There’s an idea that’s been floating around kitchens for half a century that would see plastic being safer than wood. A smooth, washable material without pores in which bacteria could hide has generated over time a belief that is easy to believe, it’s a shame that science doesn’t agree so much. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) puts it clearly: more than the material, it matters how you treat it, just as we will see shortly. The cutting board is probably the utensil we use most without thinking about it. For centuries it was just made of wood, then, at the beginning of the Seventies, the new synthetic polymers brought the first plastic models to the table, and with them a debate that has never ended. On the one hand tradition, on the other the promise of a surface that can be cleaned with a rag. If you want to take a look at the numbers, however, the picture becomes less clear than the advertising would like.
The weak point of wood is porosity
The real concern in the kitchen is cross-contamination, that is, the passage of microorganisms from one food to another through an intermediate surface just as in the case of a cutting board, which absorbs the bacteria from one food and passes them on to the next. We are talking above all about agents responsible for zoonoses, diseases that reach humans from animals, such asEscherichia colithe Listeria monocytogenes and the Salmonella typhimurium. Wood, in this case, starts with a suspicion given its porous and hygroscopic structure, capable of retaining liquids, and with them also what swims inside it. The juices that drip from a steak or chicken breast can contain pathogens, and the tiny pores in the wood trap them. For this reason, the USDA considers non-porous surfaces such as plastic less problematic, at least on paper: smooth, in theory easier to wash and disinfect, with one exception that weighs a lot, inherent cuts and signs of wear, where bacteria find refuge.
When plastic loses the comparison: studies on HDPE
Here the story gets complicated. Research published in Environmental Science & Technology found that plastic cutting boards can release microplastics to the food we cut on them. The effect on health is still to be clarified, but it is a factor that should be included in the balance sheet. And there’s more, given that a 2025 study published in the Journal of Food Protection compared professional cutting boards made of sugar maple (Acer saccharum) with others made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), the most common plastic. Counterintuitive result: on maple wood the E. coli load dropped to the detection limit after just two hours, even without cleaning, while HDPE showed higher contamination overall. The authors go so far as to ask that the hygienic status of wood in the food sector be re-evaluated. If you would like to read the work in full, you can also find it in the full open access version of the Freie Universität Berlin, as well as in the PubMed tab.
These conclusions are not new, given that the historic study by Ak, Cliver and Kaspar in 1994, again in the Journal of Food Protection, had already observed that fewer bacteria were recovered from wood than from plastic: absorbed deeply, they ended up not surviving and not rising to the surface. Why then so many opposing opinions? The problem is at the root, because there is a lack of a standardized protocol for the microbiological analysis of wooden surfaces, and there are few studies available. The results vary depending on the type of wood, the quality of the plastic, the presence of scratches, the bacterial strain tested and the intensity of use. A home chopping board used every now and then is not the same thing as a professional kitchen one that has been battered all day.
Beyond the material: hygiene rules according to the USDA
Wood or plastic, the USDA instructions remain the same and are disarmingly simple: wash with hot soapy water after each use, rinse, air dry or with paper. The rule that makes the most difference, however, is another, that is, keeping two separate cutting boards, one for meat, fish and seafood, the other for bread and vegetables, so that what ends up in the pot never crosses what is eaten raw. Then there are alternatives, such as bamboo, less porous than classic wood, or steel, ceramic and glass, smooth and easy to disinfect. The important thing, we repeat, is cleanliness.
