Hacker News Reader

Comment by ArnoVW | Hacker News Reader

Use a wooden one? Has the added benefit of being part of the short carbon cycle.

Wood 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.

I’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.

How 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?

I 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.

The 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.

Food poisoning is generally something you know you’ve got.

Really? 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/wash...

That page and its video are bat shit stupid.

Spraying raw chicken juice around your kitchen in the name of hygiene.

The 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.

If 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.

This 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.

COVID-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.

Just wash it properly after use.

Actually 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.

Wood and plastic are not the only two options in your life, this is a silly framing.

What else is? Certainly neither glass nor metal, since they dull knives way to fast.

The lignin in wood is also extremely effective at dulling knives.

The cutting bits of woodworking tools pass through more wood in a minute than a knife does over its entire lifetime.

What else do you use as a cutting board then? Slate? Metal?

I 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.

Instead of wood _or_ plastic, you have wood _and_ plastic in one board! (Or rather, paper mixed with some sort of formaldehyde resin)

And that's why you should pour boiling water over any implement that has been in contact with raw meat.

When 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com