Fart Bowls, Estate Sales, and the Smell of Nostalgia
Right, so I’ve been going down a rabbit hole this week that started with someone online asking a very simple question: how do you get the smell out of those old pressed wood salad bowls? You know the ones — dark brown, slightly shiny, vaguely basket-weave textured. Every grandmother on the planet seemed to own a set.
What followed in the comments was genuinely one of the most entertaining and unexpectedly educational threads I’ve read in a while. And it sent me spiralling into memories, material science, and the surprisingly contentious world of food-grade oils.
The person who posted had picked up a set of these bowls from an estate sale — absolute bargain hunter move, respect — only to get them home and discover they smelled absolutely terrible. They’d tried vinegar water, leaving them out for days, and nothing was shifting it. Classic bargain-buy gotcha moment. We’ve all been there. You spot something at a Camberwell Market or a garage sale in the outer suburbs, your eyes light up, and then reality hits you somewhere between the car park and your kitchen bench.
The responses ranged from genuinely useful to absolutely chaotic, and I loved every second of it. The most interesting revelation? Someone suggested these might not actually be wood at all, but bamboo — which apparently behaves quite differently and explains why some people’s sets from the seventies are still immaculate while the cheap ones you see at discount stores smell like something died in them. Someone else dropped the absolute bombshell that a lot of cheap furniture and kitchenware from a certain era was made from rubber wood — which, I kid you not, can literally smell like farts as the finish wears off. I had absolutely no idea this was a thing. The commenter described inheriting a dining table from a former in-law that was apparently now emanating egg fart energy as the lacquer deteriorated. I nearly choked on my latte.
The practical advice that seemed to rise to the top, once you filtered out the chaos, was actually pretty solid: sun exposure to kill bacteria, gentle sanding to strip the surface back, and then treating with food-grade mineral oil — not vegetable oil, not olive oil, not any of the fancy nut oils someone thought would be “a bit fancy” on their butcher block. Those all go rancid, and rancid oil is almost certainly what’s causing the smell in the first place. Mineral oil doesn’t go rancid. Simple as that.
There was also a genuinely touching undercurrent running through the whole thread — dozens of people chiming in saying these bowls triggered memories of their grandmothers, family salad nights, restaurant buffets from childhood. Someone mentioned the specific sound of a big Caesar salad being tossed in one of these bowls. Another person remembered eating chocolate pudding from wooden bowls at their uncle’s buffet restaurant as a kid. It’s funny how an object can carry that much weight. My own mum had a set of something similar — I can picture them sitting in the cupboard, slightly greasy to the touch, always smelling faintly of Italian dressing.
One suggestion that made me laugh out loud was to fill the bowls with fresh ground coffee and seal them in a box for a month. The commenter who responded to that pointed out, with devastating accuracy, that the coffee would be worth more than the bowls. Which is probably true. But also, as someone who takes his coffee fairly seriously, the idea of sacrificing good beans to deodorise a $4 salad bowl feels genuinely criminal.
The broader takeaway from all this, beyond the practical woodcare advice, is something I find myself thinking about a lot when it comes to second-hand and vintage goods: buying something cheap from an estate sale or an op shop isn’t just a transaction, it’s also an adoption. You’re taking on the history of an object, including whatever neglect or misuse came before you. Sometimes that’s charming. Sometimes it literally stinks. The skill is figuring out which situation you’re in before you’ve already driven it home.
If you’re in the same boat as the original poster, the consensus seems to be: sun, sand, mineral oil, patience. Give it a real crack before you give up. These things didn’t get smelly overnight, and they won’t come good overnight either. But if it turns out they’re rubber wood underneath a failing lacquer coat, well — maybe they’re better off as a decorative piece, or honestly, back at the tip where they can become someone else’s problem and their own future nostalgic blog post.