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One main reason I started eating mostly vegetarian at home is the preparation stage. With all vegetables, wood cutting boards are simple and easy. But they're porous and I don't want meat bacteria getting absorbed in the wood. The typical response is "use a plastic cutting board", but have you ever looked at a plastic cutting board after a few uses? 1000s of nice crevices for bacteria and loose plastic.

Nah I'm good, I'll just cook vegetables and have meat as a special treat. The only plastic in my kitchen is some measuring cups, and soft ended spatulas/ladles and even those should be replaced.

Sure I don't know what exactly plastic does to my system, but should that be a reason to not avoid putting plastic in my system? I'm sure I'm already accumulating a ton but I can at least reduce it in areas that I control.

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I've cut an awful lot of meat on wood cutting boards. It's fine. I always cut the meat last, then wash it soon. If it's chicken, I wash immediately after cutting, but that's kind of my practice regardless of cutting board material because I don't want chicken juice sitting around.

Sorry for my ignorance, but what harmful bacteria predominant to meat will live for that long on a surface? After using my wooden cutting boards for meat, I throughly scrub them and let them dry for at least 48 hours before even putting them away. Salmonella and campylobacter I think are well destroyed by then, and I probably won't even use the board more than once every 5-7 days, always cooking everything cut on it.

None, wooden cutting boards don’t house bacteria for long. Plastic cutting boards also ruins knives.

There have been some studies (plural) that indicate wood cutting boards are safer than plastic cutting boards in terms of bacteria. That said, I have a dedicated cutting board for meat.

https://commonsensehome.com/wooden-cutting-boards/

Humans are really robust against meat bacteria. Even rotten meat is not as problematic as most would think. The majority of human evolution was spend without refrigerators, so we had ample time to adapt for the consequences.

That doesn't mean it was a nice way to live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyds_Bank_coprolite

> Analysis of the stool has indicated that its producer subsisted largely on meat and bread whilst the presence of several hundred parasitic eggs suggests they were riddled with intestinal worms.

Eating spoiled meat doesn't give you worms, eating raw meat would. One of our adaptions was cooking, which this individual probably didn't do all the time.

> In 2003, the coprolite broke into three pieces after being dropped

Shit!

Fascinating article, thanks for sharing it!

What about the porousness of the vegetables? It is well understood that there is a high likelihood that vegetables are contaminated with "meat bacteria" before reaching your home. In fact, a significant number of "meat bacteria" illnesses are attributed to the consumption of contaminated vegetables.

Which, of course, is why you wash your vegetables before use. If that washing is good enough for your vegetables, why wouldn't it be good enough for a cutting board?

Only use wood. If it dries out throughly, I don’t think much can survive on it. Put it in the sun if you’re worried.

I always oil my boards.

Either way I’ve cut meat on wooden boards for 20 years and never been sick.

I think a lot of home cooks take advice meant for commercial kitchen standards out of context and apply them their home. where they make a few meals a day for probably pretty healthy people.

like there are really people out there that won't eat cookie dough :(

i remember digging into this a bit and came away from it finding that wooden cutting boards are fine for meat. supposedly they have some "antimicrobial" property, forgot what that was though or if its actually legit.

Actually, I do use a separate wooden board for meat and another for fruit, veg cheese etc...

Being a vegetarian is totally fine, but I find your reasoning pretty flimsy - it seems like you worked backwards to come up with it. Millions & millions of people cut meat on wood cutting boards every single day and it's completely fine.

You can put plastic cutting boards in the dishwasher, though, and get them quite hot to sanitize. Generally, that will destroy a wood cutting board. I suppose you could maybe use UV light to sanitize a wood cutting board.

As discussed in the article, heating can increase shedding, creating a porous surface. It's OK that it's porous if it's cleaned in the dishwasher after every use, but, and I may be wrong, I wouldn't be confident all the shedding is washed away in the dishwasher.

>I suppose you could maybe use UV light to sanitize a wood cutting board

If your wood cutting board is made right, it helps with sanitization. The grain is supposed to be "up and down", so you cut "into" the grain. This pushes the microbes "into" the cutting board, where they are starved over oxygen and die - or the wood pushes the microbes back "out", where you can clean them off the surface.

By the way, many wood "cutting boards" are actually "charcuterie" boards - they are thin, and the grain doesn't run "up and down". The wood cutting boards I'm describing are thick, like 1 inch thick.

This is backwards. Plastic gets those nicks and crevices as you point out. Good wood cutting boards don't absorb much, aren't good harbors bacteria anyway, and the nicks self heal.

I simply rinse my wooden boards with boiling water after cutting meat on them (and then wash them of course).

I use a glass plate. Cleans easily and well.

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