I've been keeping score on a rubber cutting board, and the board is winning
I always figured my next cutting board would be walnut. Buy one good board, oil it now and then, done. Rubber was a word for tires. The boards I actually owned were an Ikea plastic one with grooves deep enough to hold garlic through two washes, and a bamboo one that split along a glue line. The morning an apple slice came off the plastic tasting like last night's garlic, I went shopping for the walnut. Instead I kept tripping over the same story: restaurant people online saying kitchens in Japan cut on rubber, something about health rules and thin knives. Can't verify that. But it made the tire theory look shaky.
So the walnut stayed unbought. What pushed me over was a writeup from a guy three months into his, mostly because of the parts he didn't like: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductProbe/comments/1vn5wxe/rubber_cutting_board_took_a_week_to_stop_feeling/
Garlic got tested first, since garlic was the whole reason. Cut a few cloves that weekend, washed the board, smelled it the next morning. Still there, faint. Gone by dinner. Onions a few days later left nothing at all. People say these hold no odor. Not quite true, but a day beats grooves that held it through two washes. The quiet was never on the list: the knife lands soft and most of the chop noise is just gone. For marks, my rule is only count what a fingernail catches. Three weeks in, that's exactly one, from the serrated bread knife. That knife is banned now.
The rest of the tally is boring in a good way. It's heavier than it looks, just under three pounds, so it doesn't wander around the counter. It washes in the sink like anything else, and after seeing a photo of what a hot pan does to one of these, pans wait on the trivet. It's $83. I'm still not over that.
The walnut board is still open in a tab I haven't closed. I keep waiting for this slab to give me a reason to order it. The score says not yet.