Avocado, Bagel, Cutting Board

Some of the most common hand injuries admitted to the ER are cuts from preparing avocados and bagels. I don’t have the statistics on the reasons people give to doctors and nurses as they’re getting their wounds cleaned and bandaged, but I can make some pretty good guesses:

“I was in a hurry”, “I wasn’t being careful enough”, “My knife just slipped.”

I can sympathize: I’ve had my fair share of near misses.

The problem with this particular situation isn’t necessarily just underestimating what can go wrong—it’s what happens when you actually succeed. Or, more precisely, what happens right after you succeed.

We tend to look at some tools and technologies as the entire solution to the problem. In the case of cutting an avocado in two, we grab the part of the knife that fits our hand and vigorously apply force to the avocado-problem with the part of the knife that fits the avocado. At this point, however, the line between success and failure is razor-thin if our other hand happens to be supporting the avocado-problem.

Cutting boards are boring. They’re one more thing to get out, clean and put away. But boring things like cutting boards (and parking brakes and hard drive backups) are highly underrated, and it might make a lot of sense to consider a knife and cutting board as forming a system that can gracefully withstand your successes as well as your failures.