Many people generally don't change boards enough, yes. And keeping plastic boards after they are quite deeply grooved is a problem.

If your dishwasher doesn't have a sanitize cycle (or you aren't using it) you may not be getting hot enough at home anyway to be up to the standard a commercial kitchen would need.

Of course you may not have a dishwasher at all.

Automatic dishwasher detergent is loaded with chlorine bleach. Sanitizing temperatures are not necessary.

This is wrong (at best outdated). No dishwashing detergent sold at your local grocery has chlorine bleach in it. There are other non-chlorine bleaching agents in some formulations.

You seem to be correct, at least based on review of the MSDS for a popular powdered dishwasher detergent, it's using oxygen bleach (peroxide). Pretty sure it was chlorine bleach in the past.

yay for microplastics (and maybe phthalates) all over my utensils, plates and glasses!

on a serious note, I try to avoid putting ANY plastic in a dishwasher unless it’s silicone. what’s wrong with buying a cutting board that is used for meat only? do your best scrubbing it down with hot water and soap, and it’s not an issue. Especially if you cook your meat to a safe temperature anyway.

Even better, avoid a plastic cutting board to begin with:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c00924

At least the dishwasher is doing its best to remove surface contamination from its contents.

How does your cutting board compare to tire dust, shed particles from textiles, and latex paint in terms of your exposure and the danger thereof?

I really do try to triage "things to worry about" by severity and likelihood. At my age I'm mostly worried about not getting hit by cars and my mental health.

can’t avoid tire dust. Luckily i don’t paint often, and i don’t lick my walls. :-)

I agree it’s low on the list in terms of risk (big picture). I guess shopping for plastic free alternatives isn’t stressful to me, i view it like a shopping game. Plus the plastic free stuff tends to hold up better anyway over the long term!

I do wonder how rinse aid affects this too. Might reduce the residue left behind.

Re tire dust, you can avoid living near major roads, and running a hepa filter anywhere you spend significant time. Our old apartment’s balcony used to get a coating of black dust on everything within a week of wiping things down, since we were near some major road, now that we live in the country, I never see that.

The micro plastics people really need to link up with the urbanism people - having kilos of tire dust shredded on your doorstep isn't a necessary condition of living in a city, it's a result of how (at least in the US) car dependent our urban forms are.

I'm grateful to have moved from the Bay Area, parts of which are so criscrossed with freeways that it's impossible to not live near/under one (all of Oakland), to somewhere where, despite the density being overall much higher, I live far enough from a freeway or highway that I can't hear them at all at night.

Not everyone has a dishwasher.

Hmmm. It's only in the last four years or so that I've even had one, you'd have thought I would have remembered that ...

Buy some Purell.

I just use a plate for my cutting needs. No idea about this "cutting board" obsession. Plate just goes into the dishwasher. No wood or plastic particles to worry about and cleanup is easy.

Then again, I also exclusively use serrated knives and think people that use ultra-sharp knives in the kitchen to make food cut like butter, crazy.

The bit you're missing is that other people need cutting boards and you don't, because you don't do the types of prep work that would require a cutting board. It would take a about 4x longer if I did my prep work with your tools. No harm in that, we just do different things in the kitchen.

How does that not absolutely destroy your knife?

GP uses serrated knives. They’re not actually cutting food, more mangling it while scratching their plates. Not wanting to use sharp knives just speaks to inexperience in the kitchen.

And yet I've never once cut myself with legal near-scalpels in my kitchen, the serrated knives that "mangle" my food cut food perfectly fine, and my plates last as long as plates do.

Unless you literally never cook any food, it just isn’t possible to prepare all types of food using purely serrated knives. Cutting up many vegetables or herbs just is not possible with a serrated knife.

What is your aversion if you’ve never cut yourself?

For one, I have children in the house and scalpel-like sharp knives make me uneasy. Doubly-so as they are usually pointy and can stab too.

Besides that, serrated knifes make it practically impossible to cut yourself. You'll feel the cut way before you've sliced through any of your own meat, and that's precisely because you're "sawing" the food, or your flesh in that case.

I honestly can not think of anything (other than sticky cheese) that would be impossible to cut with the serrated knives I use. I cut up herbs, vegetables, meats, fruits everything. Come to think of it, they even cut crunchy bread with ease too, which usually requires a "bread" knife in a usual kitchen.

Not sure why you think that knife (that you posted in the other comment) is substantially safer than a regular knife. It’s similar to wavy-style bread knives, but smaller. The edge of the blade is still extremely sharp and reviewers have even noted they’ve cut themselves with it. The bread knife I own can easily cut me and it basically is just a larger version of what you linked with larger “waves”.

I don’t know how you could possibly mince herbs or dice vegetables into small cubes with something like that knife though. You need the flat slicing motion. Interrupted cutting like a bread knife does will lead to very messy cuts.

What are you making in the kitchen? Like, what's the "75%-effort" dish/meal look like for you?

I cut up all sorts of stuff. Fruits, vegetables, cheeses, meats. Seeing as other poster asked about mincing, I guess I also finely dice various herbs and garlic. Sure if I have to smash (mincing?) it I'll find something that can do that with ease, but I won't need a large heavy knife to double-up as a hammer to do so.

An easy go-to meal I guess is like stir-fry with a diced-onion base, which includes a lot of cutting of the above. I've never struggled as long as the serrated knife itself is not super old. They do eventually get dull and the bumps aren't enough for comfortable cutting.

My go-to knife that's really good quality and cuts everything with ease is this one: https://www.amazon.com/Victorinox-Classic-Serrated-Utility-H...