Dishwashers, dish washing and disgust

Modified vintage ad (reproduced under fair use exemptions for satire)

Recently, my sister sent me a meme that read ‘In every relationship, there is a person who stacks the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and a person who stacks the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth’. I laughed when I saw it because it perfectly encapsulates the different approaches my husband and I take to stacking the dishwasher. I don’t think I’m breaking any marital confidences¹ to say that bad dishwasher loading is a particular bugbear of my husband. Anyone who stays at our house discovers this soon enough, because he mostly can’t stop himself from re-stacking it after us meth-rattled raccoons (primarily me, and my sister when she visits) have cleaned up.

My approach is summarised in a recent article on this topic by the writer Ellen Cushing, who was also clearly inspired by the same meme. In her words, ‘I don’t have a philosophy about what should go on the top or the bottom—I basically just put things in the first semi-logical place I see, close the door, smash some buttons, and hope for the best’. (Amen, sister.)

As Cushing observes, dishwasher loading is the topic of numerous online diatribes and how-to guides, and the meme features as a tropey ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus aphorism that bounces around the internet like a beach ball at an outdoor concert’. Indeed, how to load the dishwasher appears to cause more household arguments than the correct position of the toilet seat,² although it’s not gendered in the same way—I know plenty of heterosexual women who are the Swedish architect of dishwasher stacking in their relationship.

Cushing attributes these arguments to the ‘uniquely confounding’ nature of the dishwasher itself³ and the ways they potentially ‘alienate us from the labor of caring for those we love’. However, I’m not convinced that the mechanical and industrialised nature of the dishwasher is the cause of the debates about how to stack them, because opinions on the best way of washing dishes by hand are equally divided.

For instance, my husband has a convoluted system he uses for washing dishes, which has something to do with starting with the cleanest items that come closest to your mouth and moving out from there.⁴ Notably, he’s not remotely anal about other forms of cleaning, so this isn’t about cleanliness per se. Indeed, my husband never rinses dishes after hand washing them; he leaves the suds to drip off them as they dry.

Although my husband is Australian, this is a common complaint about Brits. For instance, Wirecutter recently featured an article titled ‘Brits are leaving suds on their dishes. Is that actually safe?’ This topic was also the focus of a 2013 Guardian Notes & Queries thread initiated by a reader living in the UK who writes, ‘I cannot understand the British habit of washing and rinsing dishes in the same dirty water, and drying them without washing off the soap suds. Is this similar to having a bath and not rinsing off the soap? Am I missing something here?’

Notable for the sheer volume (and occasional vitriol⁵) of responses, the thread is fascinating from an anthropological standpoint. Naturally, there is the inevitable Scot weighing in with ‘I’m Scottish and have rinsed dishes all my life… Don’t tar us all with the same brush!’, although the claim that Scots don’t indulge in the practice is disputed elsewhere in the comments. Plenty of English respondents also object that they always rinse their dishes, thank you very much, asserting in tones of varying stridency that this is a baseless stereotype. However, a class dimension is often implied, with various commenters suggesting that the failure to rinse dishes is confined to the less ‘educated’ and ‘civilised’.

Still, the general consensus is that this is something that Brits more frequently do than everybody else (although Australians and Kiwis rate a mention), and much consternation and bewilderment is expressed at the practice. Indeed, it appears to be an even greater source of friction in relationships than dishwasher stacking preferences—at least for international couples.

Americans, Canadians, Poles, Mauritians and Mexicans describe in tones of horror the moment they realised that their English or Scottish partner didn’t rinse dishes after washing them. The primary exception is an English woman who complains about her Italian husband’s excessive attention to rinsing. ‘What a load of crap’, she writes; ‘A bit of fairy liquid⁶ is not going to kill you’.

Although a minority opinion, several posters suggest that the debate is much ado about nothing. ‘Who cares, it’s washing up liquid’, Gaz from Coventry writes. Likewise, according to Jonathan from Brecon, ‘Have you ever heard of anyone getting ill from plates that have not been rinsed? As long as you can’t taste the washing up water and there are no noticeable food particles left on the plates what’s the problem?’

Despite the frequent claims from commenters about the ‘nasty’ and ‘unhealthy’ petrochemicals in dishwashing detergent,⁷ Gaz and Jonathan hold the more scientifically accurate view. Fairy detergent’s safety data sheet, quoted by one reader, states that ‘Repeated exposure to low levels (e.g. residues left on dinnerware) will not cause adverse effects’. This is also the conclusion reached, albeit grudgingly, in the aforementioned Wirecutter article on Brits leaving suds on their dishes. ‘Sure, you can leave suds on your dishes after washing them’, the author concludes; ‘But like anything else you can do, it doesn’t mean you should’.

That debates about how to load dishwashers and wash dishes are so heated speaks to the fact that opinions on the topic are less about hygiene and more about ‘dirt’. As Mary Douglas has shown, dirt is a cultural category tied up with conceptions of purity rather than hygiene in a purely technical sense. This is evinced not only in the disgust and revulsion frequently expressed by the Notes & Queries commenters but in the consistent connections drawn between washing dishes and washing bodies.

The connection is evident in the question posed at the outset, where the writer compares washing dishes without rinsing them to ‘having a bath and not rinsing off the soap’. However, it becomes particularly prominent in the comments, with British dishwashing practices often seen to symbolise broader British failings in cleanliness and character. ‘You Brits may dress better than most of us in America, but your washing up habits are absolutely DISGUSTING’, one American woman opines; ‘And if this is how you wash dishes, I would hate to see how you wash your body’.

These comments point to the ways in which conceptions of cleanliness are tied to moral sensibilities, and the moral judgement associated with what we perceive to be poor hygiene. After all, disgust entails not just revulsion but disapproval. As I have previously discussed in relation to bathing practices, a Korean friend was disgusted at the idea of taking a bubble bath without washing afterwards. From her perspective, the point of bathing was to scrub the body vigorously to remove surface impurities, so lying in a bath of bubbles without washing yourself afterwards accomplished the very opposite.

But for people who don’t rinse after a bubble bath (myself included), the assumption is that the bubbles either slide off as you get out the bath or are captured by the towel you dry yourself with. This is basically the same logic that proponents of washing without rinsing use: you put the dishes and cutlery in a drying rack where gravity takes care of the bubbles, or you dry them with a dish towel to the same effect.

Is this the most hygienic way of washing dishes? No, but I doubt it’s any less hygienic than a common Korean method whereby dishes are placed in the sink, sprayed with water, scrubbed with a cloth and dish soap, and then rinsed in cold water.⁸ Clearly, both methods involve different evaluations of cleanliness—a point the anthropologist Sarah Pink has made in relation to laundry practices. In one context, it’s the immersion in detergent-laced hot water that’s seen as critical to dislodging dirt; in the other, it’s the act of scrubbing and rinsing that is seen to accomplish this.

While both methods are hygienically inferior to a dishwasher, this is not an appliance found in the majority of Korean or British households; Statista suggests that about 20% of Korean households and 49% of UK households have one. In the US, where kitchens are typically larger, this figure rises to 73%. In fact, as several commenters on the Notes & Queries thread observe, washing-up styles are at least partially a product of kitchen infrastructures, as double sinks are uncommon in the UK (and Korea), and many older UK kitchens don’t have mixer taps, which mean your choice of running water is either freezing cold or scalding hot.

It’s also likely that the dishwasher itself has transformed conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness in much the same way that the washing machine has. As Sarah Pink notes, we increasingly ascertain whether clothes are clean not just by appearance and smell, but based on whether we have worn them. Many people treat clothes they have worn as dirty by definition, and thus requiring laundering, even if they bear no visual or olfactory traces of wear. Pink highlights that the rise of the washing machine itself has been central to this new definition of cleanliness. Certainly, when we had to wash clothes by hand, we were far more conservative in doing so.

This speaks to the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s arguments in her book More Work for Mother, where she suggests that household technologies designed to save time have ironically served to increase women’s workload in the home. Cowan argues that by transforming work processes, these technologies created new expectations, and thereby new forms of labour, especially around hygiene and cleanliness.

For instance, a cup used once to hold a glass of water or a mug likewise used once drink tea or coffee are now often treated as ‘dirty’, although the hygiene risks posed by reuse are vastly different than, say, a plate that has held raw meat. Tea stains in mugs, despite being caused by harmless tannins, are likewise treated as similar to food remnants, and we expect our dishes not to just be clean, but sparkling—accomplished via the addition of specialised detergents and rinse aids. Basically, even for those who don’t have a dishwasher, the appliance appears to have set new standards for what cleanliness should look like.

Still, in the final analysis, our dishwashing practices say far more about how we construct cleanliness than about hygiene itself, despite what we tell each other—in frequently strident and sanctimonious tones. As Sarah Pink notes, through our everyday domestic practices we carve out identities and construct moralities that are informed both by culture and our individual biographies. (My mother, too, stacked the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth.) I leave the final word to the journalist Dwight Garner. ‘Tell me how you wash a plate’ he writes, ‘and I will tell you who you are’.

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Bathing, dirt and cleanliness

Do washing machines belong in kitchens? Many Brits say 'yes'

1. Although that’s never stopped me before.

2. Do people actually argue about this? I have a feeling that this impression is based on an episode of the 90s’ TV series Melrose Place in which new flatmates Billy and Allison debate the topic. Weirdly, I can still remember the characters’ names of the entire cast of the show, which leads me to suspect that some vital piece of knowledge (like how to do long division by hand) has been lost so that I can retain this information.

3. Certainly, how to stack a dishwasher is not particularly self-evident, something I learned when trying to load the separate cutlery rack at my brother-in-law’s place. ‘What a crap design’ I thought, given that the rack only seemed to hold about fifteen pieces of cutlery. My sister-in-law then had to completely re-stack it, because the cutlery is supposed to be placed on its side rather than its back, thereby fitting in triple the volume.

4. Or something like that—I tend to tune out about 10 seconds into the lecture.* But if you’d like to know more, read on, my friend, because the only way he’d allow me to write about this is if I provided a detailed explanation of his method, because his system is, and I quote, ‘logical and not a quirk’. Andrew’s explanation: ‘The idea is not only do you start with cutlery and glasses that are the things that you put into your mouth, it is also starting with the cleanest things first and working back to the dirtiest. The other benefit of that is that the washing fluid is cleanest before going to the dirtiest items; it means that the detergent in the sink is more effective. If you reverse that order, the detergent which acts by surrounding individual soil particles would mean there is less detergent effective for the plates, cutlery and you end up with more shit on them’.

*I follow the Dwight Garner school of dishwashing. In his words, ‘my system is to have no system. I wash whatever is crying out loudest to be washed, the way a person feeds bread to gulls’.

5. One gets the impression that some respondents are taking the opportunity to engage in a bit of indiscriminate Brit-bashing. For example, one American commenter begins, ‘The UK is one of the dirtiest places I’ve seen: trash everywhere, hell those guys don’t even shower or brush their teeth’.

6. This is not a whimsical British term for washing-up detergent. Fairy is the most popular brand of detergent in the UK; indeed, I use it myself. In fact, several commenters place the blame for the British tendency not to rinse dishes squarely on Fairy, because product ads used to feature dishes being washed and placed straight in the drainer. It’s true, they did, but then again, so did American ads. Interestingly, one commenter suggests that not-rinsing was commonplace in the USA prior to the 1990s.

7. If you’re worried about the health effects of petrochemicals, then I suggest you avoid lip balm, which you ingest far more of than dishwashing detergent. Focusing on the petrochemicals in dishwashing detergent is a clear case of missing the forest for the trees, because they’re basically unavoidable—at least, if you wear commercially produced clothing, wash and deodorise yourself with store bought products, and eat commercially grown and harvested food.

8. This initially caused me some problems during my fieldwork in Korea. To me, hot water was a necessary part of getting dishes clean; to the family I lived with, it was an unnecessary extravagance.