> Although very beautiful and functional, they require proper sanitation and careful maintenance. Being, in fact, the wood is a living and porous material, it is not advisable to sanitize the cutting board daily, as this could risk the proliferation of germs and bacteria.
Sometimes you just need to use the least bad option. I tend to use my wood board for dry or veg foods, and 100% always use the plastic board for meat products.
not to mention all the microplastics released in the dishwasher when it runs! this sounds like a bad idea to me.
I personally have a dedicated wood cutting board that is for meat only. I cook my meat to safe temperatures anyway so i’m not too worried about sanitizing it perfectly. I just do my best with hot water, soap, and a sponge.
Not really, at least judging by the state of my plastic boards. Contrary to wooden boards, they’re completely unsuitable for dishwashers. Who knows what were these wooden boards treated with to make them “food safe”.
I hope you don’t use any polyester if you’re so concerned about my plastic board. Just imagine all that plastic from washing polyester. Or maybe you have a car with seats made out of plastic bottles fished out of the ocean?
yeah, a wooden cutting board isn’t great for a dishwasher either.
I dislike polyester in general, with the exception of exercise shorts and sneakers. I buy cotton or wool if possible. Polyester just feels cheap to me, and avoiding it also means i have less microplastics exposure. :)
There’s no hiding from microplastics. I do take some steps to avoid them where it’s easy, instead of purposely adding more to my body.
Never seen anything made out of that in the shop. How expensive is it? And what do we think about this?
> Waxed cotton came in either black, or an inconsistent dark olive. Colour was controlled by the amount of copper left from the cupro-ammonia treatment.
You mean scrub with that sponge made out of plastic? Because you definitely want those crevasses clean. And how hot should the water be? You have 70 degree Celsius water coming out from your tap?
But hey, I used to do that. No matter how much you take care of them, the hot water wash and drying leads to those chopping boards splitting after so many uses. Those plastic buggers last for years.
I have a bamboo cutting board that I purchased in 2004, and a mesquite wood cutting board gifted to me a few years later. Both look nearly new despite using them daily.
Now I don't cook meat, so maybe that is why my experience doesn't match yours.
Under-rated comment. Microplastics are an omnipresent, low, vague risk, and I already have a long list of those which people want me to care about. While food poisoning is much more of an immediate problem - and still from time to time kills people!
Food safety. It's ironic that in a home setting they can often be better than plastic (people typically don't clean plastic well enough, or replace often enough), but you can't sanitize them like you typically would in a commercial prep area, so they are disallowed/discouraged (based on jurisdiction).
Are folks not simply throwing their plastic cutting boards in the dishwasher after finishing prep? I basically always do, especially after cutting meat...
yay for microplastics (and maybe phthalates) all over my utensils, plates and glasses!
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:
At least the dishwasher is doing its best to remove surface contamination from its contents.
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.
can’t avoid tire dust. Luckily i don’t paint often, and i don’t lick my walls. :-)
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.
Re tire dust, you can avoid living near major roads, and running a hepa filter anywhere you spend significant time. Our old apartment’s balcony used to get a coating of black dust on everything within a week of wiping things down, since we were near some major road, now that we live in the country, I never see that.
The micro plastics people really need to link up with the urbanism people - having kilos of tire dust shredded on your doorstep isn't a necessary condition of living in a city, it's a result of how (at least in the US) car dependent our urban forms are.
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.
Many people generally don't change boards enough, yes. And keeping plastic boards after they are quite deeply grooved is a problem.
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.
This is wrong (at best outdated). No dishwashing detergent sold at your local grocery has chlorine bleach in it. There are other non-chlorine bleaching agents in some formulations.
You seem to be correct, at least based on review of the MSDS for a popular powdered dishwasher detergent, it's using oxygen bleach (peroxide). Pretty sure it was chlorine bleach in the past.
I just use a plate for my cutting needs. No idea about this "cutting board" obsession. Plate just goes into the dishwasher. No wood or plastic particles to worry about and cleanup is easy.
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.
GP uses serrated knives. They’re not actually cutting food, more mangling it while scratching their plates. Not wanting to use sharp knives just speaks to inexperience in the kitchen.
And yet I've never once cut myself with legal near-scalpels in my kitchen, the serrated knives that "mangle" my food cut food perfectly fine, and my plates last as long as plates do.
Unless you literally never cook any food, it just isn’t possible to prepare all types of food using purely serrated knives. Cutting up many vegetables or herbs just is not possible with a serrated knife.
What is your aversion if you’ve never cut yourself?
For one, I have children in the house and scalpel-like sharp knives make me uneasy. Doubly-so as they are usually pointy and can stab too.
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.
Not sure why you think that knife (that you posted in the other comment) is substantially safer than a regular knife. It’s similar to wavy-style bread knives, but smaller. The edge of the blade is still extremely sharp and reviewers have even noted they’ve cut themselves with it. The bread knife I own can easily cut me and it basically is just a larger version of what you linked with larger “waves”.
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.
I cut up all sorts of stuff. Fruits, vegetables, cheeses, meats. Seeing as other poster asked about mincing, I guess I also finely dice various herbs and garlic. Sure if I have to smash (mincing?) it I'll find something that can do that with ease, but I won't need a large heavy knife to double-up as a hammer to do so.
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.
The bit you're missing is that other people need cutting boards and you don't, because you don't do the types of prep work that would require a cutting board. It would take a about 4x longer if I did my prep work with your tools. No harm in that, we just do different things in the kitchen.
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.
The thing about replacing them frequently is that that goes against the principle of using something until it is worn out. (That is, reducing the amount of plastic we use.) I'm not sure if this is a problem, or if there are better solutions (I use wooden chopping boards for vegetables and fruit of course).
An excellent point. Most modern germ theory says all bacteria is bad. This, despite the fact that our guts are full of bacteria and that you simply cannot avoid ingesting bacteria. Nevermind that plenty of wood cutting boards are full of beneficial bacteria that keeps listeria and e. coli at bay.
Edit: Also there are literally some forms of cheese that you cannot make in sanitized stainless steel. The combination of bacteria you need needs to be impregnated in the wood.
No, you need to clean and disinfect to kill bacteria regardless.
Cooking meat does not kill the toxic byproducts of bacteria. Many bacteria produces enterotoxins, which survive cooking and cause what we know as "food poisoning".
You would not want your cutting board harboring and growing these bacteria under any circumstances, even if you're cooking the product you're cutting.
You could stop eating meat instead. But unfortunately vegetables can get cross-contaminated with animal products during growing/harvesting/processing. So even vegetarians like me have this risk, albeit at lower levels, along with contamination from non-animal sources.
It’s interesting that, if you go to a wet market in many Asian countries (e.g. Hong Kong) you will see the butchers cutting meat on wooden chopping blocks where the cutting surface is _grain up_ - typically a circular section of a log. I thought “surely this is the worst possible orientation for the wood?” I think they clean the blocks by using hot and cold water to expand and contract the wood, and scraping it with the blade of their knives.
I believe that if you're doing some heavy chopping, that orientation keeps the cutting board in good condition for the longest time, as you're not cutting through the wood grain and taking chunks out of the board.
Separately I've heard that while bacteria can live in wood cutting boards, they tend to stay where they are rather than migrate out of the board and into the food -- but I can't back that up with any actual references.
Plastic cutting boards are mostly just plain undyed polyethylene (HDPE)- which is just a fully saturated perfectly straight hydrocarbon, similar to saturated fat or wax and lacks the kind of reactive functional groups that make other plastic polymers toxic. I think it is quite unlikely that HDPE in particular is toxic or endocrine disrupting to humans in the way a lot of other plastics seem to be.
It's also basically just a very viscous fluid and I suspect would flow into grooves when a knife blade hits it, without releasing particles like harder more solid plastics would.
Personally, I try to avoid having most plastics contact my food and water, but make an exception for HDPE.
In general, each plastic polymer is very different from another chemically, and it makes sense to consider their safety independently, and not group all plastics together.
The problem is cutting boards break off little bits of plastic with use and your body has evolved zero mechanism for disposing of microplastics once they are in your system.
I've looked a bit, and not been able to find evidence of HDPE getting into cells, or exhibiting biological toxicity, whereas there seems to be quite a bit of evidence of this for almost every other type of plastic. Still, I wouldn't blame someone for just avoiding all plastic food contact by the precautionary principle.
The first study you linked is interesting- it does seem to confirm what I suspected, that HDPE does flow on knife impact causing it to release less plastic debris than other plastics, but still not zero.
The second one seems to be a fairly low quality review article looking at what does sound like a concerning issue, but doesn't really consider different types of plastic independently. It might be useful in the sense of citing a lot of papers in this area that could be looked at directly.
> Plastic cutting boards are mostly just plain undyed polyethylene (HDPE)- which is just a fully saturated perfectly straight hydrocarbon, similar to saturated fat or wax and lacks the kind of reactive functional groups that make other plastic polymers toxic.
This is all just completely made up -- starting with the assertion that "plastic polymers" (whatever those are; you're not being specific enough to have a debatable claim) are "toxic" in the first place.
Everything I said are basic facts about plastic chemistry you can verify yourself, but I can elaborate more if that is helpful.
If you'd like a more specific example of what I am talking about, take for example Bisphenol A (BPA), one of the monomers used in making polycarbonate - which most people have heard of, and has now been eliminated from consumer products like water bottles (edited per correction from reply below). It is chemically similar enough to steroid hormones, that it can bind to steroid hormone receptors (in particular estrogen receptors), making it a potential endocrine disruptor. HDPE does not contain complex functional groups that are likely to mimic natural hormones and bind to receptors or enzyme active sites in a living system.
In general, molecules that contain a lot of aromatic rings, or reactive functional groups are more likely to exhibit drug like effects or toxicity. Such properties are systematically enriched for in chemical libraries used for drug discovery, but if trying to avoid unintended biological effects, it makes sense to exhibit more caution with such molecules.
> take for example Bisphenol A (BPA), one of the monomers used in making polycarbonate - which most people have heard of, and has now been almost universally eliminated from things that contact food and water for human consumption.
Why did they find large amounts of BPA in more than a few foods they tested if it has been eliminated from food manufacturing process?
Good point- what I said is wrong, it was removed from consumer goods like water bottles but is still legal and used in food manufacturing equipment in the USA. It has been banned in the EU from all food contact. I have edited my post above to correct this.
You should do as you want ofc but I don't trust anything that hasn't been proven toxic.
If they make a fine wine or a quality beer and put it in plastic (or something coated with plastic) I can't take the company seriously.
Tomatoes are the worse I hear because of their acidity. In the store there is a whole wall of canned tomatoes and plastic bottles. Non of the more expensive brands use it. The Tupperware comes out of the microwave all red? It even looks unappetizing.
If you can choose why go with the experiment? I'd pick the silverware over the plastic utensils every time.
My mum has been on the plastics thing since as long as I can remember (35+ years), we never had plastic in the house and if someone gave us something in tupperware mum wouldn't let us eat it, ha. Once I questioned her on this as I thought it was nuts, she said "plastic can melt, stretch, move, if it breaks off or leaks into our food it's toxic because it's chemicals, that is why we only use glass metal and wood in this house" - I still thought she was nuts, toxic plastic? What a load of hippie hogwash... I thought...
> Everything I said are basic facts about plastic chemistry you can verify yourself, but I can elaborate more if that is helpful.
Sure, go ahead. Nobody could verify what you claimed, because it was so vague to be undefined. That's the point.
You said something vague ("plastic polymers"), then you asserted toxicity (which is also a meaningless word -- nearly everything is toxic at some dose). As for the rest of the comment...I actually do have some training in chemistry and I have no idea what you're talking about. Just for example:
>> polyethylene (HDPE)- which is just a fully saturated perfectly straight hydrocarbon, similar to saturated fat or wax
No. Saturated fat is nothing like polyethylene. A fat is a triglyceride. A polyethylene molecule is not. You can't just wave your hands and say "they both have carbon chains" and draw broad conclusions from that.
Similarly, A "wax" can have all of the stuff that I think you'd (probably?) characterize as a "reactive functional group" -- things like esters, alcohols, and ketones.
> take for example Bisphenol A (BPA), one of the monomers used in making polycarbonate
You're trying to overgeneralize from very specific examples. Setting aside the evidence (or lack thereof) regarding the specific harm of BPA, the difference between BPA and even other kinds of polycarbonates is so vast as to be a meaningless comparison.
In biochemistry, the stereochemistry of a single bond can make orders of magnitude difference in toxicity, even if all the other atoms are the same. You can't just go "oh, it has rings/oxygens/whatever, so it must be toxic", or even "it looks like a fatty acid, so it must be safe".
I'm not writing a biochemistry textbook here (although I have done so)- the things you are saying are not new concepts to me. It is always challenging to be precisely correct, while clear enough to have a meaningful discussion with people of varying backgrounds.
Everything I said was very simplified, but could be much more specific with a lot more details that would be inappropriate for a HN comment- however I am happy to clarify exactly what I meant if you have more specific questions about what I mean. Indeed, each individual chemical structure can and should be evaluated for it's actual effects, and very small changes in structure can make a big difference. The importance of stereochemistry, and using biosynthesis to control it precisely is something I am very focused on. I stand by the claim that it is realistic to generalize that straight chain alkanes are well understood and have a lower risk of drug like effects than other classes of compounds, and mentioning fats and waxes here is an appropriate comparison in this specific context of risk assessment from limited evidence. Natural waxes - and most living things- actually do have a small fraction of saturated "fatty hydrocarbon" molecules that are not triglycerides/alcohols/etc. [1]. Some will even be unbranched alkanes, but with much much shorter chain lengths than HDPE. We also have liver enzymes that can convert these to alcohols.
I am an academic PI in this field, and much of my labs research is focused on discovery and biosynthesis of novel small molecule drugs, new plastic polymers predicted to have low toxicity, and saturated hydrocarbon biofuels. However, it is inappropriate for me to lay out a full technical description of exactly what I am thinking rather than a high level generalization in a HN post- for an audience that has largely never even had an organic chemistry course.
When I (or anyone else) is talking about the potential toxicity of plastic polymers, there are a lot of (hopefully) mutually accepted assumptions: we are talking about the real world exposure levels from real world regular use of products made from these. If I say "plastic polymers" in this context I'm talking about all of the common ones that are used in modern times to make things that contact food and water as a group- as done in the context of the article we are talking about. Doing so doesn't in any way conflict with the fact that this is a very heterogenous group with very different potential risks in different contexts.
Is it possible there is something else you are upset about here other than the specifics of what I actually said? There seems to be an undercurrent in your replies about being very skeptical of the idea that any of the widely used plastic polymers are possibly harmful, which I suspect is our real area of disagreement- and we would need to discuss the actual evidence of that for specific molecules with a lot more specifics to actually get anywhere. In a lot of cases the evidence is very minimal, and vague generalizations about the drug-likeness of monomer structures of the kind I am making here is the best current evidence one is going to have. One should absolutely be aware of how small changes in structure can massively alter toxicity, while still making generalizations with the evidence we do have about the relative probabilities of different biological effects from different broad categories of chemical structure.
We must make our decisions with the evidence that exists now, even if we don't like how little we have. One can and should collect better evidence to make better decisions as quickly as it is possible (to get funded to do so). If you're offering the funding, many people including me are quite prepared to collect better evidence starting immediately.
As a chemical engineer who has worked in plastics manufacturing and has a degree in bioprocess engineering...The statements made by 'UniverseHacker seemed pretty reasonable.
The main point of contention for me is rather than establishing all HDPE as 'safe', it might be worth mentioning that some HDPE may have other chemicals added to it which could be harmful. Most HDPE doesn't have plasticizers like phtalates/etc added, but it's not completely unheard of. Some HDPE has been analyzed to contain ethylbenzene, xylenes, etc. And some HDPE is partially fluorinated.
Any thoughts on how to identify which HDPEs have those things as a regular consumer, without mass spec? I'd assume they add those to get specific properties for specific applications and knowing the application and/or that an expert could tell from simply looking at or feeling the material? This is stuff hard to figure out as an academic, because it seems to be mostly internal industry knowledge.
Silicon dioxide is not chemically toxic. But you can put microfiber crystals of it in a mammal's lungs and get tumors that grow around them. It is not a huge stretch of the imagination from there to hypothesize that nano- and micro-particles of a nontoxic polymer could also cause problems.
True- I don't think they are likely to specifically exhibit the drug like toxicity that some other plastics are responsible for, but you are right that doesn't rule out other potential issues from a small, hydrophobic, physical object.
I'm not 100% sure HDPE is safe- and if not it might depend on how it is used, but I am less concerned about it than a lot of other plastics.
HDPE Nalgenes (branded "Ultralite") are my standard water bottle. Unlike the clear plastic sort, they're not see-through, nor very heat/impact resistant, but they weigh next to nothing. Just don't use 'em as a hot water bottle.
The soft HDPE bottles are actually more heat and impact resistant than the rigid clear polycarbonate ones. They’re the standard recommendation for winter hiking.
Honestly the water bottles are probably fine as they likely don’t leach much BPA unless something happens to break the polymer apart- like contact with a strong chemical solvent. Although BPA is an endocrine disruptor, it is likely that normal use of a polycarbonate water bottle is fine. They stopped selling them because people got afraid and stopped buying them. I still see no reason to use one given the uncertainty.
You can get really good HDPE, stainless steel, and glass water bottles with a silicon impact cover.
IIRC it’s because plastic cutting boards can be put into a sanitizing dishwasher with reliable minimum-effort sanitary outcomes, whereas wood cutting boards require more rigorous care to remain sanitary and so the US generally bans their use rather than allowing rigor as an option. In the US, rigor is historically something one can trust food producers to sacrifice first in favor of turnaround time, profits, etc. so it does make sense that they’ve just given up and disallowed it. For possible exceptions, look into bamboo cookware and/or sushi preparation?
An argument that I’ve heard is that wooden boards can get more infected with bacterial colonies if not washed and maintained properly. I’m not sure how actually true this is though.
Well, for one, they're not. "Apparently" in their post implies that they are, but instead signals that they haven't done any actual research. For instance, hard wood cutting boards are permissible for use in Wisconsin: https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/code/admin_code/atcp/055/75...
The main issues with using wood are 1) that generally you don't want to put them in a dishwasher, 2) it's trickier to track cross-contamination as you might with color-coded boards, and 3) they're much more expensive than plastic.
Wood is porous and unable to be fully sanitized, as well as absorbing and giving back off everything from soaps and sanitizers to food flavors. Example: chop a few onions on a wood cutting board. Clean and dry. Then the next day wet your cutting board and give it a sniff. The onion is still there.
It also has trouble with repeated washing cycles as a material.
There's some evidence that biologically, wood fibers will dessicate and shred bacterias, and there's the historical anecdotal evidence of wood cutting boards having been used throughout history, but those anecdotes aren't enough for commercial kitchen operation where food needs to be able to be given to all comers, including infirm, allergic or immunocompromised.
Something this study has me concerned about is that regular piping hot cup of coffee served in a plastic cup. I didn’t see it in the plastic list, bit I’m near certain it’s not good for EDC and plastic ingestion
I'm doing the same - both for health and taste reasons. Can't imagine drinking coffee in those waxed-paper cups that leaches massively into the coffee - you can even see the wax floating on top! I'm not sure how these ever got approved for hot liquids!
they can't possibly be. One thing I appreciate about PlasticList and similar projects is that they are exposing how flimsy and preposterous most of our food safety protocols actually are.
You may be disturbed to find out how much plastic is in contact with boiling hot water in your typical automatic drip coffee brewer.
I was recently trying to find one without plastic to replace the $25 all black plastic one I've had for years. The only one I could find without any plastic was one of those all metal Bunn ones you see at diners. It was more than $400! And even that still required you to purchase a separate all metal basket as the one that comes with it was plastic. And that coffee maker doesn't really make "good tasting" coffee. Any premium "good tasting" drip coffee maker will have plastic, and probably black plastic at that.
hmm, I think some of your ratings might be very misleading. One of the ideas behind plasticlist was looking at things like plastic packaging leaching into the product itself, which wouldn't be in the ingredients list.
For example, you list Fairlife Core Power Chocolate Protein Shake as 100/100 but it is on the plasticlist report as containing levels of DEHP and DEHT, likely coming from the packaging. Not sure what an accurate rating would be, but not 100 for sure.
Maybe it works for non-food items better, but for food it might be counterproductive.
We're at an interesting inflection point with plastic recycling, where people have generally accepted it's a scam, and the environmental contamination with microplastics becomes too big of a cost to overcome.
This group is calling for foods companies to test all of their inputs. Eventually it is going to point to recycling's plastic processing & grinding stage.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadPlasticlist Report – Data on plastic chemicals in Bay Area foods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525633 - Dec 2024 (188 comments)
https://www.euroceppi.com/en/blog-en/why-cant-wooden-cutting...
Makes sense to me, I never process meat at home on a wooden board. Only plastic and dishwasher after use.
Not that I use a plastic board anyway.
I personally have a dedicated wood cutting board that is for meat only. I cook my meat to safe temperatures anyway so i’m not too worried about sanitizing it perfectly. I just do my best with hot water, soap, and a sponge.
I hope you don’t use any polyester if you’re so concerned about my plastic board. Just imagine all that plastic from washing polyester. Or maybe you have a car with seats made out of plastic bottles fished out of the ocean?
I dislike polyester in general, with the exception of exercise shorts and sneakers. I buy cotton or wool if possible. Polyester just feels cheap to me, and avoiding it also means i have less microplastics exposure. :)
There’s no hiding from microplastics. I do take some steps to avoid them where it’s easy, instead of purposely adding more to my body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxed_cotton
> Waxed cotton came in either black, or an inconsistent dark olive. Colour was controlled by the amount of copper left from the cupro-ammonia treatment.
It reminds me of this cling-wrap alternative i use in the kitchen: https://www.beeswrap.com/
Switched to this kind of stuff instead https://www.dm.de/profissimo-frischhaltehauben-aus-silikon-p... + normal cotton towels and paper for everything else.
This looks great for wrapping avocados, cucumbers, etc. Thanks for the tip!
But hey, I used to do that. No matter how much you take care of them, the hot water wash and drying leads to those chopping boards splitting after so many uses. Those plastic buggers last for years.
You can oil them occasionally if they are drying out too much and cracking.
But yes they probably won't last forever. Shrug. Get another one.
Now I don't cook meat, so maybe that is why my experience doesn't match yours.
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:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c00924
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.
Edit: Also there are literally some forms of cheese that you cannot make in sanitized stainless steel. The combination of bacteria you need needs to be impregnated in the wood.
I've never heard anyone say this.
One for anything which is not likely to harbor dangerous bacteria. (eg: vegetables, bread, etc.)
One of meat, which gets cut and then gets cooked, and so theoretically a bit of bacteria is no issue in any case.
I can see how this would be much tougher for a commercial kitchen, though.
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/3053/cutting-boards.html?fi...
Cooking meat does not kill the toxic byproducts of bacteria. Many bacteria produces enterotoxins, which survive cooking and cause what we know as "food poisoning".
You would not want your cutting board harboring and growing these bacteria under any circumstances, even if you're cooking the product you're cutting.
Separately I've heard that while bacteria can live in wood cutting boards, they tend to stay where they are rather than migrate out of the board and into the food -- but I can't back that up with any actual references.
It's also basically just a very viscous fluid and I suspect would flow into grooves when a knife blade hits it, without releasing particles like harder more solid plastics would.
Personally, I try to avoid having most plastics contact my food and water, but make an exception for HDPE.
In general, each plastic polymer is very different from another chemically, and it makes sense to consider their safety independently, and not group all plastics together.
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2023/10/making-meals-... https://phys.org/news/2024-12-microplastics-multiple-human-t...
The first study you linked is interesting- it does seem to confirm what I suspected, that HDPE does flow on knife impact causing it to release less plastic debris than other plastics, but still not zero.
The second one seems to be a fairly low quality review article looking at what does sound like a concerning issue, but doesn't really consider different types of plastic independently. It might be useful in the sense of citing a lot of papers in this area that could be looked at directly.
This is all just completely made up -- starting with the assertion that "plastic polymers" (whatever those are; you're not being specific enough to have a debatable claim) are "toxic" in the first place.
If you'd like a more specific example of what I am talking about, take for example Bisphenol A (BPA), one of the monomers used in making polycarbonate - which most people have heard of, and has now been eliminated from consumer products like water bottles (edited per correction from reply below). It is chemically similar enough to steroid hormones, that it can bind to steroid hormone receptors (in particular estrogen receptors), making it a potential endocrine disruptor. HDPE does not contain complex functional groups that are likely to mimic natural hormones and bind to receptors or enzyme active sites in a living system.
In general, molecules that contain a lot of aromatic rings, or reactive functional groups are more likely to exhibit drug like effects or toxicity. Such properties are systematically enriched for in chemical libraries used for drug discovery, but if trying to avoid unintended biological effects, it makes sense to exhibit more caution with such molecules.
Why did they find large amounts of BPA in more than a few foods they tested if it has been eliminated from food manufacturing process?
If they make a fine wine or a quality beer and put it in plastic (or something coated with plastic) I can't take the company seriously.
Tomatoes are the worse I hear because of their acidity. In the store there is a whole wall of canned tomatoes and plastic bottles. Non of the more expensive brands use it. The Tupperware comes out of the microwave all red? It even looks unappetizing.
If you can choose why go with the experiment? I'd pick the silverware over the plastic utensils every time.
Sure, go ahead. Nobody could verify what you claimed, because it was so vague to be undefined. That's the point.
You said something vague ("plastic polymers"), then you asserted toxicity (which is also a meaningless word -- nearly everything is toxic at some dose). As for the rest of the comment...I actually do have some training in chemistry and I have no idea what you're talking about. Just for example:
>> polyethylene (HDPE)- which is just a fully saturated perfectly straight hydrocarbon, similar to saturated fat or wax
No. Saturated fat is nothing like polyethylene. A fat is a triglyceride. A polyethylene molecule is not. You can't just wave your hands and say "they both have carbon chains" and draw broad conclusions from that.
Similarly, A "wax" can have all of the stuff that I think you'd (probably?) characterize as a "reactive functional group" -- things like esters, alcohols, and ketones.
> take for example Bisphenol A (BPA), one of the monomers used in making polycarbonate
You're trying to overgeneralize from very specific examples. Setting aside the evidence (or lack thereof) regarding the specific harm of BPA, the difference between BPA and even other kinds of polycarbonates is so vast as to be a meaningless comparison.
In biochemistry, the stereochemistry of a single bond can make orders of magnitude difference in toxicity, even if all the other atoms are the same. You can't just go "oh, it has rings/oxygens/whatever, so it must be toxic", or even "it looks like a fatty acid, so it must be safe".
Everything I said was very simplified, but could be much more specific with a lot more details that would be inappropriate for a HN comment- however I am happy to clarify exactly what I meant if you have more specific questions about what I mean. Indeed, each individual chemical structure can and should be evaluated for it's actual effects, and very small changes in structure can make a big difference. The importance of stereochemistry, and using biosynthesis to control it precisely is something I am very focused on. I stand by the claim that it is realistic to generalize that straight chain alkanes are well understood and have a lower risk of drug like effects than other classes of compounds, and mentioning fats and waxes here is an appropriate comparison in this specific context of risk assessment from limited evidence. Natural waxes - and most living things- actually do have a small fraction of saturated "fatty hydrocarbon" molecules that are not triglycerides/alcohols/etc. [1]. Some will even be unbranched alkanes, but with much much shorter chain lengths than HDPE. We also have liver enzymes that can convert these to alcohols.
I am an academic PI in this field, and much of my labs research is focused on discovery and biosynthesis of novel small molecule drugs, new plastic polymers predicted to have low toxicity, and saturated hydrocarbon biofuels. However, it is inappropriate for me to lay out a full technical description of exactly what I am thinking rather than a high level generalization in a HN post- for an audience that has largely never even had an organic chemistry course.
When I (or anyone else) is talking about the potential toxicity of plastic polymers, there are a lot of (hopefully) mutually accepted assumptions: we are talking about the real world exposure levels from real world regular use of products made from these. If I say "plastic polymers" in this context I'm talking about all of the common ones that are used in modern times to make things that contact food and water as a group- as done in the context of the article we are talking about. Doing so doesn't in any way conflict with the fact that this is a very heterogenous group with very different potential risks in different contexts.
Is it possible there is something else you are upset about here other than the specifics of what I actually said? There seems to be an undercurrent in your replies about being very skeptical of the idea that any of the widely used plastic polymers are possibly harmful, which I suspect is our real area of disagreement- and we would need to discuss the actual evidence of that for specific molecules with a lot more specifics to actually get anywhere. In a lot of cases the evidence is very minimal, and vague generalizations about the drug-likeness of monomer structures of the kind I am making here is the best current evidence one is going to have. One should absolutely be aware of how small changes in structure can massively alter toxicity, while still making generalizations with the evidence we do have about the relative probabilities of different biological effects from different broad categories of chemical structure.
We must make our decisions with the evidence that exists now, even if we don't like how little we have. One can and should collect better evidence to make better decisions as quickly as it is possible (to get funded to do so). If you're offering the funding, many people including me are quite prepared to collect better evidence starting immediately.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030881461...
The main point of contention for me is rather than establishing all HDPE as 'safe', it might be worth mentioning that some HDPE may have other chemicals added to it which could be harmful. Most HDPE doesn't have plasticizers like phtalates/etc added, but it's not completely unheard of. Some HDPE has been analyzed to contain ethylbenzene, xylenes, etc. And some HDPE is partially fluorinated.
https://www.pfasinsights.com/2024/01/u-s-epa-seeks-to-elimin...
I'm not 100% sure HDPE is safe- and if not it might depend on how it is used, but I am less concerned about it than a lot of other plastics.
https://momgoescamping.com/water-bottles-insulators-winter/
You can get really good HDPE, stainless steel, and glass water bottles with a silicon impact cover.
The USDA also recommends wooden cutting boards be used so long as they are properly washed and sanitized before and after use: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...
The main issues with using wood are 1) that generally you don't want to put them in a dishwasher, 2) it's trickier to track cross-contamination as you might with color-coded boards, and 3) they're much more expensive than plastic.
It also has trouble with repeated washing cycles as a material.
There's some evidence that biologically, wood fibers will dessicate and shred bacterias, and there's the historical anecdotal evidence of wood cutting boards having been used throughout history, but those anecdotes aren't enough for commercial kitchen operation where food needs to be able to be given to all comers, including infirm, allergic or immunocompromised.
I was recently trying to find one without plastic to replace the $25 all black plastic one I've had for years. The only one I could find without any plastic was one of those all metal Bunn ones you see at diners. It was more than $400! And even that still required you to purchase a separate all metal basket as the one that comes with it was plastic. And that coffee maker doesn't really make "good tasting" coffee. Any premium "good tasting" drip coffee maker will have plastic, and probably black plastic at that.
think it would be a helpful tool for people interested in this topic!
For example, you list Fairlife Core Power Chocolate Protein Shake as 100/100 but it is on the plasticlist report as containing levels of DEHP and DEHT, likely coming from the packaging. Not sure what an accurate rating would be, but not 100 for sure.
Maybe it works for non-food items better, but for food it might be counterproductive.
This group is calling for foods companies to test all of their inputs. Eventually it is going to point to recycling's plastic processing & grinding stage.