Well, I can't imagine that this has been through more than 1k-2k cycles, max. My mom had it in storage for the better part of ~20 years and only used it a few times. This isn't and hasn't been used with commercial/industrial frequency, people, just 5-10 times a year. All the evidence I have supports that it's completely safe if used and maintained properly.

Interesting! Yes it does have a shell apparently, but it's aluminum not steel. This is just a canner, not a pressure cooker, so there's no contact between the aluminum and our food. We don't use aluminum cookware because of the leeching you pointed out.

You're not wrong. My mom had me at 21, grandmother was married at 14 and had my mom (her second child) at 16, and my great grandmother had four kids by the time she was 21... The assumption itself isn't necessarily true if the first generation was already older when she bought it, though. Say she bought it in 1930, passed it onto her daughter in 1940, then it only needs transfered three more times in the next 82 years to reach 5 generations of ownership.

Fun fact: my wife actually has a 5 generation matrilineal photo taken in 2018 with her great grandmother (who was 96 at the time) all the way down to our daughter.

It's nice to be able to preserve your own food without filling up the freezer. When we see really good food or produce deals, like when turkeys and hams get discounted to 75% off after the holidays, we buy enough to last us a year and can it. It's also how we preserve about half of the food from our garden.

I know pressure cookers/canners can be dangerous, but I honestly feel better about these old ones than some of the newer ones. The design is so heavy duty that the only way that things could really go sideways is if 1) you forget what you're doing, don't watch the cooker, or otherwise fail to keep pressure at the right level. We don't do this, but it's why my mom isn't allowed to have a stovetop cooker/canner anymore (she gets to doing other things and forgets). We got her an electric Instapot now and that's much safer because it shuts itself off automatically, or 2) you've seriously damaged it by dropping it or hitting it with something hard, causing a potentially hidden fracture in the metal, but you use it anyway.

Thanks! I think so, too. I've actually got two of these that are identical. The wood handles and the old-school pressure gauge are cool.

Ham, lentil, and carrot stew that my wife made a big batch of

This is a pressure canner, not a cooker (though we use one of those as well). In this one, you put glass canning jars with food that you want to preserve in it and it will cook, sterilize, and seal them so they're shelf stable for 1-5 years or more. In the early-mid 1900s, many (the majority?) of American families would can some of their own vegetables, meat, sauces, jellies and jams, etc. It's getting more popular again now.

We love our instapot for cooking and use it 4+ times a week but you can't beat these big old canners for canning (my wife just canned a bunch of soup, broth, and tomatos from our summer garden that we froze until we had time to process them).

I'm not sure. If any engineers or metallurgists see this and want to weigh in I'd be interested. This is super thick cast aluminum, not anything like modern stamped metal pressure canners/cookers. But I don't know how that bears on metal fatigue.

It's completely clean. That's what pitted cast aluminum looks like, fyi.