Another bad plastic item for the kitchen: plastic cutting boards. If you look at them up close, you can see that every time you cut on them with a sharp knife, lots of small micro plastic pieces are cut off.
Plastic cutting boards are sadly the cheaper and less work requiring option for restaurants/ larger kitchens. Wood just doesn’t survive going through an industrial dishwasher that many times and nobody is going to hand wash 10+ wood boards a day. I haven’t properly looked into what plastic our kitchen’s plastic boards are, but it seems to be more durable than the usual home ones.
I worked in a private school kitchen briefly, and was absolutely shocked they still had butcher block benches for food prep and such. Like, the school was built in the 50s/60s at least, and these things looked original. We always put some barrier between the food and the actual table surface when we worked on them, but still…
I even brought it up at one point and was told the health inspector never mentioned it. Personally, I both believe that (health inspectors are very 50/50 on how thorough, and most aren’t looking to shut places down), and find it hard to believe they never mentioned the tables that had obvious grooves in them from knives of yesteryear, and discolorations from whatever organisms were growing in the pores and what not.
But outside of that, yes, 100%, professional kitchens would either need dozens and dozens of wooden boards to cycle through throughout their shift. Every kitchen I worked in used plastic, and you can buy the boards they use in pro kitchens online from restaurant supply stores.
Another bad plastic item for the kitchen: plastic cutting boards. If you look at them up close, you can see that every time you cut on them with a sharp knife, lots of small micro plastic pieces are cut off.
Plastic cutting boards are sadly the cheaper and less work requiring option for restaurants/ larger kitchens. Wood just doesn’t survive going through an industrial dishwasher that many times and nobody is going to hand wash 10+ wood boards a day. I haven’t properly looked into what plastic our kitchen’s plastic boards are, but it seems to be more durable than the usual home ones.
I worked in a private school kitchen briefly, and was absolutely shocked they still had butcher block benches for food prep and such. Like, the school was built in the 50s/60s at least, and these things looked original. We always put some barrier between the food and the actual table surface when we worked on them, but still…
I even brought it up at one point and was told the health inspector never mentioned it. Personally, I both believe that (health inspectors are very 50/50 on how thorough, and most aren’t looking to shut places down), and find it hard to believe they never mentioned the tables that had obvious grooves in them from knives of yesteryear, and discolorations from whatever organisms were growing in the pores and what not.
But outside of that, yes, 100%, professional kitchens would either need dozens and dozens of wooden boards to cycle through throughout their shift. Every kitchen I worked in used plastic, and you can buy the boards they use in pro kitchens online from restaurant supply stores.
I made the mistake of buying a plastic cutting board exactly one time lol