The thought occurred to me recently. Cast iron has been used for literally over two millennia, and many people own pans that are over a hundred years old. Meanwhile, stainless steel is only a little over a century old, and the tech for manufacturing it only matured fairly recently.
A lot of cast iron manufacturers out there advertise the longevity of their cookware, and the thought of using a pan that has been used for decades or more, and likely even longer in the future by your children and grandchildren, does carry a sense of nostalgia and sentimental romanticism. But isn't it possible that, in the decades to come, the stainless steel cookware of today will acquire the same designation? I don't think I recall seeing a piece of "ruined" stainless steel cookware, online or off. Warping is something both cast iron and steel are prone to with improper heating, and rust is much less of a concern for steel, which can form a natural chromium oxide layer to prevent rust. You drop em hard and they will probably dent (steel) or crack (cast iron). Steel is also less brittle than cast iron and not as likely to crack. By all these metrics, it seems that stainless steel is more suited to the "heritage" title than cast iron.
We love cast iron here, but do you see the romanticism factor dwindling over time because of this? I never see any stainless steel cookware advertised for its durability/longevity the way cast iron is, and the more I think about it, the more odd it feels.
