Bad teeth and eating soap
One of my very good friends who is from the United States has just messaged me to ask if I wish the soap off dishes after washing them, because apparently Americans think that British people don't do that.
I knew about the bad teeth thing, but do they really think we eat soap?
— Hannah Al-Othman (@HannahAlOthman) April 21, 2021
But apparently many do.
Do YOU eat soap?!https://t.co/FmQhTqfpRp
— Hannah Al-Othman (@HannahAlOthman) April 21, 2021
https://twitter.com/HannahAlOthman/status/1384928453129027588
Ew. You hafta rinse them.
You don't rinse them under the tap after they come out of the bowl?
— Hannah Al-Othman (@HannahAlOthman) April 21, 2021
— indefatigable (margaret) (@Indefatigabl_) April 21, 2021
Ew.
you aren’t supposed to use that much soap, although this explains why USians think handwashing uses more water than dishwashers.
What is “that much soap”?
My wife’s family isn’t particular about getting all the soap suds off when washing dishes, but I am. It does use a lot of water, especially since I wash dishes in running water, rather than a tub of soapy water. I also check for invisible soap (or grease) residue by seeing if the surface is slippery. All things I was taught by my mother; some of those habits are impossible to change. My wife’s family will put things in the drying rack with soap suds on them.
Mostly I use a dishwasher, though.
so much soap that there’s a film left on your dishes. The detergent is a surfactant, which allows it to drain off. That’s all your dishwasher rinsing agents are.
You don’t have to rinse if you use a dishwasher, right?
Dishwashers do a rinse cycle after the wash cycle. I don’t have one myself but I’ve used other people’s. Or you mean first? I think you don’t need to, but I give really mucky plates a brief rinse first anyway.
I can’t get my husband to rinse the dishes; he was never taught to wash dishes, and learned by watching his father, who merely rinsed dishes to put into a dishwasher, so didn’t actually rinse them separately. And I use much, much less water (and soap) washing by hand than with the dishwasher. It depends on habits of washing dishes, and there was no way my mother was going to let me waste water growing up. We had a well, and if we didn’t use it carefully, we could find ourselves needing to sink a new well, which was tremendously expensive. So I learned good habits to save water.
We always, always rinse the dishes. But not everyone does, and that failure isn’t a peculiarly British thing but a family culture thing, I think. I have met people from all backgrounds over washing up (that tends to happen when Youth Hostelling) and I would find it impossible to predict whether someone will rinse or not, just from their nationality.
Dishwashers use less water and energy on a full load of dishes than washing dishes by hand does. Rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher does defeat that somewhat. Thankfully we have a dog that does a fine job of removing food residue from our plates before we put them in!
1) Detergent’s being a surfactant merely means that it causes the filth on your dishes not to stick by reducing the surface tension between the two. You still need to rinse, which is the process that actually cleans your dishes.
2) It’s unlikely that you’re going to save water when washing by hand rather than using a dishwasher. The whole point of the dishwasher is, in fact, to save water. A modern dishwasher uses something like three gallons during its entire run. It takes that much just to fill my kitchen sink enough to submerge a coffee mug.
3) If you’re using your dishwasher correctly, you shouldn’t have to do anything more than scrape the big or really-stuck-on stuff into the trash beforehand. No pre-rinse required.
Who doesn’t like the occasional soap stew…
A bowl of hot water with a squirt of washing-up liquid next to a sink half-full with cold water. Wash in the hot, put into the cold to rinse. Less than two bowls of water for a full wash.
On the subject of washing-up, a top-tip to save on scrubbing pans clean: when you’ve used a pan to cook either milky or egg-based dishes, particularly sauces and scrambled eggs, or if you’ve burnt something onto a pan, as soon as the pan is empty and while it’s still hot, immediately fill it with cold water to the level of the residue. Food cools faster than metal, so the residue cools and shrinks away from the base and sides, making it doddle to wash later.
Oooh, I thought I was a bit weird for rinsing! I do it because I find the “wash everything in a bowl / sink of soapy water and by the end of the process your water is grey and has bits of food floating in it” completely unacceptable. Also, I think manually drying dishes is nonsense and they dry better when rinsed with clean water.
On the subject of using less water for washing, We’ve just bought a good quality but budget dishwasher. 9.2 litres of water for a full wash. No pre-rinse required for dishes as long as not actually burnt on. Less than 520 W of electricity per wash. Prove to me that manual washing including rinsing a days worth of dishes will use less water and energy – especially in climates where cold water out of the tap might be only 10 C and so most people will rinse using warm or hot water.
Also, soap (more likely detergent). Not good to eat.
This is as much as anyone should need.
What is this “soap” of which you speak?
J.A., I actually looked up those studies, and the findings are, shall we say, somewhat dubious. To save water requires certain assumptions be met, and then the water savings is small, and disappears if you don’t run the water constantly. Also, less energy? How? When people use a dishwasher, it requires energy to pump the water, to run the dishwasher, and to heat the water. People using a dishwasher usually keep their water heater set much higher than people who don’t, because if you wash your dishes by hand, you really can’t use the water as hot.
Yeah, I see that cited all the time in various forms of literature, but as a scientist (and an environmental scientist), I do tend to check such things out.
I was under the impression that more modern dishwashers heat the water themselves, and don’t require very hot water on the intake.
I am convinced that it is possible to wash dishes by hand using less energy than a dishwasher. I am also convinced that the method I use for washing dishes by hand uses more energy, and I’m not interested in changing it. I’ll just use the dishwasher. I don’t have the dishwasher to save energy or water, but to save effort and time. The energy and water savings are a bonus.
The method: warm water running for the entire washing and rinsing, with thorough rinsing, and no soaking in soapy water in most cases. We do have a pretty efficient water heater, but still, it’s a bunch of hot water. This is the method that most of the people whose dishwashing style I get to see use (perhaps with the exception of the fastidious rinsing I prefer) That’s a sample set of a whopping maybe three households. But I suspect it’s fairly common.
There are a lot of things where Careful Manual Task > Machine Task > Typical Manual Task. I don’t fault the machine makers for comparing themselves favorably in this way. Not everybody is willing to do Careful Manual Task.
I should stop rinsing the really mucky plates before putting them in the dishwasher then.
No big; mostly I’m just washing by hand anyway.
iknklast
Neither my dishwasher nor clothes washer have hot water inlets, both heat their own water to the required temperature according to the cycle I choose.
My water heater temp is changed each season, and right now in middle autumn, I can shower with barely any cold water required unless showering in the middle of the day.
However, I cannot speak for USAian appliances.
Thankfully we have a dog that does a fine job of removing food residue from our plates…
Just a few years before he died I visited my father in his little home and stayed for a meal.
The plates he was putting food on looked unclean, and I asked him if he needed help around the house. No, he replied, “I can manage. I get the dishes as clean as cold water can.”
Shocked, I asked him if needed a new hot water heater, but he said “It’s OK, I prefer cold water to do the dishes. I still have hot for bathing.”
We ate, we reminisced about old times and talked about our futures. At the end of the meal, he gathered the plates, laid them on the floor and called out “Coldwater, here boy, come and do the dishes.”
But get rid of the remaining grease, attached flecks of old food, & soap-suds on everything, plates, saucepans, etc, and you get rid of the most important joys of British cuisine…
Don’t forget dandruff!
lol
Tim, I’m glad I read #21 before making coffee.
In one of Raymond Chandler’s novels, Marlowe talks with an alcoholic woman while she washes dishes. She puts them in a drying rack and dumps a glass of water over all of them. Nationality not given, presumably American.
With all due respect to John the Drunkard, Raymond Chandler was brought up largely in Britain, and it seems to me that he must have been shocked by the alcoholic, presumably American, woman’s efforts to ensure that the dishes were properly rinsed – efforts that would not occur in Britain, where the fermenting mixture of scraps of food, grease, soap and, possibly, dandruff, not to mention anything worse, imparts to British taste-buds in subsequent meals the kind of savour that the French attribute to their sauces, and at much less cost.
Just to make it clear, I do realise that Chandler’s woman, American almost certainly, but alcoholic definitely, is a fictional character created by him, but the passage in which she is described as actually rinsing the dishes, as opposed to leaving them at peace to fester, is surely intended as a criticism of the American obsession with cleanliness – an obsession that makes this woman, even when in an alcoholic near stupor, to mechanically make a stab at what has been instilled into her since early childhood, and, in British eyes, and surely in Chandler’s eyes to ruin the flavour of subsequent meals (he was, after all, educated at an English public school, Dulwich College, which is also known for educating Nigel Farage, and there he would certainly have become inured to the delights of English cuisine, and in later life nostalgic about those festering stews, that boiled-to-death cabbage, under- boiled potatoes, not to mention spotted dick).
Heh.
Sorry, Tim, but you overstep the boundaries of decency by disparaging the glorious Spotted Dick. I tut in your general direction, Sir, and tut once again!
Dear Acolyte, I personally think that spotted dick manages to overstep the bounds of decency all by itself! The tale of its origins – well, I better not go into that, beyond saying that it was first invented by monks in the 14th century after a particularly terrible visitation of the Black Death.