It's annoying that the dishes still have some pooled water in them when the cycle finishes; it doesn't always get everything perfectly clean; I have to know not to put the knives or the wooden stuff or anything fancy in it. But in spite of all of that, I use it every day, it's a huge productivity boost, and I'd hate to be without it.
It is significantly less productive to do both, and yet…
I can tell you that I didn't observe a single hand-wash-only holdout.
Perhaps such holdouts existed at a point, but a restaurant can only flatter the ego of their performatively-unproductive seniors for so long. Competition exists.
That's completely, demonstratively false. Our dishwasher broke and we couldn't replace it for a month for different reasons – it was a complete nightmare. Without dishwasher:
- You need to have a space to store dirty dishes
- You must wash them right away, unless you want smell of rotten food that attracts all sorts of nasty from insects to rodents
- You need to have a big enough kitchen sink to wash comfortably
- You need to have a steady supply of hot water in the kitchen
- You need to have a supply of latex gloves, unless you want your hands to look like they're 50 years old
- You need to have a drying rack
- It takes a shitton of time compared to loading dishwasher, starting it and forgetting about it
- You need to clean up everything after you're done
Hand-washing dishes also, from what I understand, uses more energy and water than the dishwasher does.
Correct, more energy, detergent, and water. Dishwashers are more efficient than what you can do by hand because they effectively manage their water usage.
A modern dishwasher will use 3 to 4 gallons on a run. By comparison, my kitchen sink holds about 10 gallons of water on each side. When I wash by hand, I'll fill one side with soapy water and rinse each dish individually. Easily more than 10 gallons of water get used in the whole process.
Dishwashers are so efficient because they rinse everything off the dishes with about ~1 gallons of water, they drain the water, then use detergent in the second run which gets off the tougher food stains, another 1 gallons of water. Then they rinse with another gallon of water.
Dishwashers maximize getting food particulates into dirty water in a way that you can't really sanely do by hand.
Modern high-efficiency dishwashers probably beat the most efficient humans now, but that's relatively recent and not a huge margin (and may not get the same results).
I use the time I spend to hand-wash my dishes as a time to pause and to let my mind wander. Having the hands in water is soothing.
And its a pleasant feeling, where cleaning is part of the food workflow : I cook, I eat, I clean (the kitchen, the dishes, my teeth).
I hate home dishwashers: you have to play Tetris after each meal to fill them, trying not to get your hands/arms dirty, then you have to let it do the work, and now you have to spend a few minutes to get the dishes out and store them where they should be, even though most of them are not linked to a meal you just had. Maybe worse, you could unload the dishwasher at a time completely unrelated to food, so that breaks the link.
On the other hand, having worked in restaurants, industrial dishwashers are awesome.
Fridge OTOH, not so much.
