Are Wooden Cooking Utensils Sanitary? What Science Says

Far less than most people assume — and in the research that's been done, wood has actually come out ahead of plastic. I understand the worry, though. Wood is porous, and we've all been taught that porous means germs. A wooden spoon feels like it should be the risky choice next to a plastic one you can bleach.

I get asked about this by customers periodically. Someone picks up a spoon, turns it over in their hands, and then asks, a little apologetically, "But is wood... clean?" It's a fair question. It deserves a real answer, not a sales pitch.

So here's the honest version: the science on this is more settled than you'd expect, it mostly favors wood, and the few ways a wooden utensil can become a problem are all things you can see and prevent. Let me walk through it.

The most-cited work here comes from Dean Cliver's food-safety lab at the University of Wisconsin, later at UC Davis. His team put bacteria like Salmonella and E. coli onto wooden and plastic cutting boards and then went looking for them afterward. On the wood, the bacteria disappeared — within minutes they could no longer be recovered from the surface, even overnight. On the plastic, the bacteria survived, and if the plastic had knife scars in it, they multiplied.

What seems to be happening is that wood's natural structure works against bacteria rather than for them. The same capillary action that makes wood absorbent pulls moisture down below the surface — and the bacteria go with it. Stranded inside the wood without the surface moisture they need, they die off instead of multiplying. It's the opposite of what our instinct tells us.

I want to be careful not to overstate it, because that's where a lot of "olive wood is antibacterial!" marketing goes wrong. Wood is not a sanitizer. It won't actively kill everything on contact, and you shouldn't treat a wooden spoon as if it disinfects your food. The honest, research-backed claim is narrower and still remarkable: under normal kitchen conditions, wood doesn't let bacteria survive and grow the way scratched plastic does.

A new plastic spoon really is easy to sanitize. The trouble is that plastic doesn't stay new. Every pass of a knife, every scrape against a hot pan, opens up scars — and in Cliver's work, knife-scarred plastic was the worst performer of anything tested. Bacteria settled into those grooves, survived a hand wash, and kept going. Wood that had been cut up and used for years behaved almost the same as a fresh board.

There's a second thing worth mentioning, and it's not about bacteria at all. Plastic utensils shed. Stirring something hot with a plastic spoon wears the tip down over months, and that material goes somewhere. Research on microplastics in food is still developing and I'm not going to pretend it's settled, but it's a reasonable thing to weigh when you're choosing what to leave sitting in a simmering pot.

None of this means plastic is dangerous or that you need to throw yours out today. It means the intuition — plastic is clean because it's smooth and non-porous — describes a spoon in its first month, not a spoon in its third year.

It does, and the thing that matters most is density. Close-grained hardwoods — olive, maple, beech, cherry, teak,— have a tight cell structure that absorbs less water and gives bacteria less room to sit. Open-grained woods like oak or ash have wider pores. Soft woods like pine dent and scar quickly, which gives you the same problem as scarred plastic. If you're buying a wooden utensil, dense hardwood is the thing to look for, whatever the species.

Olive wood sits at the dense end of that range, which is one honest reason we work with it. It's also, frankly, what grows here. The trees on Lesvos have been worked for centuries, and when a grove is pruned or a tree finally comes down, the wood that isn't burned for heat is dense, tight-grained, and slow-grown. The men in our workshop shape it into spoons, spurtles, and more. That the same qualities that make it beautiful also make it practical in a kitchen is a genuinely good coincidence.

I'd rather be straight with you than sell you on olive wood specifically: a well-made maple spoon, cared for properly, is a perfectly safe tool. Density and care matter far more than species.

The whole thing comes down to a few habits, and none of them are hard. Wash by hand with hot water and a little dish soap right after you use it — not a long soak, just a wash. Then dry it. Standing it upright in a rack or on a towel so air reaches all sides is better than leaving it flat in a puddle. That drying step is the one that matters most, because it's exactly when the trapped moisture and bacteria are pulled down and dried out.

Two things to avoid. Don't put wooden utensils in the dishwasher — the long soak and the heat swell the wood, strip its oils, and eventually crack it. And don't leave them sitting in the sink or standing in a pot of water. Wood doesn't mind getting wet; it minds staying wet.

Every so often, give it a little oil. Food-grade mineral oil or our olive wood care balm is the standard choice because it doesn't go rancid — rub on a thin coat, let it sit a few hours or overnight, wipe off what didn't absorb. Regular olive or vegetable oil, does work, however it can turn and leave a sour smell over time. Do these few things and a wooden spoon will outlast just about anything else in your drawer. We wrote a fuller care guide if you want the details.

So when someone asks me if wood is clean, here's the short version of what I tell them: yes, and the research actually puts it ahead of plastic. Wood pulls bacteria off the surface and lets them die there. Scarred plastic does the opposite. The only real risks with a wooden utensil — deep cracks, the dishwasher, letting it sit wet — are things you can see and prevent with a wash, a good drying, and a little oil now and then.

There's something I like about that. The safest tool for your kitchen turns out to be the old one — a piece of dense hardwood, shaped by hand, cared for simply. On Lesvos that piece of wood came from an olive tree that might otherwise have been firewood, and it was shaped by a man rebuilding his life here. It ends up in a kitchen in Indiana or Ohio, doing honest work for years. That it's also the more sanitary choice is just one more reason it was worth making.