Wood, food, Bacteria & Nana-tech

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 work of Dean O. Cliver, a UC Davis prof who compared bacterial survival on wooden cutting boards to bacterial survival on plastic. Guess what? Wood won. Here’s a pdf of the article (nana-tech follows):

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 I can’t resist the urge to coin a counter-term: “Nana-technology,” to renew the status of those practices that our ancestral grandmothers (and fathers) used through all those tens of thousands of generations which resulted in us! Interestingly enough, when (as Cliver did) someone does apply scientific procedure to nana-tech, and is willing to deeply consider and investigate a particular practice, they often not only come out clean, but often superior to (generationally) untested “modern solutions.”