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Hi, today I am going to be writing about plastic cutting boards, and what you will probably want to buy instead.
Plastic cutting boards are a pretty ubiquitous piece of kitchen equipment; almost everyone has one in their kitchen. At first they seem pretty great: they are cheap, resilient, non-absorbent, and easy to sterilize. That is until you start using them and after a little while they end up looking something like this (fig 1). Pretty gross, right? And it’s not just gross to look at, all those cut marks are almost impossible to clean and dry well, and so become the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. Now if that’s not bad enough, what do you think happened to all the plastic is now missing from those grooves? If you have ever sawn wood you will know how saw dust goes everywhere, the same thing happened to your chopping board, every time you cut into it minute pieces of plastic wear away. Many of these microscopic pieces of plastic will embed into your food. This means you cooked, ate, and ultimately digested tiny particles of cutting board. If you have ever read anything about the harmful effects of plastic on our bodies you are probably ready to get rid of your cutting board right about now.
So what alternatives do you have? The first to come to mind is probably the traditional wooden cutting board (fig 2). Since they can still score and crack easily wooden boards have many of the same problems as plastic. They are however far more attractive than plastic ones, so are great for presenting food, especially something dry; which is why I still have mine.
Another alternative would be marble. They are great since they are hard enough to not wear down, and should not react with your food. They are also beautiful to look at, and unfortunately their price reflects that, putting them out of the budget most people would be willing to spend.
This leaves us with my preferred option: glass cutting boards (fig 3)! Glass is non-reactive, so will not contaminate your food. It is also much harder than plastic: after years of near daily use mine have very little visible wear, this makes them very easy to keep clean and sanitized. Now you might be thinking that if they are as great as I am saying their price is probably up near the price of marble ones; but thankfully you’d be wrong! I bought some of my smaller ones at dollar stores, and even though the larger ones were more expensive I have saved a lot of money. I have had the large one in the photo for 5 years, and it is not even close to needing to be replaced, as opposed to plastic ones I would have to have replaced several times each year.
Now we all know that I was a bit lucky finding my glass cutting boards in dollar stores, since they are not normally the best at keeping their stock of these kinds of items up. So just in case you do not want to drive around town hunting for them I have put some convenient Amazon links bellow. I searched for reasonably priced ones; I found a set of large ones and a set of small ones. To order just choose from the links bellow. Let me know in the comments bellow if you will be getting any!
Max
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