Mostly unrelated, but glass in the kitchen:

I was in a restaurant the other day and a friend pointed out a small chip on a pint glass. They mentioned that many people take their glass cups and scoop ice out of an ice drawer which can result in small glass shards to be ejected into the ice drawer (and thus ice) which would be very, very bad to ingest.

It might be obvious, but probably best to avoid ice scooping with glass cups!

Big difference between glass and plastics. Glass is chemical inert while plastics degrades and leaks into everything. See the flavor of a plastic bottle that has been in your car for a while. Some plastics may even resemble stuff that is in your body. It's all processed dinosaur juice after all (actually trees, but whatever).

True but glass is very much "outside the body only". Don't want shards in your gut.

Eating a small shard of glass will kill you far more quickly than any amount of chemicals from your spatula

Glass shards can also be very sharp.

> Glass is chemical inert

Well, except for leaded glass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_glass

"Several studies have demonstrated that serving food or drink in glassware containing lead oxide can cause lead to leach into the contents, even when the glassware has not been used for storage."

Glass is not so harmless when you consume shards of it. Chemically inert things can damage the body by mechanical means (I’m a little surprised that this has to be said!)

My spouse worked as a server in a restaurant, was told not to do this and learned the hard way and it's common sense: someone has to empty the machine, clean it completely out, and wait for it to fill back up again which takes hours.

Do people still use ice drawers anymore? I only see dispensers everywhere.

As someone who lived in Europe for a while, I am completely mystified about this obsession with ice in every drink.

When I was young and didn't have disposable income and consequently cheap, I skipped the ice because it simply reduced your available drink quantity and it watered down your soda.

A number of French-door style fridges have ice drawers since the freezer is positioned below knee level.

If you can swallow glass shards without feeling any pain, they will pass through the intestinal track just fine.

Source: ER doctor when I checked myself in after discovering I accidentally ate glass. He was right. Nothing happened. I was fine.

I’d be interested to know how you ate glass without realizing it until it was too late.

I poured soup into a glass bowl that contained many shards from a chipped rim that I failed to notice. I had consumed nearly the entire bowl when I bit into the largest shard. I strained the remaining soup for glass, found more shards, but many were unaccounted for. Only possibility left was that I had slurped them down

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What about wood?

Wood is safe, but since it's organic has the potential to fuel the growth of molds, bacteria, and other microorganisms. I'm not sure the best way to sanitize wood from these elements? You could light the wood on fire, but then you wouldn't have any wood leftover.

Wooden spoons go in the dishwasher and then they're perfectly safe. Wooden chopping boards have been shown to be safer than plastuc, because they don't get the cuts that plastic boards do, which harbour microorganisms. Cuts in wooden boards close themselves up.

I've heard the opposite, that wood has anti-microbial properties that results in less cross contamination than plastic, even though it is harder to sterilize. For example, here is one study on cutting boards[1].

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31113021/

You can seal woods (polyurethane, linseed oil, etc) and they take well to disinfectants (UV, povidone iodine, etc) and can be submerged in common commercial disinfectant washes.

It's just uncommon in a commercial kitchen because it costs 4-5x the price, depending on how many you want and how many you'll destroy from use over time. A cheap steel implement in a commercial kitchen will last 4-5x the lifetime of a wood one but that same wood implement will last just fine in a home kitchen.

> polyurethane

If you are using wood to avoid plastic but coat your wood in polyurethane or any other fossil fuel based compound, I kind of feel like you’ve gone full circle back to consuming plastic.

I provide it simply as an example of one way to seal woods.

Wood cutting boards ("butcher's blocks") have been a popular item for as long as the profession of butcher has been around and longer.

Microbial growth on wood is really only an issue when conditions are right -- namely, when the wood is wet for an extended period of time.

Washing wood utensils immediately after use, with some soap if needed, and drying quickly and completely, should eliminate 99%+ of the risk.

I don't know where this "unless the surface is sterile it is significantly dangerous" thing comes from. How many people have died from bacteria that grew on wooden utensils that were regularly washed? Is it anything other than zero?

I've unintentionally melted enough plastic cookware- that I should probably move to metal anyways.

"crunchy" is such a cynical designation.

I just prefer no plastic in my food, or in my body. This shouldn't be "crunchy", it should be common sense.

The black plastic spatula entered the trash bin a while ago. I was not sorry to see it go at all.

We also replaced our plastic tooth brushes, and have been using bamboo/natural fiber tooth brushes. They work great. I did this before microplastics started making the news, it was just common sense to me. Just think about the abrasiveness of brushing teeth, and tiny micro-sized pieces of plastic from the brushes shearing off as they grind on your teeth.

Silicon kitchenware? Can be extended baked or boiled to sterilize.