The Cutting Board That Brings Honest-to-Goodness Excitement to Prep Work
Shop $25-$35, materialkitchen.com
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Remember that day in July when photographs of Gigi Hadid's kitchen hit the internet? Man, it felt good to laugh—the rare Fun Day on social media. Here, I'll remind you. Her cupboards were decorated with differently colored dried pastas, a bowl of colorful billiard balls sat on her island, and even more colored pasta filled glass containers on her counter. It was a rainbow array of kindergarten art masquerading as interior design. It was so, so bad.
But when you dug way down into the design schematics, at the core of Gigi Hadid's kitchen was one great idea: color. In this era of clean, minimalist, white-and-neutral-everything kitchen decor sweeping middle America, I believe color is important. Just not that much color. We're talking a pop, like you'll get from Material Kitchen's reBoard cutting boards. These are cutting boards worth your attention.
More on that color.
You might've noticed that this cutting board isn't white. Nor is it wooden, the heavyweight champion of countertop cutting. Imagine! This cutting board is green, and Material Kitchen also makes its cutting boards in shades of teal, orange, yellow, blue, and pink. Not only is this the simplest way to get a zap of color into your kitchen, but it really does make prep work more delightful. Maybe that's just where I am in pandemic coping: Needing a bribe in the form of bright color to dice onions instead of order out, like a bull with a red scarf. An emotionally drained bull. But it's cheery, and "cheer" isn't something I can afford to undervalue right now.
Shop $25-$35, materialkitchen.com
They come in two sizes. You'll want both.
A few words on the design of Material's cutting boards. They're cutting boards. They do what cutting boards do. But Material makes them in two sizes, regular and mini, which is useful—the big one for lots of vegetable prep, the small one for tiny counters, like what I'm working with. (You can easily maneuver the mini reBoard with one hand, which is a dream for those of us manually washing dishes in a sink.) Both cutting boards are strong but lightweight as well, keeping you quick on your feet as you chop and grate and pare.
They're made well, and responsibly.
You might've clocked that these cutting boards go by the name "reBoard." The "re" is as in "reused." Or "recycled." Material uses plastic that's been wasted by the cycle of consumerism, as well as sugarcane grown in a renewable fashion, and puts them to use to manufacture the reBoards. In an additionally cool move, this colorway, called Reimagine Justice, and a pinkish reBoard dubbed To Pó-Po, with Love, see 50 percent of their proceeds headed toward two nonprofits: Drive Change, a culinary fellowship for formerly incarcerated youths, and Heart of Change, which gets good meals to elderly Asians in New York.
Now, a final word on color. There is a middle ground between Gigi Hadid and desaturation. It is small kitchen items, like cutting boards, in hues that radiate energy.
Shop $25-$35, materialkitchen.com
Photography and prop styling by Allie Holloway and Timothy Mulcare
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