on a serious note, I try to avoid putting ANY plastic in a dishwasher unless it’s silicone. what’s wrong with buying a cutting board that is used for meat only? do your best scrubbing it down with hot water and soap, and it’s not an issue. Especially if you cook your meat to a safe temperature anyway.
Even better, avoid a plastic cutting board to begin with:
How does your cutting board compare to tire dust, shed particles from textiles, and latex paint in terms of your exposure and the danger thereof?
I really do try to triage "things to worry about" by severity and likelihood. At my age I'm mostly worried about not getting hit by cars and my mental health.
I agree it’s low on the list in terms of risk (big picture). I guess shopping for plastic free alternatives isn’t stressful to me, i view it like a shopping game. Plus the plastic free stuff tends to hold up better anyway over the long term!
I do wonder how rinse aid affects this too. Might reduce the residue left behind.
I'm grateful to have moved from the Bay Area, parts of which are so criscrossed with freeways that it's impossible to not live near/under one (all of Oakland), to somewhere where, despite the density being overall much higher, I live far enough from a freeway or highway that I can't hear them at all at night.
If your dishwasher doesn't have a sanitize cycle (or you aren't using it) you may not be getting hot enough at home anyway to be up to the standard a commercial kitchen would need.
Of course you may not have a dishwasher at all.
Then again, I also exclusively use serrated knives and think people that use ultra-sharp knives in the kitchen to make food cut like butter, crazy.
What is your aversion if you’ve never cut yourself?
Besides that, serrated knifes make it practically impossible to cut yourself. You'll feel the cut way before you've sliced through any of your own meat, and that's precisely because you're "sawing" the food, or your flesh in that case.
I honestly can not think of anything (other than sticky cheese) that would be impossible to cut with the serrated knives I use. I cut up herbs, vegetables, meats, fruits everything. Come to think of it, they even cut crunchy bread with ease too, which usually requires a "bread" knife in a usual kitchen.
I don’t know how you could possibly mince herbs or dice vegetables into small cubes with something like that knife though. You need the flat slicing motion. Interrupted cutting like a bread knife does will lead to very messy cuts.
An easy go-to meal I guess is like stir-fry with a diced-onion base, which includes a lot of cutting of the above. I've never struggled as long as the serrated knife itself is not super old. They do eventually get dull and the bumps aren't enough for comfortable cutting.
My go-to knife that's really good quality and cuts everything with ease is this one: https://www.amazon.com/Victorinox-Classic-Serrated-Utility-H...
Edit: I remembered that beyond being simply slower, some important operations are extremely impractical without a cutting board, like mincing. Flat out impossible to do with a serrated knife as well.