4 ms·
Use a wooden one? Has the added benefit of being part of the short carbon cycle.
by ArnoVW 2y ago
Use a wooden one? Has the added benefit of being part of the short carbon cycle.
- Etheryte 2y agoWood is not good if you want to handle raw meat, since it's fibrous it makes it pretty easy to eventually cross contaminate something you eat. It's the same reason wooden cutting boards are usually avoided if you're working with raw meat. Every single time, the risk is small, but over time, the dice rolls add up.
- iamacyborg 2y agoI’m in my late 30’s and have basically forever used wooden chopping boards and wooden utensils. I’ve not gotten sick from home cooking once. I think you might be overstating the potential harm here.
- echoangle 2y agoHow do you know by what mechanism you’ve become sick? Do you cook that sparsely that you can positively say you’ve never become sick a few days after eating something you’ve cooked?
- iamacyborg 2y agoI cook all the time and come from a family that actually cooks meals, so yeah, the hygiene aspect is a non-issue so long as you just wash stuff properly.
- echoangle 2y agoThe specific thing I was talking about is this: > I’ve not gotten sick from home cooking once. How would you know that? Unless you’ve never been sick at all, I don’t know how you could say that.
- iamacyborg 2y agoFood poisoning is generally something you know you’ve got.
- chithanh 2y agoReally? It's one thing to understand that whatever pathogen you were infected with is (also) foodborne. But tracking the infection to something particular which you ate is generally quite hard, and it is even harder to track accidental contamination. And many people do not understand where actual danger comes from. For example it is a really bad idea to rinse raw chicken meat. Yet this practice is still widespread. https://www.cdc.gov/food-safety/communication-resources/washing-chicken-spreads-germs.html https://www.cdc.gov/food-safety/communication-resources/wash...
- kazinator 2y agoThat page and its video are bat shit stupid.
- iamacyborg 2y agoSpraying raw chicken juice around your kitchen in the name of hygiene.
- kazinator 2y agoThe taxpayer-funded makers of the video couldn't pass a grade 5 science test. Every argument there could be used to justify not washing your hands. Just lick them to keep the germs to yourself. Wouldn't wanna spray them around.
- kazinator 2y agoIf you've only been sick with respiratory illnesses that were "going around", you can be about, oh, 100% sure it wasn't from your wooden cutting board.
- Etheryte 2y agoThis is as useful of an insight as saying that I'm in my late 30s and never gotten Covid, I think you might be overstating the potential harm here. A sample size of one is not much use when we talk about statistical probabilities.
- gjm11 2y agoCOVID-19 has only been around for about five years, as the name indicates, so "I'm in my late 30s" says nothing about how many opportunities you've had to get it, whereas being in one's late 30s does say something about how many opportunities they've had to get (or give someone else) food poisoning. I'm in my mid-50s. I use wooden cooking implements a lot. I clean them pretty carefully. So far as I know, no one has ever got sick from eating food I've cooked. The sample size is one person cooking but it isn't only one opportunity to get food poisoning. Let's say 20 years, 300 days per year, one meal per day; that's 6000 food-poisoning opportunities, none of which has obviously resulted in food poisoning for anyone involved. That is in fact quite good evidence that the risk of serious food poisoning on any single occasion, if you use wooden implements but are reasonably careful with them, isn't high enough to be noticeable above the baseline rate of people getting sick. If someone doesn't take any particular precautions and never gets COVID-19, that is evidence that COVID-19 is less of a threat than it's sometimes felt to be. But not very much evidence, and it can readily be outweighed by all the other people who have got COVID-19, including some who did take reasonable precautions. Similarly, my and iamacyborg's anecdotal evidence could absolutely be outweighed by statistics correlating food poisoning with type of cooking implements. If anyone has those, I'd be very interested to see them.
- shrx 2y agoJust wash it properly after use.
- hnbad 2y agoActually wooden cutting boards are safer than plastic ones because the plastic ones not only result in lots of plastic particles being dislodged while cutting but also the cuts into the board are harder to clean and result in a higher likelihood of contamination. Wooden boards need to be maintained, however, which with frequent use means occasionally sanding them down a bit in addition to the usual cleaning and oiling. The problem with wooden boards is mostly that they're not dishwasher-safe and people are too lazy to clean them properly by hand. A plastic cutting board you regularly put in the dishwasher is probably safer than a wooden one you only half-heartedly rinse, at least in terms of contamination.
- Etheryte 2y agoWood and plastic are not the only two options in your life, this is a silly framing.
- moe_sc 2y agoWhat else is? Certainly neither glass nor metal, since they dull knives way to fast.
- dotancohen 2y agoThe lignin in wood is also extremely effective at dulling knives.
- kazinator 2y agoThe cutting bits of woodworking tools pass through more wood in a minute than a knife does over its entire lifetime.
- jamiek88 2y agoWhat else do you use as a cutting board then? Slate? Metal?
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoI have a composite (???) cutting board, the surface kinda feels like it's papery / fibrous something when it's wet and some of the bits flake off. But it's dishwasher safe.
- kazinator 2y agoWhen cooking meat, I use two pairs of chopsticks: the raw chopsticks and the cooked chopsticks. The raw chopsticks are used to loaded into the pan and to flip it once. Once that batch is flipped I use the cooked chopsticks.