Chronos, no no no, lad! It’s only the mechanism of this solvation that’s the mystery, not the fact of it! When we shuffle off this mortal coil, we do indeed dissolve into the bath of the ecosphere; our many and varied component parts are recycled into the components of other organisms (if we’re lucky; some of us are merely incinerated) and thus life goes on. I have personally dissolved many many animal cells growing in bottles, years ago, with a little sodium dodecyl sulfate (a pretty determined detergent if ever there was one). Enough chemical bonds get disrupted in the membranes surrounding a cell, and the poor thing just dribbles away, turns to mush.
Bacteria, generally, aren’t so easy to dissolve as an animal cell; they have a cell wall, more like a plant, and that generally keeps them from getting dissolved by, well, most anything. Acid, alkali, detergent, you name it; maybe not all bacteria, but there will be at least one bacteria that won’t get dissolved by whatever you got to throw at it. Bacteria are tough, and it only takes a few of them (like in the case of E coli o157) to genuinely mess you up by secreting some NASTY poisons inside of you.
And that, THAT is what is so remarkable about this simple observation about wooden cutting boards – that they make the bacteria vanish. The amount of actual stuff in a bacterial cell is vanishingly small; you have to have zillions of them before they even make the water look a little cloudy, and that’s mostly from light scattering. So there’s very little stuff there after the wood, well, dissolves them. Dissolves them into what? I don’t know. The water. The water everybody uses right after they cut something up on the cutting board, to rinse away the offal. Or the steak juice. Whatever.
Think of it as like breaking a bunch of water balloons. What’s left? non-waterballoons. Not much. What’s left of the bacteria? Nothing you’ll get sick from. They’re dead, man. They’re so dead, there’s nothing left to bury. They went down the drain. They’re dissolved.
and to date, nobody seems to know just what it is in that piece of wood that dissolved them!!! I think that’s a real trip.
I hope someobody writes in to this Board and tells us that I’m full of crap, they’ve known what it is that is in the wood and dissolves the bacteria for two years now, and it’s _______.
Last I heard, it might be lignin. But historically, people don’t believe in any kind of medical preventative or cure until it’s synthesized in a lab and checked out in the field. Hell, people Believed that scurvy was a communicable disease until 1920 or so, when somebody finally synthesized vitamin C from scratch. (Yeah, I know, the Royal Navy knew about the lemons and limes since 1754. Go figure. People are so wedded to the germ theory of disease, they used to Believe that scurvy just had to be caused by a germ. They used to maroon scurvy victims, lest the rest of the crew catch it. Of course, if the marooned guys found any food where they were marooned, they got well immediately. Hey, hope it doesn’t take a hundred and seventy five years for everybody to get the message about the cutting boards )
