Stop Using Plastic Cutting Boards
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
> “Our study assumes that the average person makes 500 cuts per day on a board, or over the course of a year, 128,000 cuts. Given those numbers, the cumulative microplastics exposure ranges from 7.4 to 50.7 grams per year.”
> For context, a plastic credit card weighs about five grams, so the highest end of this estimate amounts to 10 credit cards per year, shed onto your board and food.
I have several plastic cutting boards I've used close to daily for probably 10 years. But they still have the same shape and weight as when I bought them, based on simple visual inspection. Yes, the surfaces are positively covered in probably hundreds of thousands of scratches from each cut I've made, but the surface is still visibly the same height in the middle of the board where it's most scratched, vs. the edges that don't have any scratches at all.
Yet according to this "study" my cutting boards ought to have developed entire holes in their middles by now.
I can quite confidently say that I haven't removed even one credit card's worth of plastic in a decade. A tiny fraction of a credit card's worth across all the boards, maybe.
500 sounds like a lot for the "average person". Not sure if that's realistic. Maybe for some people...
I wonder where this assumption came from. It's key to the study's conclusions but there's no mention of that.
I’m sure it is variable based on diets. But full home cooking, 500 doesn’t seem that far off to me.
Edit: I just tested this. 30 for half an onion.. so 60 for a whole onion.
I’m pretty certain when I make stew tonight; I’ll hit several hundred just for that.
I cannot imagine cooking without dicing and mincing ant least once a day. And it’s not a couple dozen cuts otherwise.
Dice onion: 60 cuts
chiffonade basil: 20 cuts
mince clove garlic: 40 cuts
Julienne carrot: 25 cuts
Cube chicken: 20 cuts
etc etc etc.
I don’t have a clear sense of what an average American does, then, but if you’re an “average home cook for a family” then I don’t think it’s that far off.
Obviously you can make a sandwich. Or cook a burger. But if you’re eating healthy fresh produce and meats then how are you not cutting things? Maybe like steak and asparagus every night? It’s that or processed food. Or maybe people call warming up pre made foods cooking? I honestly don’t know.
Here’s random recipes I picked from a recipe app.
Mushroom kale risotto (chopping mushrooms, garlic, kale)
Ratatouille penne (celery, red onion, garlic, zucchini, squash)
Gnocchi veg (tomatoes, broclli garlic)
Turkey sweet potato roast (sweet potatoe, garlic, onion, yellow pepper, parsley)
Stuffed pork tenderloin (garlic)
Chicken pasta (chicken, garlic, green onions)
So maybe I’m in a bubble cooking these meals, but I’m not sure what actual “cooking” doesn’t do a lot of cutting. Knifes are the chefs primary tools. (watch any cooking show and count how many times knife hits board)
I often prepare my own museli, zero cuts. Pasta, zero cuts.
Snap frozen vegetables, almost always fresher and cheaper than 'fresh' vegetables, zero cuts.
If I do cook onions, course chopped, maybe 7 cuts per. Garlic, ginger, from a jar.
Who has time to make even a hundred cuts a day.
It is not possible to dice an onion with 7 cuts. Even “course chopped”, 7 cuts would have giant chunks of onion in them.
Also, it's not even clear what toxicity level there is for microplastics, if any. The article even points this out.
However... as soon as you do something like use a serrated knife to cut bread on a cutting board? There's no way that wouldn't produce a ton of microplastics. Or if you scoop chopped vegetables by sliding a sharp knife -- that's also going to produce a lot of plastic particles. So it might not be a terrible estimate for some sizeable fraction of the population.
That figure seems too high.
One could find the upper bound by measuring how much weight of chopping board decreases over a year?
Slice an old chopping board with a deep depression from cuts and compare weight of center strip against unused edge?
I don't cook much and mostly make simple meals, but when I do prepare food, half the time I'm using the cooking board only to capture crumbs, fruit juices, etc. Actual cuts terminate either in the air, e.g. when slicing bread rolls in half, or on the inside of the outer layer, followed by ~90° turn of the thing under knife and finishing in the air (e.g. slicing lemons, tomatoes, etc.). None of those cuts have the knife making direct contact with the board.
(Sure, it's probably bad technique and somewhat inefficient; I think I unintentionally learned to do it because plastic cutting boards with cuts in them look ugly and are annoying to clean, so I tried to avoid damaging them.)
> All the chopped carrots were carefully transferred to the glass wash tray. As shown in Figure 2,
> 500 mL of ultrapure water was used to wash the blade and the chopping board further to transfer all the particles in the same glass wash tray.
Who would expect contaminants left on the blade and the board to be counted alongside those in the chopped food itself? I suppose it's difficult to rigorously separate the chopped and the chopped-upon, but the distinction seems essential to support, or not, the hypothesis about human consumption.
[1]: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c00924?ref=PDF
One cool thing about wooden cutting boards is that they are somewhat self-healing. Wood swells with water so small incisions can close by themselves.
> One cool thing about wooden cutting boards is that they are somewhat self-healing. Wood swells with water so small incisions can close by themselves.
I believe it's also more hygienic, because with plastic cutting boards the bacteria stay on the surface, whereas in wooden ones they're "absorbed" by the wood (or something along those lines, I'm too lazy to find a reference).
I always presumed wood becomes a spongy high-surface area surface filled with food - a bacterial heaven - especially cracks! There is a definite funk to wooden boards. However, there are claims that wood is more healthy! Maybe some truth to the myths?
Plastic boards get a proper clean if the water is hot enough? They also dry completely - wooden boards stay wet for far longer. I don't think I've noticed plastic boards ever getting a bacterial funk smell. Then again I don't cook heaps so...
According to e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31113021/
"Bacteria inoculated onto Plastic blocks were readily recovered for minutes to hours and would multiply if held overnight. Recoveries from wooden blocks were generally less than those from plastic blocks"
Now, I wouldn't put too much stock in a single study like this, as it only tests a single bacteria under a limited set of conditions for starters, and when cleaned thoroughly it probably doesn't make too much difference. But in reality people are lazy, in a hurry, etc. and don't necessarily clean and scrub properly.
Either way, I certainly wouldn't just assume plastic boards are more sanitary (ignoring the microplastic issue).
As I understand it, a steel doesn't sharpen the knife, but aligns the edge - in normal use, the edge folds over; steeling makes it straight again, and should be done before using the knife. It takes a _lot_ of effort with a steel to put an edge on a knife where it's worn away.
But we bought all sorts, IKEA to Williams Sonoma $100 hardwood boards, religiously washed and dried them, oiled them monthly. But they all split and crack so quickly
Bamboo seems nice enough, but those are bound in plastic/resin and coated with something other than mineral oil — not sure they are better.
We stock up on the polypropylene thin cutting boards from IKEA. They are made in Taiwan which has a bit better regulation than other places, and polypropylene is an old plastic that is known to be very inert if not the most inert.
Huh? That’s news to me and the opposite of my understanding. Can you elaborate?
I have no issues with cracking or splitting with my wooden boards. Are you running them through the dishwasher?
Let's be honest, this is just preemptive marketing for kitchen nerds. HN is too easy.
I'm not saying microplastics aren't a problem. Of course they are. I'm saying that any trend is an opportunity for sales and I'd question whether this item is the one that really makes a difference for you. The whole article is so sleazily written.
They’re great to chop on and dishwasher safe (although they may discolour a little, but that never bothered me). Not cheap though.
- microplastics (dubious impact, considering the article's weird numbers)
- bad for your knife (even porous plastic wears down a well honed blade quicker)
- harbors bacteria (wood is proven to inhibit backteria)
- "looks cheap, is cheap"
I have some big wooden cutting boards, and while they are really nice in a lot of ways, they are an absolute pain in the ass to wash by hand in a normal kitchen sink. You have to wash half at a time or something. After spending an hour or two cooking, then eating, then cleaning and putting things away, I don't need to have to maneuver this thing under a faucet to try to get it clean. So I have a somewhat big plastic one I just throw in the dishwasher. Easy.
Also, I tend to only use the wooden ones for vegetables and cooked meat. I know the wooden ones "inhibit bacteria", but if that's what is standing between me and salmonella/E. Coli, I'm taking modern chemicals every time. I know that's slightly germophobic but sorry, food-borne illness really sucks.
I would love to see some studies on this.
...
> “We did not find toxic results or effects from polyethylene on the mouse cells,” says Yadav. “But this portion of our testing was very preliminary, and not detailed.”
So I use a plastic board whenever I need to cut anything messy or chop raw meat etc. and can just shove it into the dishwasher afterwards.
There are compressed wood boards which can be dishwashed but they're literally 10x the cost of a plastic board, so to be honest I'll probably just keep using the plastic.
That said, my wooden cutting board is getting to be quite hollow...
Edit:
You could make other pragmatic arguments (e.g. I'm sure some people generate enough dirty kitchenware that you need to pick some big things to do by hand), but "easiness" by itself clearly isn't viable.
Complex shapes are also not worth putting in.
I don’t see how my laziness is elitism.
Wooden chopping boards are bonded, so your still cutting in to whatever that bonding agent is.
You can't put a wooden chopping board in the dish washer.
Wooden chopping boards tend not to be distinctly colour coded.
Wooden chopping boards the size of the commercial plastic boards I use are much more expensive, invariably get left in the sink by someone, which invariably ends up splitting them, and their weight is unweildly.
The only time I thought wooden end grain boards were better, was when I was hanging out with people who'd spent too much on their second or third one because the cheaper first one or two they'd bought had already failed.
That and several commercial chefs have since told me the kitchens they work in don't permit the use of wooden chopping boards, other than as serving platters for some dishes.