Erin Napier

Sama Hoole Verified account @SamaHoole · Aug 25

Every kitchen used to have the one board.

Wood. Thick as a paving slab and about as heavy, dished in the middle from forty years of use, and it did everything, the raw chicken included. It was also, though nobody knew it and nobody needed to, the safest surface in the house.

Scarred all over in a fine grey web where a knife had landed ten thousand times. A burn on one corner from a pan set down in a hurry sometime around 1962. It had come from her mother, and it smelled faintly of onion no matter what had last been on it.

It never sat in water longer than a minute. Scrubbed with salt and a stiff brush, rinsed, stood on its edge against the tiles to dry. Once a year it went out to the shed to be sanded flat and rubbed over with oil, and came back looking twenty years younger.

Chicken went on it. Beef went on it. Then the bread went on it. Nobody in that house was ever ill, and nobody in that house gave it a second's thought.

Then the advice arrived, the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Wood is porous. Wood harbours bacteria. Buy plastic, because plastic can be properly cleaned.

The old board went out to the shed for good, and a whole generation of them followed it, in the space of a few years.

A microbiologist at the University of California, Dean Cliver, asked the Department of Agriculture what that advice was based on. They told him they had no evidence for it.

So he tested it himself, and got the opposite of everything he expected.

Bacteria smeared onto wood vanished from the surface within minutes. The grain had drawn them down, away from the food, into a dry dark where they could not multiply and simply died. Days later you had to split the board open to find them at all.

On plastic they sat on the surface, alive, waiting. And once a plastic board carried a few hundred cuts, no amount of scrubbing got them back out, least of all with fat worked into the grooves.

The board that looks filthy kills bacteria. The board that looks clean stores them.

What replaced the old one was a set of six, colour-coded, red for raw meat and blue for fish and green for the veg. A professional kitchen system, sold to a woman feeding four people out of one pan.

And the new one sheds into you. A study in 2023 put it at tens of millions of plastic particles a year off a single board, somewhere between seven and fifty grams of polyethylene, cut loose by your own knife and served up in your own dinner.

Her board is still there, standing on its edge against the tiles in her daughter's kitchen, dished in the middle, older than everyone in the room.

Sand it. Oil it. Put a chop on it.

It will outlast every plastic board you will ever buy, and it was never the thing that needed fixing.

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HGTV Verified account @hgtv · Aug 22, 2025

Big news from Laurel!

Not only is Home Town returning in 2026, but the Napiers are launching a new spinoff called Home Town: Inn This Together, where the duo will enlist the help of family and friends to transform a 1930s building into a dream hotel 🏨✨ #HGTVHomeTown #ComingSoon

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Sandy Maynard @sandymaynardmsu · Jun 7, 2025

@ErinRNapier a lot happening on the circle tonight in Sebring. Enjoying a nice weekend here.

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