Using a plastic cutting board? Then stop. Just…STOP.

So when my husband turned 40 this spring, I splurged on something we’d always talked about: a private Japanese dinner, cooked by a real chef right in our own kitchen.

Chef Hiro arrived with a knife roll that probably cost more than my car payment. But what caught my eye was something else: tucked in next to the knives, he’d brought his own cutting board.

I laughed and told him we owned cutting boards — he really didn’t have to pack one. He smiled politely and kept setting up. Later, while he was prepping, I asked him about it.

Instead of answering, he picked up my cutting board — the white plastic one from Target I’d been using for about 18 months — and held it up under the kitchen light.

“Do you see all these scratches?” he asked, running his thumb across the deep grooves and knife marks. “That’s plastic your knife shaved off the board. So where do you think it all went?”

I just stared at him.

“It went into the food,” he said, setting it back down. “I stopped cutting on plastic years ago. Most chefs I know back home have too.”

I laughed it off in the moment. But that night, after the kids were in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about it — so I started googling. Within ten minutes I found a university study that literally made me sick to my stomach.

The average person swallows up to 50 grams of microplastics from their cutting board every year.

That’s roughly the weight of ten credit cards — tiny, invisible plastic particles getting ground straight into your food every time you slice, dice, or chop. And I had been doing exactly that on the same plastic board for years, mindlessly serving it to my family.

Believe it or leave it, things only get worserer and worserer from there. From what I’ve read over the years, wooden boards have their issues also; in fact, I suspect that one way or another, there are always gonna be perfectly valid objections to any cutting-board material you can think of, up to and likely including stainless steel. But I washed my hands (in a manner of speaking—heh) of the plastic ones years and years ago, and have no plans to go back to ’em.

Via Insty, who in response can only mutter, “WELL.”