of daily acidic-food contact on a leaded glaze can show up in adult blood lead levels. Search DetectLead's Check Your Dish database before buying decorative ceramics.

Test the cookware your dinner is sitting on.

The decorative bowl. The vintage Pyrex. The aluminum chapati pan. The hand-painted Talavera. The antique brass cooking pot from grandma's wedding. Spray, wait, UV. Done.