by Steve Szilagyi
It’s been many decades since I worked as a restaurant dishwasher. The best part of the job was the camaraderie of the kitchen—the japes, the clash of pans, and the friendly female server who’d stop back to chat during slack times. The worst part was wiping uneaten food off plates with my bare hands into a dirty garbage can by the sink. I had a keen social conscience at the time, and it was depressing to send one half-eaten or barely touched delicacy after another into the moist abyss with my bare palm (no rubber gloves in those days), while elsewhere my favorite rock stars were raising money to feed the starving in Bangladesh. Once I’d cleared the plates of food, I’d spray them with a hose and place them into the rack of the dishwashing machine. Once the rack was full, I’d close the hood, press a button or something, and wait a couple of minutes while the machine soaped and rinsed the dishes at the requisite 140-180 degree temperature. Then I’d lift the hood, let the steaming dishes dry for a few seconds, then pile them on the shelf. The pots and pans I did by hand over the sink.
The human dishwasher is the lowest person in the restaurant kitchen hierarchy. (I was demoted to the position from busboy after an unfortunate incident involving a tray of hot soups and a customer’s lap.) But it’s not a disgraceful position. The dish-doer in a restaurant has a certain solitary dignity, supported by the essential nature of his or her task. In the home, however, dishwashing can be a surprisingly emotional flashpoint. It’s not for nothing the British domestic dramas of personal and social resentment were labeled the kitchen sink school.
While there are many volatile issues involved, the main points of contention are who does the dishes; when they get done; and who notices they need doing. What’s at stake isn’t the difficulty of the task, it’s the implied low status of whoever does it.
Really, since the invention of modern plumbing, dishwashing is probably the least difficult of regularly performed domestic tasks. Compare it to making beds, mopping floors, or changing the cat box. Washing dishes is no more physically demanding than washing your hands. Most kitchens have a window over the sink. You can contemplate the view, slap on a pair of headphones, and listen to podcasts while you wash.
Yet dirty dishes still trigger sulks, accusations, and grim domestic reckonings. Perhaps because the argument occurs in the kitchen – the emotional center of the house – where resentments hum like an old Kelvinator. And if the dispute is postponed, morning delivers its own rebuke: dirty dishes in the sink, that universal emblem of disorder, discouragement, depression, sloth, illness, addiction—possibly even the suggestion of a dead body somewhere in the house. If you cannot be bothered to do the dishes, something larger seems wrong.
It’s what economists call a first mover problem. Everyone in the house is waiting for another to take the first step. And every day they wait, the pile gets higher; the task becomes more difficult. Eventually, someone will find that the psychological cost of looking at a dirty sink exceeds his or her resentment at having to do the work. In my house that person—by a slender but decisive margin—is me. My wife makes dinner and I do the dishes. She enjoys cooking, and I enjoy having an excuse to leave the table early when we have guests (which is frequently), and skipping the after-dinner chit-chat. It’s a fair trade-off: she enjoys the prestige of being the chef (she’s a good cook) and I enjoy the privilege of abandoning her guests and enjoying quiet time in the kitchen.
I do the dishes entirely by hand. People think I’m eccentric or a Luddite for not dumping them into the dishwasher, turning it on, and rejoining the merry converse at the table. But my distrust of the machine is not merely sentimental. People act as if dishwashing machines are obedient servants quietly taking work off your hands. But you are as much its servant as it is yours. Couples and housemates argue about the proper way to rack the dishes, which direction they should face, and whether to run a cycle with less than a full load. Those three plates in an otherwise empty washer are a nagging presence, like all deferred labor. And then there’s that little pang of environmental guilt when you hit the on button …
Sometimes you hear people complain that modern dishwashers are not as good as those that were built before the age of environmental regulation. This is true. And all the more reason to find them annoying and more symbolic than useful. The mechanical dishwasher is a triumph of hope over experience. Or maybe it demonstrates a willing suspension of disbelief: we put the dishes in the magical box where, out of our sight, they are not only sanitized, but cleansed of our bad feelings. When you open the box and pick those hot dishes out of the machine, it’s hard to remember the arguments they caused.
When I came to live away from home for the first time, I noticed how much unhappiness dirty dishes caused in the world, and grieved over this fact. With a young man’s eagerness to put the world right, I pondered the subject deeply, and came up with what I thought was a simple solution. I called it one man, one bowl.
As I saw it, dirty dishes piled up in the sink because there were clean dishes in the cupboard. The final reckoning could always be postponed by simply grabbing a new dish. Nobody “owns” the dishes in a cupboard. They’re like a slush fund that everyone draws from, but no one replenishes until it runs out, and then all hell breaks loose. But what if there were only one bowl, one dish, one cup, one fork, one spoon per person? And we carried these with us like a wallet or purse. What if after eating off a dish, we carried it over to the nearest sink and washed it ourselves, just as we wash our hands after going to the bathroom? Dinner guests, too, could wash their own plate before leaving. At a party the line at the sink might become part of the evening’s sociability. I once imagined everyone carrying personal utensils in a kind of utility belt, like frontier tableware elevated into fashion. Nobody I’ve told it to has thought much of it.
Meanwhile the younger generation has arrived, by another route, at my ideal of fewer dishes. As any estate-sale dealer will tell you, kids nowadays are aghast at the amount of fine china set to come down to them as an inheritance. Preceding generations were raised to believe that you were not an adult without a proper set of formal china, accumulated over a lifetime, and brought out for distinguished guests. Young people stare at the stacks of porcelain in glass-fronted cabinets and say, “What the hell are we supposed to do with this stuff?”
Well, I have the answer. Do not reject those elegant cups, saucers, plates, platters and gravy boats. Accept them gladly. Store them in the basement, the garage, or wherever there is room. Then use them. Eat and drink from them. See what it’s like to devour takeout noodles and burrito slop from fine dishware. Drink your pod-brewed coffee from delicate cups and saucers. Raise your pinkie.
Then, after dinner, instead of letting the dishes pile up in the sink and provoke a quarrel, toss them one by one into the garbage—or better yet, stand in the driveway and frisbee them into a can, each throw ending in a gratifying crash.
Put it on TikTok, and within days half the country will be doing it.
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