Some common themes in the studies I skimmed were that 1) a good rinsing eliminates most of the bacteria from the surface anyway, though they will continue to live on underneath wooden surfaces 2) unwashed plastic boards will harbor more surface bacteria over time (because they have nowhere to go, obviously)
Would anyone actually not wash a plastic cutting board? I always scrub mine down with hot water and detergent, or put it in the dishwasher after I’m finished with it. I use it for vegetables first, meat last, rinse it between ingredients and then wash thoroughly.
I always thought it was that the wood dried out after washing, and eventually dessicated the bacteria present in little cuts and abrasions in the wood.
Otherwise, when you cut into a cutting board, you’d just be getting down to the point where the bacteria have been sucked down to, and reinfecting any food.
If I am in a thrift store and I see all those cut marks and grooves on wood, marble,
glass and plastic cutting boards, it’s a complete turnoff. So I use untreated
fragments of lumber from the workshop as cutting boards.
wood as tanks and barrels has been used for various types of fermentation for centuries. so i don’t think wood would be a powerful broad spectrum antibiotic.
I’ve decided on a wood board, after much thought about cleaning the scratches and cuts with soap water, bleach and all…
There’s this thing called sand paper, put the sand paper on a sander or a sanding block and refinish the board of the scratches. Look a New cutting board.
You cant really do that with the plastic ones I have.
You can also make you own board the size and thickness you want.
Hell, make a few of em while you have all you tools out.
There were several references in the beginning of this thread; one of them was to Dr Cliver’s article in the Journal of Food Protection. But the URL just went to an abstract of the article and then you could buy the whole article for 37 bucks. Right.
Well, I’ve got the article, and I’ve put the most essential data online. It’s figure 4 and it’s at www.frogojt.com/Cuttingboards.html . See, that’s okay by the doctrine of Fair Use, right? One little figure.
I’m not giving you my opinion, as in “That’s just your OPINION, man!” as The Dude says in The Big Lebowski. I’m asking everybody — Everybody on Earth — to please look at the data of wood vs plastic cutting boards and whether wooden cutting boards KILL bacteria (just about all of the in three minutes, and all of them overnight) whereas polypropylene plastic cutting boards incubate bacteria and let them grow overnight into many many more bacteria.
The bacteria are not hiding in the wood. they are being put to death; lysed. The bacteria are undetectable. No shit.
Man, I wonder how long it will take before this is straightened out. Those plastic boards have been around since 1972, and the plastic industry has been touting them as being safer than wood all that time, and people fall for it. amazing. I would say it’s dumb, but that’s just too simple an analysis. People aren’t dumb, but in a certain way they are just amazingly gullible. there was another movie that said it so well: The Graduate. “One word for you , Benjamin – Plastics!”
I gotta add one more thing to what I wrote supra about the wooden cutting boards being one hundred percent better than plastic cutting boards —
Right after the plastic polypropylene cutting boards came out, in the Seventies, Dr Kampfelmacher in Europe wrote up (in German) how the plastic was pretty bad — a source of contamination! (Prof Kampfelmacher died not that long ago – quite a guy. RIP.) So this issue should have been put to bed a long time ago.
Every time I see a plastic cutting board in a restaurant I talk to the manager. I’ve had nearly zero success getting them to throw the damn things in the trash, but a few, yes.
