Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons

Summary

You know what they say in the world of products: fast, cheap, good; pick two Which is very similar to my experience when trying to find the most suitable wood finish for my hand carved wooden spoons and coffee cups. hand carved wooden spoon It’s hard to find a finish that: cures fast (in less than 2 days) is food safe (can be used on things you eat or drink from, like spoons and cups) is free of solvents (doesn’t smell of nasty chemicals that make you dizzy every time you apply it) and with the hard requirement of making wood hydrophobic and leaving a visually pleasant sheen without creating a plasticky layer # Natural drying oils Sure, we have pure tung oil which doesn’t need any solvent, has a pleasant nutty smell, and cures into a food-safe hydrophobic polymer inside the wood fibers. But it takes 2 to 4 weeks for the curing to happen depending on oxygen intake, and the finish is quite matte and boring. While tung oil is natural, that doesn’t mean you can ingest it. It is a powerful irritant in its liquid form, it is only food-safe after curing into its inert polymer state. There’s also the more rare polymerized (or heat-bodied) tung oil, which is a honey-like viscous oil that cures in a few days because it was heated to very high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. That would be ideal except I can’t find it anywhere around me to buy, and it would most likely need thinning with citrus oil solvent (or D-limonene). Citrus oil has a nice but way too potent smell of orange peel. It might seem pleasant at first compared to the chemical smell of naphtha and white spirits, but it can be too much if you finish small wooden objects often like I do. ash cup, in the process of being oiled with tung oil And there are plenty other drying oils, the most well-known being linseed oil, which is indeed edible but has the unfortunate disadvantages of yellowing over time, taking ages to cure and having a persistent oily-grassy flavor. Polymerized linseed oil (aka stand oil) cures ...