Grab Some Wood, Bub

Edson (AKA e4), over at Green, Blue, Brown sent me a very interesting article recently about the differences between cutting boards made from wood vs. those made from plastic. The article is from Ellen Sandbeck's book Green Housekeeping.

The article states that researchers at the University of Wisconsin had discovered that wooden cutting boards are safer for food preparation than plastic cutting boards. That's right -- safer. A 1993 press release I found online confirmed the article. Here's what the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Research Division at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had to say:


For decades now, cooks in homes and restaurants have been urged to use plastic rather than wood cutting boards in the name of food safety. The fear is that disease causing bacteria – salmonella from raw chicken, for example – will soak into a cutting board and later contaminate other foods cut on the same surface and served uncooked, such as salad ingredients. It’s become an article of faith among “experts” that plastic cutting boards are safer than wood for food preparation because, as the thinking goes, plastic is less hospitable to bacteria.

It seems reasonable, but it just ain’t so, according to two scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Food Research Institute.

Dean O. Cliver and Nese O. Ak, food microbiologists in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, have found that in some as yet unknown way wooden cutting boards kill bacteria that survive well on plastic boards.

“This flies in the face of prevailing wisdom”, says Cliver, “It isn’t what I expected. Our original objectives were to learn about bacterial contamination of wood cutting boards to find a way to decontaminate the wood so it would be almost as safe as plastic. That’s not what happened.”

Cliver is quick to point out that cooks should continue to be careful when they handle foods and wash off cutting surfaces after they cut meat or chicken that may be contaminated with bacteria.

“Wood may be preferable in that small lapses in sanitary practices are not as dangerous on wood as on plastic,” he says. “This doesn’t mean you can be sloppy about safety. It means you can use a wood cutting board if that is the kind you prefer. It certainly isn’t less safe than plastic and appears to be more safe.”

Cliver and Ak began by purposely contaminating wood and plastic boards with bacteria and then trying to recover those bacteria alive from the boards. They also tested boards made from several different species of trees and four types of plastic. They incubated contaminated boards overnight at refrigerator and room temperatures and at high and typical humidity
levels. They tested several bacteria – Salmonella, Listeria and enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli – known to produce food poisoning.

The results consistently favored the wooden boards, often by a large margin over plastic boards, according to Cliver. The scientists found that three minutes after contaminating a board that 99.9 percent of the bacteria on wooden boards had died, while none of the bacteria died on plastic. Bacterial numbers actually increased on plastic cutting boards held overnight
at room temperature, but the scientists could not recover any bacteria from wooden boards treated the same way.

Huh. Well slap my ass and call me Sally, it looks like plastic is NOT the 'be all / end all' when it comes to sanitary. Who knew?

I guess can stop using my one plastic cutting board that I've always kept specifically for use with poultry, beef and pork. Turns out my meat likes a little wood.

Thanks for the great article, Edson!