The TikTok Butter Board Trend: Here Are The Dangers

Here’s a TikTok trend that you’d “butter” be careful about. It’s the “Butter board” trend that has folks slathering gobs of butter on cutting boards and dumping sauces, spices or fruits on top of said butter. They are then having people use pieces of bread to scoop up these concoction off the boards and into their mouths. If you search TikTok for the hashtag #butterboard, you’ll get a butter-load of videos with a total of 236.9 million views and counting. Before you deem this to be the best thing since sliced bread, though, you’d “butter” beware of the potential hazards of this spreading trend.

Now, TikTok videos such as the following are calling “butter boards” extensions of or even improvements over traditional charcuterie boards:

But there are several key differences between a “butter board” and a traditional charcuterie board, which is essentially a platter holding a bunch of cheeses, meats, dried fruits, and other things such as jams.

First of all, the whole “butter board” thing is not exactly above board. By smearing the butter into the wooden board, the butter is going into all those crack and crevices in the wood. This is very different from traditional charcuterie boards, where people don’t tend to smear brie, chevre, camembert cheddar, gouda, or manchego cheese into the board’s cracks. Cracks of any sort can be kind of gross. They tend to be dark and dank, providing good conditions for nasty microbes to grow. A study published in the Journal of Food Protection showed how easily bacteria such as Escherichia coli , Listeria innocua, L. monocytogenes, and Salmonella typhimurium can stay and multiply in wooden cutting boards. Think about that the next time you get the urge to lick the charcuterie board at a party.

Add butter at room temperature into the cracks in the wooden board and you’ve basically built a cheap motel for microbes to have their version of sexy time and reproduce. Being a breeding ground for bacteria is yet another reason why using butter that’s been sitting out for a while as toothpaste is not a great idea. Scooping up butter out of the cracks of a wooden board could in turn be scooping up a bunch of board bacteria that won’t be so bored once they get into your gastrointestinal tract. It could be like playing diarrhea roulette.

A second difference is that eating gobs of butter is not the same as eating some salami, prosciutto, Italian speck, or cheese. While munching on traditional charcuterie board components in moderation may be OK, butter in large amounts can be particularly unhealthy, being high in both calories and saturated fat. That’s why you don’t regularly see sticks of butter on a charcuterie board, eat butter sandwiches, or order butter as a topping on your pizza. So regularly eating a butter board could eventually put you at higher risk for obesity, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic medical conditions.

A third difference is the potential for double-dipping, triple-dipping, quadruple dipping, and other types of communal contamination, assuming that you aren’t eating an entire butter board yourself. When a bunch of people are repeatedly smearing bread on a buttered-up surface, each can end up leaving his or her germs on board so to speak. This is very different from your typical charcuterie board situation where people tend to quickly grab the items that they want and not try to drive them into the board.

The “Butter board” trend has melted into other similar offshoots as well. Some folks have been spreading other smearable substances such as cream cheese, goat cheese, Nutella, and the always delightful vegemite on their wooden boards and topping them with all sorts of things.

Again before you get on board with any of these possibilities, think about the risks. If you’d like to enjoy some cream cheese or goat cheese mixed with other thing, eating it off of a wooden board is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Why not use a relatively non-porous surface like a properly glazed ceramic plate instead?