> my husband never rinses dishes after hand washing them;
> he leaves the suds to drip off them as they dry.
Kirsten, we don't know how to tell you this, but your husband is very weird.
> ‘A bit of fairy liquid is not going to kill you’.
Would you put a dollop into your tea to improve the taste? Yes I will grant there is an element of disgust, fussiness, and moralism going on here, but the idea of rinsing off the suds isn't something Americans have cultivated merely over a finnicky or pusillanimous attitude towards dirt. Our family will gladly reuse dishware and cutlery, and my favorite mug is usually crusted with brown tea-stains, but we're not interested in drinking a glass of water that tastes like detergent. While that taste won't kill you, it's not likely to be good for you either, as mice fed detergent in their water revealed a dose-response relationship between proportion of detergent and hypochromasia, macrocytosis, microcytosis, eosinophilia and arisocytosis: https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/full/10.5555/20133062547
> Interestingly, one commenter suggests that not-rinsing was commonplace in the USA prior to the 1990s.
Oh, don't listen to such people. I assure you they are pulling your leg. Americans are eighteen flavors of crazy, but at least we've always known to rinse chemicals off of our dishware.
> my husband never rinses dishes after hand washing them;
> he leaves the suds to drip off them as they dry.
Kirsten, we don't know how to tell you this, but your husband is very weird.
> ‘A bit of fairy liquid is not going to kill you’.
Would you put a dollop into your tea to improve the taste? Yes I will grant there is an element of disgust, fussiness, and moralism going on here, but the idea of rinsing off the suds isn't something Americans have cultivated merely over a finnicky or pusillanimous attitude towards dirt. Our family will gladly reuse dishware and cutlery, and my favorite mug is usually crusted with brown tea-stains, but we're not interested in drinking a glass of water that tastes like detergent. While that taste won't kill you, it's not likely to be good for you either, as mice fed detergent in their water revealed a dose-response relationship between proportion of detergent and hypochromasia, macrocytosis, microcytosis, eosinophilia and arisocytosis: https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/full/10.5555/20133062547
> Interestingly, one commenter suggests that not-rinsing was commonplace in the USA prior to the 1990s.
Oh, don't listen to such people. I assure you they are pulling your leg. Americans are eighteen flavors of crazy, but at least we've always known to rinse chemicals off of our dishware.