I recently bought some materials from Lee Valley Tools, and they were looking for feedback. Few of their customers are materials science and engineering people, so it wasn't surprising that they didn't think highly of my suggestion.
People bend wood. And often, they need to machine the wood after bending it.
If the wood is wood, people have been doing this for a long time and there is no problem.
A person could choose to lay up natural fibres (jute, kenaf, flax, ...) in a "green" epoxy. The advantage being, that the grain follows the curve desired by design.
Most people who might want to take advantage of such a thing, don't want to build the thing from scratch.
For me, epoxy (green resin and green hardener) is the only choice, green resin and non-green hardener is more available.
PLA might be an alternative to epoxy in terms of making this kind of "wood". I've seen a MechE talking about using styrene with PLA in a thesis, but I don't think this is where anyone wants to go.
But do people think about how to produce materials which look like wood and act like wood, but aren't wood? Or in this case, are designed to behave like wood machines in a straight direction, when the tool is not traversing a straight direction.