People often express concerns that eating off of wood is “unhygienic,” and perhaps even dangerous. I will restrain myself from ranting about how industrialized, commercialized, and commodified culture has turned nature into an evil villain bent on poisoning humanity. Instead, I’ll refer you to the pdf below, a scientific study which compares bacterial survival on wooden cutting boards to bacterial survival on plastic. Guess what? Wood won
Plastic & Wooden Cutting Boards, by Dean O. Cliver, UC Davis
If you look around the web, you’ll find other articles extolling the virtues of various other materials (plastic included, of course), along w/various new “nano-technologies,” but Nana-tech refers to ancestral knowledge that has been practiced through thousands of generations — and we are the result! Interestingly enough, investigators do sometimes disclose a scientific basis for nana-tech. See also the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Suzanne Simard, and Diana Beresford Kroeger, among others.
I Know this is an old article but COULDN’T help but add, i grew Up EATING all manner of meats and sea mammals off of random pieces of wood and pLywood as did EVERYONE else around me. Rarely washed with more than seawater and left exposed to the ARctic sun. No one got sick from that. Also INTERESTING to note that inuit people Didn’t have problems with botulism until plastics came around. I’m so grossed out by plastIc cutting boards and dishes!
thanks for the interesting comment. I’d be curious to know more about botulism among the inuit. I’ve been (re) reading Peter Freuchen’s Arctic Adventure. Amazing stories. Amazing food! Sun is good!
Well, I quickly discovered that “nana-tech” already has it’s own hashtag, so clearly I can’t make any claims to originality — great minds think alike? Or just nothing new under the sun…