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> “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

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• pessimizer 3y ago
  I cook every day and my number is closer to 50 than 500. 50 even seems high.
  • crazydoggers 3y ago
    How is this possible? One onion probably is at least 25 or more cuts. Anything chopping or mincing is going to be a lot. 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.
    • happytoexplain 3y ago
      The average person is not mincing, or often even chopping, on a daily basis. And when they are, they are doing a couple dozen slices each through a few vegetables.
      • crazydoggers 3y ago
        If that’s true, then the average person is not cooking but preparing ready made foods. 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 have a feeling hacker news is the wrong demographic, and most folks on here are too busy to cook healthy foods for themselves every day, let alone a family. 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.
        • plorkyeran 3y ago
          Are you aware that there are dishes which don’t involve dicing everything?
          • crazydoggers 3y ago
            Well I mean I do use garlic in about 2 out of every 3 meals.. so there’s mincing at least. 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) Now if you tell me the average person just makes Mac and cheese, or eats sandwiches, well then I understand. About 42% of Americans are obese, and fast food makes up a significant part of the average American diet. So I guess I’m reading the study as if it’s looking at the “average” person who uses a cutting board cooking, rather than an average American (many who may not even use cutting boards) 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)
    • TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
      Even cooking four hundred eggs and ninety kilos of bacon for breakfast requires precisely zero cuts on a chopping 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.
      • crazydoggers 3y ago
        > If I do cook onions, course chopped, maybe 7 cuts per. It is not possible to dice an onion with 7 cuts. Even “course chopped”, 7 cuts would have giant chunks of onion in them.
        • happytoexplain 3y ago
          The parent said course chop, not dice. And plenty of dishes have pieces of onion of the size the parent is describing, especially considering that the pieces come apart. I'm not following the nature of your disagreement. It sounds like you're responding to a different post, or are trying to gatekeep something, but it's not clear what.
        • TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
          I hate diced onion.
    • plorkyeran 3y ago
      I... don't chop an onion every day? I'm sure there's days I've hit 500 cuts, but it sure isn't typical.
• happytoexplain 3y ago
  Yeah, that is wild. I'm honestly very confused by it. I feel like I'm pretty average and I probably make about two orders of magnitude fewer cuts than that as a daily average. The average person is roughly cutting up some meat and/or some vegetables, and probably not even every day.
  • _Microft 3y ago
    If you are doing two orders of magnitude less cuts than that (i.e. ~ five cuts, or maybe even ten or twenty?!) you can hardly be preparing fresh food? You’re most likely not even in the group of people that this study is about in that case.
• Etheryte 3y ago
  Agreed, I would wager I average a few dozen cuts a day at most, if even that, never mind hundreds.
• _Microft 3y ago
  The number doesn’t seem that outlandish. Slicing a single onion of 50mm diameter into two halves and each of the halves into 1mm thin layers is 100 cuts already for example (yeah, 99, I know…).
  • happytoexplain 3y ago
    The average person is not in the same universe as doing the equivalent of cutting five onions into one millimeter slices every single day.
  • jahewson 3y ago
    What dish are you making, onion dust?
  • vile_wretch 3y ago
    When you put it that way it seems even more outlandish. No one except maybe a disciple of Marco Pierre White is cutting an onion into 1mm thin slices.
• sp332 3y ago
  The first paragraph of the article describes the author making one meal with over 500 cuts.
• EPWN3D 3y ago
  500/day is frankly preposterous for the "average person". I cook very regularly for a family of three, and the most cutting I'm usually doing is cutting the ends off green beans. That's two cuts per bean pod, with maybe 75 pods. (And I'm usually cutting a few in one go.) That's an above-average day. It's nowhere close to 500. It's much closer to 100. Also, it's not even clear what toxicity level there is for microplastics, if any. The article even points this out.
  • bozhark 3y ago
    Be real, you’re using scissors for the green beans anyways
    • thiht 3y ago
      I use my nails
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Half Chinese family here. We chop up something almost everyday, but I don’t think we get close to 500/day. We are using manufactured bamboo cutting boards anyways, which we sometimes throw in the dishwasher if meat is involved.
  • fallinghawks 3y ago
    I can see mincing garlic or herbs as being a lot of small cuts, but more like 50-75. I think a person might get up to 500/day if they're finely chopping something for all 3 meals, but I don't think that's average.
• askvictor 3y ago
  Yeah, that's a pretty huge assumption. I struggle to imagine more than 50, even when cooking something moderately elaborate. So one order of magnitude there. Perhaps someone cooking a lot (e.g. for a large family) cuts more. But then that microplastic exposure is shared between everyone in that family. Pity we can't access the paper to check...
• phyzome 3y ago
  That sounds like the right ballpark for making a big stir-fry, including a lot of mincing of ginger and garlic and peppers. Not something I do every day, though! I feel like this is off by an order of magnitude. 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.
• khazhoux 3y ago
  What world do these people live in?? I cut fruit every day for my family in about 20 slices. Vegatables might be another 15. One or two slices if I make a bagel for lunch.
• robocat 3y ago
  > 7.4 to 50.7 grams per year. 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?
• TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Beyond the number of cuts themselves, how many of those cuts actually touch the board? 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.)