Twin Eagles TEPS-30FSD (as shown) - Manual (Page 3)

Alaska Science Forum
February 17, 1993
On the Chopping Block
Article #1121B
by Carla Helfferich
This article is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of
Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Carla Helfferich
is a science writer at the Institute.
Bad news arrived with an outspoken dinner guest. "You're carving on that?" she asked,
pointing at the wooden board upon which the newly roasted duck awaited the knife. Well,
yes, I was. We'd used that board for years, as had a great-aunt before us; it showed its
age, so it did not leave the kitchen, but it was kindly to knives and comforting in its family
tradition.
The upset guest told me she'd just read an article on how unsanitary wooden kitchen
implements were. A butcher block might look elegant, but it was unhealthy, as were bread
boards and meat planks of the sort I cherished. "Think of all those pores and nicks," she
continued. "It makes sense that germs would thrive on wood. You never can get it really
clean."
It did make sense. Soon I too saw articles exhorting cooks to avoid porous, organic, and
germ-encouraging wood in favor of inert sterilizable plastic. Sadly I replaced my cherished
wooden things with inorganic, impervious plastic, stuff so hostile to bacteria that nothing
seems to cause it to decay.
Science giveth bad news, but sometimes it taketh away again. Recently, researchers
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have concluded that wood is good---and
plastic is unhealthy.
Microbiologists Dean Cliver and Nese Ak were looking for ways to clean wood safely after it
had been in contact with food contaminated by bacteria. The first step was to be sure their
study boards had appropriately unpleasant microorganisms to be cleaned off. They
cultured some known disease-causing bacteria, such as Salmonella, Listeria, and
Escherichia coli, and anointed wooden boards with about 10,000 cells of cultured bacteria.
That's about 10 times the number of organisms that typically wash off a contaminated
chicken carcass.
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