Dirty Dishes and Bacteria

Filed in archive General Health on March 12, 2007

Do you use a dishwasher or do you prefer the old-fashioned method, washing dishes by hand? My kids all have dishwashers. Me? I prefer to dip my hands in that hot, soapy water and let my mind wander. It's a method of meditation for me. You'd be surprised what great ideas come to the surface.

Whatever method you use to wash your dishes, try to get to them before the food has a chance to dry on them, and make sure they're squeaky clean when you're through. According to Health and Fitness at ArcaMax:

Leaving food on eating utensils and dishes could easily cause bacteria to grow on them, especially if it's moist, according to a U.S. study.

"The best thing you can do is wash your dishes off right away, before the food dries," said Melvin Pascall of Ohio State University. "It saves washing time and gets rid of places where bacteria can survive drying and washing."

Need instructions on the right way to wash dishes by hand? How to Wash Dishes has in depth coverage of the topic, starting with Order of Washing:

This defines the order in which the items (a general term covering all cutlery, crockery, pots and pans) are selected.
The order of washing, through experimentation, is:
Cutlery, cleanish plates, dirty plates, pots and pans, any very dirty item.
Note that any item can be demoted to the bottom of this list simply by force of its disgustingness.

How about using a dishwasher? Opinion, The Newspaper of the University of Waterloo Engineering Society, has a very humorous article on that. Lesson Number One reads:

Lesson 1 - My Dishes are Dirty, What do I do?

Okay, you have some dirty dishes. Say, you made a big ol' eggs and bacon breakfast and all your dishes are covered in a shiny layer of greasy fat. Do you start to pile them up in the sink and hope one of your roommates will come by and the dishes will magically be cleaned? NO! First, you *can* leave your dishes in the sink - but really, this is "temporary" storage for these grimy beasts. (By "temporary" I mean something less than 2 weeks - with something less than 1 week preferred.) The correct answer is take all the dirty dishes (rinsing those with extra grimy layers) and then load these nicely rinsed dishes into the dishwasher.