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Comment by FooHentai | Hacker News Reader

Good timing on this post, I was researching this last night after one of our wooden bowls was placed in the dishwasher by mistake.

There's conflicting information out there about flax/linseed oil - All state that the boiled variety is not food safe, but advice on raw linseed oil is quite divided. Some advice says it's fine, some not. The bottle of raw I currently own says not to ingest, so I'm taking it to be not food safe :)

One of the commonly suggested alternatives is to use mineral oil, or a combination of beeswax and mineral oil. Knowing that mineral oil is a product of crude oil refining really makes me uneasy, but at the same time I know that's an appeal to nature fallacy.

Walnut oil is sounding like an expensive but worthwhile third option.

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Mineral oil is also used medically as a laxative; you put a few spoonfuls in a glass of juice and drink it. So, pretty safe to use as a wood conditioner but its not a drying oil so needs to be re-applied from time to time. It's used a lot on wood cutting boards, which take a lot of abuse and need regular re-application of a flowing finish that won't build up in hard layers.

Wax can be used over most wood finishes to to give it added lustre but also needs to be re-applied to maintain it.

The advantage of a drying oil is that it gets absorbed deeply into the pores of the wood grain and dries to a plastic-like hardness. Because the unpolymerized oil penetrates so deeply, the cured finish isn't just a hard layer weakly bonded to the wood surface which can flake off, but weaves itself into the grain and pores of the wood itself. It seems that most people who avoid linseed oil finish complain they don't like the smell when working with it.

Walnut oil can be dangerous for anyone who has peanut allergies, which might be one reason why its not so common.

Mineral oil is literally sold as a laxative. It does this mechanically, ie by being indigestible and lubricating things along. That suggests that it’s pretty safe to ingest.

Perfectly safe to ingest. I've done it once, because, well - you know.

Taste? Literally tasteless. But it has the texture of plain oil; I can't really describe it, but you have to have a very good gag reflex control to get it down. Then you have in your mouth this "oiled" feel.

Not pleasant, but I was desperate and in pain, and it was all I had available at the time.

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