Could you link to part one so we know what this is referring to?

I redid my pantry about a year and a half ago, and added a ton of Rubbermaid Brilliance. I've liked it more and more since I got it. Just jump back if you drop one, as if it were a knife. It hurts a lot more than you'd guess, falling on your foot. ;) The ridge around the top makes for some gaps, and the way they fit in the existing cabinetry, I fill the leftover space with flat ones on end, ones with nuts and raisin kind of things that don't mind.

I like glass (Pyrex) for the fridge, and have a few small no-name glass ones for single portion freezer to microwave, but can't do it for pantry or most freezer. The whole drop thing.

Thank you carabubble, i didn't think to do that!!

good to hear pllog! my containers come this week!

i do have some Pyrex refrigerator containers, that i love, but will test for lead this week.

(crazy daisy pattern, butterfly gold nesting bowls ets...) i really love them, they are just so functional, i would hate to discard them, but i will of course if they test postive :(

i will report back this week with my test results

You could save your pretties for non-food. IIRC, it takes alcohol or acid to get the lead out of glass and into the food. My Pyrex is less than 20 years old, just plain glass with plastic tops, though I do have my mother's mixing bowls. I don't worry about the exterior paint.

I hope you like the brilliance as much as I do.

I thought about using the swabs, but they aren't particularly reliable as to whether the lead is going to leach into your food. Most will read negative for lead, even in high lead-containing dishware. Testing the product for lead content won't necessarily indicate leaching either, but high lead levels will point to POTENTIAL problems. But not necessarily actual ones at your house. That's the problem with testing for pesticide residue as well. One cannot possibly test all produce with the expensive reliable tests, and hard to get a representative sample to use, since agricultural conditions and processing variations is vast across the market. The test swabs are inexpensive, and could help you figure out if you have a particularly bad actor, but a false negative is also a risk with them, so caveat emptor.

That being said, I threw out any crazed or cracked dishes that I didn't love, and saved a few crazed or cracked mugs to use as decorative vases or pencil holders. I sometimes use my Bubbe's and Grandma's old crazed soup bowls as fruit bowls or to hold dry ingredients like snack mix or chips. Unlikely to have leaching in that situation. I have been known to use old pottery plates and bowls as planters or to put under pots to catch drips, and also occasionally for pot pourri.

Pottery on the red end of the color wheel is the worst offender, so I would start with that. As for storage, I use plastic due to my propensity to drop stuff, but heat in glass in the microwave. I love these glass mugs linked below, from Libby, for a whole host of reasons, including that they go with everything and also you can keep track of how much liquid is in them. I've read that they don't hold heat as much as pottery mugs, but heck, pottery doesn't hold all that much heat either. I just ordered a tea cozy for my teapots, and they also make mug cozies to help with that problem. Hubs and I also have insulated stainless coffee mugs for keeping things hot over long periods, like in the car, etc.

Libby Robusta glass mugs, 13 oz., on Amazon

Good to know about the unreliability of those test swabs, I pink, thanks.

And I had this very nice double walled glass mug that kept things hot very well - until I cracked the handle 😕

And I do the same with old mugs, bowls and whatnot.

Here's the problem with the tests. Sure, if you swab some dishware and it picks up lead, then obviously you don't want to be using that piece. But it doesn't account for the other factors that would be contributing to lead leaching into food from dishware: the temperature of the food (hot more than cold) and the acidity of the food (acid facilitates leaching) and the length of time the food comes into contact with the dishware, and what part of the dishware. And even if you test your dishware with an expensive meter that can identify lead within the pottery and glazes, that does not mean that it is leaching into your food, only that the potential is there. The glaze and finish is quite important as a prevention of leaching of all kinds of things into food, including bacteria. That's why anything cracked or with a crazed, scratched or disturbed finish should be suspect.

I would focus my attention on soup and salad bowls, drinking cups and mugs for hot beverages, as well as tea and coffee pots. Tea and coffee are both hot and acidic, so the potential is there. Also any dish that is going to hold pickles or condiments, which very likely will contain acid.

With older baking ware, I think the question are, what is the condition of the interior finish, and what kind of color and glaze is used on the interior. I think the jury is out on the Corningware issue, but I don't regularly use any antique bakeware anyway. It doesn't clean up all that well, and if you have to scrub it with an abrasive, that is going to compromise the finish . . .

There are also a lot of inexpensive "hand painted" dishes coming out of poor countries in Latin America and Asia, and I would not necessarily be confident of their glaze quality, considering the workmanship that is usually present. I would not use such pottery for any of the above mentioned uses. I have repurposed a lot of mine. They look lovely, but aren't necessarily good functioning over time . . . the glaze tends to wear rapidly. I even have some platters hand painted by my Mom's cousin, and although lovely, I only use them as cookie trays, nothing hot or wet ever goes on them . . . the paints could contain all kinds of nasty stuff that could wear off.

I find that white or clear glass serving dishes are best anyway, since they go with so many different table looks. You can mix it up with colorful placemats, napkins and tablecloths, as well as napkin holders and centerpieces.