Dishwashing Debates: The Soapy Science Behind Everyone's Favorite Chore

Next week, the US celebrates the dishwashing Olympics—also known as Thanksgiving. But how best to tackle the washing-up after the big meal can cause as much conflict as your uncle’s hot takes at the table. Do dishes get cleaner when they’re hand-washed or run through the dishwasher? Which is better for the environment? Are those convenient little detergent pods poisoning our oceans with microplastics? And who do we have to thank for that most glorious of inventions, the dishwashing machine? This episode, we’ve got answer to all these crucial questions and more, as we dive into the sudsy story of dishwashing through the ages and across cultures. Listen in now to make the most mundane household chore 100 percent more fascinating, guaranteed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What's funny when I was thinking about talking about this today is so much of this stuff is like at the heart of a lot of arguments within relationships, I feel like. I think there are marriages that are strengthened or hurt by what happens around washing dishes.

• 0:17Nicola Twilley?

  To be honest, there are few things that are more contentious than the correct method of washing the dishes, unless perhaps it's the correct way to load a dishwasher, which is deeply divisive.

• 0:29Cynthia Graber?

  We at Gastropod are here to solve these debates once and for all and to tell you and whoever you are sparring with, which of you is right.

• 0:36Nicola Twilley?

  It's you, or really, me. I'm Nicola Twilley.

• 0:39Cynthia Graber?

  And I'm Cynthia Graber, and this is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. This week, we're not looking at food, but rather what happens to its aftermath, the cleanup.

• 0:49Nicola Twilley?

  Assuming you don't have servants, which sadly neither of us do, post-meal cleanup is a task that has to happen on an extremely regular basis. And even though we never think about it, all the tools we use for that cleanup had to be invented. So we wanted to know about this history. How did people wash dishes before dishwashers and detergent?

• 1:13Cynthia Graber?

  And we wanted to know, if you have a dishwasher at home, is it better to use that? Or should you be doing the dishes by hand? And what's with all the dishwashing pods you can find in the stores these days? Are they really better, or just more expensive? Or could they actually be a worse choice?

• 1:26Nicola Twilley?

  These are the questions of our time, and this is the episode with the best answers science and history can offer. It's supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  You know that feeling when the holidays are here at Starbucks?

• 1:50Speaker 04

  Welcome in. Peppermint mucus for Holly and Ivy? Thank you.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, that one. Together is the best place to be, at Starbucks. Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture.

• 2:17Nicola Twilley?

  And get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 2:41Cynthia Graber?

  So how did people wash dishes in the past before all the necessary ingredients like electricity and indoor plumbing and detergent and dishwashers?

• 2:49Nicola Twilley?

  Short answer, we don't really know.

• 2:51Cynthia Graber?

  There are historical recipe books and books about household management, but there's very little on washing the dishes.

• 2:57Nicola Twilley?

  Cooking, doing laundry, all of it gets more airtime than washing dishes. But in part, that's because for most people, for most of history, there weren't all that many dishes to wash.

• 3:09Cynthia Graber?

  Most meals were eaten right out of the pot they were cooked in. From what we know, for most people in medieval Europe, a flat round of bread was usually the plate. It was called a trencher. If you did happen to have a plate plate, it was typically wooden and you didn't wash it, you just wiped it clean.

• 3:22Nicola Twilley?

  And people didn't have a ton of cutlery either, often just a single personal knife or spoon. Forks were late to the party, as you'll know if you've listened to Gastropod's very first episode.

• 3:33Cynthia Graber?

  But people did clean things, and they occasionally even cleaned things that they used for cooking and eating. There's a little ceramic figure from China of someone scrubbing a pot in a tub from about 1,500 years ago. This was how you cleaned up after the meal in the past. You filled a tub with heated water and scrubbed away.

• 3:49Nicola Twilley?

  Sadly, there's not enough detail in that Chinese ceramic to show exactly what they're using to do the cleaning, but we do know that soap was invented thousands of years ago.

• 3:58Cynthia Graber?

  For most of history, soap has been made by cooking two things together. It's a combination of a fat, either animal fat or a vegetable fat like olive oil, heated up together with an alkali. Alkali just refers to a substance's chemical properties. It's the opposite of an acid. A popular alkali was wood ash from a fire, or in ancient Rome, apparently cuttlefish bones were also super useful in soap making.

• 4:20Nicola Twilley?

  The two ingredients, fat and the alkali, when they're combined, some very cool chemistry happens. It's literally Called supponification or soap making. The final product, soap, does a couple of things. It helps water to not stick to things so the water can flush dirt away more easily. And it encapsulates dirt, too. Both of these properties make soap soapy for cleaning.

• 4:44Cynthia Graber?

  That soap came in bar form. It was a solid. Women traditionally made that soap at home, or if they lived in cities, they could find soap in the shops by the mid 1800s. But they had to shave it up to make sudsy water because it's just hard to get the water to be soapy enough by rubbing a bar through it.

• 4:59Nicola Twilley?

  A big breakthrough in the dishwashing universe was something called the soap saver.

• 5:04Speaker 05

  It's sort of like a little cage on a stick and the cage opens and you can put slivers of soap. So if you had bar soap and you had a little soap left over, you would put the sliver of soap in that little cage and then swish it around in the dishwater to make soapy water.

• 5:25Cynthia Graber?

  Susan Strasser is an Amerita history professor at the University of Delaware, and she's the author of a book about housework called Never Done. She says that people also used metal scrubbers. These were available from about the mid 1800s onwards, or they might have used rags, basically whatever they could find.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  Sand was a big thing to use to scrub.

• 5:44Nicola Twilley?

  In magazines and housekeeping manuals from the time, Susan has found tips on scrubbing with salt, soda, borax powder, clay, and all sorts of other things.

• 5:53Cynthia Graber?

  But the actual biggest issue before plumbing wasn't the soap or what you used to scour the pots and dishes, it was the water.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  And the most important thing to remember about water is that a pint's a pound the world around, that it's heavy. It's really heavy. It's hard to haul a lot of water. And so the important thing about dishwashing was conserve water as much as you can.

• 6:17Nicola Twilley?

  Before the glories of indoor plumbing, women, and it was usually a woman's job, they had to go fetch water and haul it back to their kitchen by hand. The water might be coming from a few blocks away at a city pump, or 50 or 60 yards away from a well, or even further from a river or lake, and they had to slog back home. With all that water.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  I have a dehumidifier in my basement and I have to lift the water from the floor of the basement to the utility sink. It's heavy. It's heavy and I, you know, I try to lift weights from time to time. I try to keep myself strong, but to think about how much water women were hauling all the time.

• 6:59Cynthia Graber?

  It was a lot of work to get all that water home. So people were pretty miserly with it. When it came to dishwashing, they filled two tubs. One had cool water in it. That was for the rinsing. And one had to be lifted onto a stove and heated up for the cleaning.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  And then when you think about so much of it being hot water, it's becomes not only grueling work, difficult work, but also potentially dangerous. I mean, you could scald yourself.

• 7:24Cynthia Graber?

  And so you can imagine that it was a huge transformation for a household, and particularly for women, when homes started to get indoor plumbing. That didn't happen until really pretty recently.

• 7:33Speaker 05

  Well, I would say it started to change in about the 1880s. But how much it changed for whom was really a matter of class, not only of class, but also of urban and rural differences. So really, for working class people in urban areas, I don't think that it really started to change until the 1920s, that you really had large numbers of people who had running water in their living spaces.

• 8:06Nicola Twilley?

  The impact of indoor plumbing was a huge, huge saving of women's time and effort. You can hardly imagine how much time women spent hauling water in the past, unless you look at parts of the world today where women and girls still have to do exactly that. Yunisef says in places without plumbing, women and girls spend on average more than two hours collecting water every single day.

• 8:30Cynthia Graber?

  In America, once people had indoor plumbing, they were no longer quite as worried about conserving water. Susan says that in Philadelphia, water consumption per person doubled in the first 14 years after the city built its public waterworks. Of course, this wasn't just from dishwashing. People were also less miserly with washing laundry. And with bathing, but it all added up and everything was cleaner.

• 8:51Nicola Twilley?

  Indoor plumbing for the win. But women of the 1800s, have I got something super exciting for you? How about a machine to wash those dishes?

• 9:01Cynthia Graber?

  Because at the same time as indoor plumbing started to come into existence, early to mid 1800s, inventors started to turn their minds to how to use that flowing water to clean dishes mechanically and save even more labor. A guy named Joseph Houghton patented the first dishwasher design in 1850.

• 9:17Speaker 06

  Now, it was a really crude thing. It was a wooden box with a crank on it that pumped the water around in there and splashed it over the dishes. That never really got commercialized.

• 9:27Nicola Twilley?

  Alan Claus is a chemist who spent a large chunk of his career in R and D at Procter and Gamble, which makes a lot of the world's dishwashing detergent.

• 9:36Cynthia Graber?

  Houghton's design was basically like an open tub with dishes and water splashing around. It really didn't work very well. But those early designs were the spark that inspired the woman who is usually credited with, quote, unquote, inventing the dishwasher. She was a wealthy socialite from Illinois named Josephine Cochran. She, of course, had servants and they did the dishes, but she was really unhappy with their dishwashing skills.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  When the servants were cleaning them, sometimes something broke and sometimes things got chipped. So they got a little bit broke and she was very dissatisfied with that.

• 10:08Nicola Twilley?

  To be fair, Josephine's dishes were family heirlooms from the 1600s. So it wasn't unreasonable to be a little annoyed. And the woman telling us this story is Lotta Keenitz. She's a test editor at a German magazine and she wrote her PhD thesis on dishwashing.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  And so she first wanted to do it herself because she said, they can't do it. I can do it better. Let me do it. But then she realized how much work it was, especially. If you threw a big party to clean everything up yourself. And so she came from a family of engineers and yeah, got into thinking, how could this be made easier? How could it be automated?

• 10:53Cynthia Graber?

  She had the idea, and this was different from the earliest dishwashers. She thought you could put dishes on wire racks inside a copper boiler and then spray all those dishes with hot soapy water. She tested this idea in her home sink and then she hired an engineer to actually build it.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  And yes, she kind of made a prototype and developed the first dishwasher.

• 11:13Nicola Twilley?

  Josephine's first dishwasher was still hand cranked. But the idea of spraying the dishes, that was her innovation and it's still pretty much how dishwashers work today. She got her first patent in 1886 and promptly hit the road to start selling her magical new device.

• 11:30Cynthia Graber?

  Josephine thought that wealthy housewives like her would be interested, but they weren't biting. The machine was quite expensive. It was like $2,500 to $3,000 in today's money. Servants were cheaper.

• 11:39Nicola Twilley?

  So Josephine pivoted. She went to Chicago and she sold two of her machines to hotels. Hotels washed a lot more dishes and they were convinced that her machines would pay for themselves by saving on labor and broken dishes, as well as giving them a more hygienic wash.

• 11:56Cynthia Graber?

  Josephine made a particularly big splash at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Nine of her machines were used there. They were a huge success and she won a major prize at the fair. It was one of the very few inventions by women to do so.

• 12:09Nicola Twilley?

  Josephine died in 1913. She never saw her invention become ubiquitous. But her company was bought by KitchenAid and then by Whirlpool. So her legacy really does live on.

• 12:19Speaker 06

  But it was still a very long time until it caught on and became common in US households well after the clothes washing machine, which was actually invented later.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  It didn't really become commonplace until the 1970s. I grew up in a household without a dishwasher. Or as my father used to say, I have four dishwashers, meaning the four children.

• 12:42Cynthia Graber?

  Child labor is always going to be the least expensive option. But one reason that dishwashers weren't quite as useful in the beginning as they theoretically should have been was because nobody had invented dishwashing detergent. That story's coming up after the break.

• 12:58Cynthia Graber?

  Support for this episode comes in part from NetSuite. We hear a lot about how AI can change how business gets done, but NetSuite Next can help you figure out what that actually looks like. It's the next generation of the business management suite that more than 44,000 companies rely on.

• 13:12Nicola Twilley?

  With NetSuite Next, AI is woven into every tool you already rely on. It gives you insights when you need them. It puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems. And it lets you ask complex questions about your business in natural language, just like talking to a colleague.

• 13:28Cynthia Graber?

  NetSuite has put out a new free business guide. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. You can download it today and see how AI could reshape work across your organization and how you can prosper from it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to netsuite.com/gastropod. Get your free guide at netsuite.com/gastropod. That's netsuite.com/gastropod. netsuite.com/gastropod.

• 13:58Cynthia Graber?

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences,

• 14:11Nicola Twilley?

  and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 14:26Nicola Twilley?

  Support for this episode comes in part from Feeding America. The holidays feel a little different when we show up for one another. And for families facing hunger, your generosity could mean one less difficult choice.

• 14:38Cynthia Graber?

  Across the Feeding America network, your donation fulfills the promise of connecting families to nourishing food and greater stability. When you give this holiday season, your help ensures more neighbors can gather around a meal.

• 14:49Nicola Twilley?

  This Thanksgiving, give at feedingamerica.org/holiday.

• 14:57Nicola Twilley?

  So we said that soap goes way back, and that is, of course, what people historically used to do their dishes. But these days, we use detergent. So how did soap become detergent? And what's the difference, anyway?

• 15:11Cynthia Graber?

  Until, really, quite recently in human history, all soap was natural soap. Like we said, it was made from animal or vegetable fat with an alkali. This was great for washing hands and bodies, but when it came to doing the dishes, there were some limitations.

• 15:23Nicola Twilley?

  Natural soaps are not great at cutting through the kind of heavy grease that can be left on dishes and pots. And they often react with water in a way that isn't fantastic either.

• 15:34Speaker 06

  When you try to wash dishes in hard water with soaps, you tend to have a problem with soap scum leaving films, particularly on glasses, you know, where you can really see it. But even on ceramic dishes, they're not very shiny and don't look perfectly clean.

• 15:50Nicola Twilley?

  Hard water just means water with a lot of minerals in it, usually calcium and magnesium picked up from the rocks the water has percolated through. Soap molecules react with that calcium and magnesium and produce a scum.

• 16:04Cynthia Graber?

  Luckily, scientists found a solution, pretty much by accident. In Germany in World War I, they were short on animal fat. And so researchers started trying to make soap from coal tar instead. It took a while to get it to work, but by the '30s, they'd nailed it.

• 16:16Nicola Twilley?

  The result was synthetic detergent. It cleaned things the same way soap does, but because it's chemically different, when it reacted with hard water, it didn't form a solid scum.

• 16:27Cynthia Graber?

  The first synthetic detergents were for laundry, not for dishes. Procter and Gamble sold a product called Dreft in 1933. And even though it was meant for laundry, they also had ads showing housewives sprinkling it into tubs to wash dishes.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  She uses Dreft, remarkable new suds improvement. And here's what happens when these dishes have been rinsed and allowed to dry by themselves. See? No trace of scummy dishpan film. They're sparkling clear without polishing.

• 16:53Nicola Twilley?

  The next breakthrough in detergent also came about kind of by accident. Scientists were working on another problem with hard water. Even when you don't add soap, if you evaporate hard water, the minerals precipitate. Out and form lime scale. That grody white gunge was really an issue in the era of steam engines because it would clog up valves and pipes and lead to explosions. Which is why in the 1920s, researchers at the US Bureau of Mines began to tackle the problem of lime scale.

• 17:24Cynthia Graber?

  They came up with a nifty solution. Just add something called phosphate. We talked a lot about phosphate in our episode on fertilizer. Phosphate is a naturally occurring mineral. It's a combination of the elements phosphorus and oxygen, and phosphorus in fertilizer is an essential food for plants. But it turns out that phosphate is also an awesome water softener. The phosphate surrounds the minerals so they can't stick to your pipes.

• 17:46Nicola Twilley?

  And so, in the 1930s, one of those researchers at the Bureau of Mines patented a new product called Calgon, short for calcium gom, that was filled with phosphates. It was marketed, first of all, as a water softener, and it was used everywhere in industry, anything that relied on hot water, from mining to dairies. But before long, Calgon also started advertising itself as something you should add to your home laundry washing machine to stop it from gunking up too.

• 18:16Cynthia Graber?

  And once people did that, they were surprised to find out that not only did phosphates prevent lime scale, but they also actually improved existing detergents. Because that early draft powder, it was great, but it still wasn't perfect, in part because it did still react with the minerals and clothing didn't get perfectly clean.

• 18:31Nicola Twilley?

  Whereas when you combined detergent with phosphates, you didn't get that reaction, but also you got a whole load of unexpected added benefits. Phosphates turn out to help with cleaning. They break up grease and oil, they improve a detergent's ability to grab onto dirt, and they also help keep dirt suspended in water so it doesn't settle back onto the surface you're trying to clean.

• 18:54Speaker 06

  The combination of synthetic detergents and phosphates was truly a breakthrough in cleaning your laundry.

• 19:01Cynthia Graber?

  As Alan says, once again, these phosphates were first introduced in laundry products, most notably Tide in 1946. Tide was a huge success, and it sold out faster than P&G could make it. And that's because people were using it for everything, including hand washing dishes.

• 19:15Nicola Twilley?

  But here's the thing, phosphates are really hard on your hands. People used gloves to avoid what they called dishpan hands, but it is really gnarly to soak your hands in tide water.

• 19:28Cynthia Graber?

  So soap companies took these new synthetic detergents, and they mixed a bunch of them together without phosphates in a way that would foam up and clean really well, but also not leave your hands rough and red.

• 19:38Speaker 06

  The big companies making and marketing hand dishwashing detergents really homed in on the message that it was gentle on your hands. And there were commercials that had the women even soaking their their hands in the dish detergent and saying, oh, you know, my skin still feels good and so forth.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Yes, for sparkling dishes, for soft, smooth hands, there's nothing like wonderful Ivory Snow. Softens your hands while you do the dishes. Pretty green. You're soaking in it. A dishwashing liquid? Palm olive. Mild, then. Oh, more than just mild.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  They were much better than using soap to clean your dishes, natural soap. And they caught on pretty quickly for washing dishes at the sink. And there were a number of brand names, Joy and Ivory.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Dishes go from grease to shine in half the time with Joy. Yes, Joy.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Joy in a bottle.

• 20:39Nicola Twilley?

  These new dishwashing detergents were also liquids, not powders or flakes, and they were all the rage in the 1950s. Companies advertised them heavily to their target audience, the lady homemakers, by sponsoring dramatic serialized TV shows. Yes, the kind of shows we call soap operas.

• 21:00Cynthia Graber?

  As it happens, this is literally because the shows were sponsored by soap making companies. In the 1930s, these serialized dramas started on the radio and aired during the daytime. And the radio networks wanted to get sponsors that would match their target audience, these lady homemakers who were cleaning a lot. And so they enlisted the support of all the big soap companies, hence soap operas.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  The brighter day brought to you by Drift, America's favorite brand for dishes.

• 21:30Nicola Twilley?

  As the soap companies experimented with all the different molecules they could make from petrochemicals, they came up with better and better synthetic detergents that behaved exactly how consumers wanted them. And they'd formulate their products to target different, particular consumer desires.

• 21:47Speaker 06

  Gentleness to hands was a segment, okay? Cleaning better was a segment, particularly grease. And there was one product that came out much later than the earliest ones called Dawn that was particularly effective at cleaning grease. So effective, it was used for crazy things like cleaning crude oil off of water fowl, you know, and things like this.

• 22:12Cynthia Graber?

  Remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 that covered all sorts of animals in oil and how that oil could literally kill them?

• 22:21Speaker 05

  There's a lot more to washing pelicans than there is to washing dishes, but they do have one thing in common. Remember Madge, the manicurist? You're soaking in a dishwashing liquid? Palm olive. Yeah, well, what the pelicans are soaking in is Dawn. Animal rescue folks have been using it for 30 years.

• 22:40Speaker 06

  Now, that's a bit tougher on your hands than Ivory Liquid, for example. So depending on what the user, the consumer, wanted, the products were formulated a bit differently and differentiated somewhat along those lines.

• 22:56Nicola Twilley?

  Back in the 1950s, when these new liquid detergents were taking off, it was the era of better living through chemistry, and Americans loved their sudsy, petrochemical-based dish soap for hand washing dishes.

• 23:09Cynthia Graber?

  And in the 1950s, there was finally also phosphate-enriched detergent for dishwashing machines. The problem before had been that detergent, like Tide, was just too sudsy.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  I think probably most of us, hopefully just one time in our lives, one time or less, have used the dish soap instead of detergent in the dishwasher. And that's where you see like, oh, wow, foaming is a really big deal and your kitchen looks like a Foam party, you know, in Cabo or something like that.

• 23:35Cynthia Graber?

  Dan Souza is Chief Content Officer at America's Test Kitchen, where they study the best recipes, tools and techniques for everything in the kitchen, including dishwashing.

• 23:43Nicola Twilley?

  Fortunately, the chemists persisted. And by the 50s, they'd come up with low foam detergents and foam suppressants, and Cascade and Finish were launched. Finally, dishwashing machines had their own detergent and could clean effectively.

• 23:59Cynthia Graber?

  But it wasn't all good news. Another big change was happening at around the same time. Scientists started to notice that all this phosphate that was being used for things like laundry detergents, it was also causing problems in lakes and rivers. As we said, phosphorus is a source of food for plants, and that includes algae. All that phosphorus in the water led to algal blooms that were overwhelming water bodies and killing off other life.

• 24:20Nicola Twilley?

  Detergent wasn't the only source of phosphorus in our water. We first talked about this problem back in our fertilizer episode, and fertilizer was a significantly bigger source. But manufacturers were eventually forced to take phosphorus out of their detergent. First laundry detergent, and then, quite recently, dishwashing detergent.

• 24:40Cynthia Graber?

  And consumers really noticed the difference.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  We're seeing in our glasses a film and splotchiness.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  They look cloudy and it's hard to explain. Like they're smudged, like they're, like they're dirty.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  No, it's not your dishwasher or just your house. It's a nationwide problem. The reason, the elimination of phosphates in dishwasher detergent.

• 25:04Speaker 06

  And that left a big gap in the cleaning ability of both laundry detergents and automatic dish cleaning detergents.

• 25:14Nicola Twilley?

  But luckily for all those angry customers with their scummy dishes, big detergent had yet another cleaning solution that they were working on behind the scenes: enzymes.

• 25:25Speaker 06

  Well, enzymes out in nature are effectively used by both plants and animals to break down, digest and dissolve different materials.

• 25:37Cynthia Graber?

  We make enzymes in our bodies to do all kinds of things. Some of our homemade enzymes break down fats. Starches and proteins.

• 25:43Speaker 06

  You know, some enzymes can break wood down. So when you see wood rotting in the forest, it's enzymes that are doing that. Okay. They're released from fungus and yeast and bacteria. So, you know, the people that were formulating detergents got on to this and said, wow, you know, if enzymes can break down all these things out in nature, why don't we have them break down soils that are on our clothes and on our dishes?

• 26:06Cynthia Graber?

  This is a different way of cleaning from all the other ingredients in detergent. Some ingredients in detergent loosen and lift up soil. Others do things like making water less sticky so it carries that soil away.

• 26:16Speaker 06

  Enzymes chew things up. Okay. The enzymes break down the basic chemical bonds so that things like protein are broken down into amino acids. Starches are broken down into simple sugars. And then these simple building blocks are soluble and they wash away. So a big old protein that's, you know, that's sitting on your, on your plate when you're trying to clean it, if the enzyme can break that down into a bunch of little fragments, they just dissolve off into the water.

• 26:49Nicola Twilley?

  Research into using enzymes in detergent goes way back. Already in the early 19 teens, a German company was trying to commercialize a pre-wash soak with an enzyme from a pig pancreas in it. But at the time, we didn't know how to make enzymes ourselves and pig pancreases were in high demand to make insulin, so that product went nowhere.

• 27:10Cynthia Graber?

  Then in the 1940s, we got better at making enzymes using bacteria to do the job. But the other problem was that they're pretty sensitive. They break down really easily and so they weren't super useful for a commercial product.

• 27:21Nicola Twilley?

  The first stable one hit the market in the early 1960s. It used the same enzyme German researchers had identified in the 19 teens, but it was manufactured using microbes rather than extracted from a pig pancreas. A Dutch company and a Swiss company came out with enzyme enriched detergents, but they were marketed as specialist products for washing blood stained laundry from hospitals or slaughterhouses.

• 27:46Cynthia Graber?

  Research continued and then in the 1980s and 1990s, the number of different enzymes available to use in Detergents for both laundry and for dishes started to really grow.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  Enzymes is enormous. I mean, it started off with one or two kinds of enzymes. And now there's a half dozen kinds of enzymes that are commonly used in detergent formulations. And they really work and they can be targeted because of the different types of enzymes that are out there in nature. And you can go after carbohydrates, you know, sugar and starch-based soils with certain kinds of enzymes, protein-based soils with other types, fat-based soils with other types. So there's a cocktail of enzymes in many of the detergents today.

• 28:32Nicola Twilley?

  As phosphates were phased out, these enzymes became more and more important, first for laundry and then for dishes.

• 28:39Speaker 06

  Nobody's ever figured out how to totally replace phosphates performance-wise, but there's been amazing progress in automatic dishwashing detergents today are complicated in their formulation, but they're good. They really work.

• 28:54Cynthia Graber?

  Great. Dishwashing detergent works. Everything is awesome. Harmony in the kitchen, right?

• 28:58Nicola Twilley?

  Unfortunately not. I hate to disappoint you, Cynthia, but in fact, the real struggle is just about to begin. We may have dishwashers and fancy detergents, but we also have disagreements and disputes, big ones about how to use them. Fortunately, we've got the correct way to load your dishwasher and so much more after this quick word from our sponsors.

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• 30:20Speaker 04

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• 30:49Cynthia Graber?

  Something that can be a source of strife in a household is whether you should wash the dishes in the sink or throw them all in the dishwasher. We spoke to a guy who loves hand washing dishes so much, he wrote an entire book about it called How to Wash the Dishes. His name is Peter Miller.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  How to Wash the Dishes was written as an article for a magazine. A little piece that I wrote prompted by my two 30 and 32 year old, I forget what they were, 28 and 30 at the time, kids where I said to them, neither one of you knows how to wash the dishes. And they looked at me and laughed and said, you wash the dishes. And I said, I know, I do wash the dishes. But I said, you really don't have a sense or a plan for how to wash the dishes.

• 31:37Nicola Twilley?

  I'm gonna take a wild guess and say maybe Peter's kids rolled their eyes at this point. We're gonna get to the prescription for perfect dishwashing in a minute, but first I should declare an interest. I am on Team Dishwashing Machine.

• 31:51Cynthia Graber?

  So am I, big fan here. And so to be able to really judge whether one option is better than the other, we wanted to understand how dishwashing machines work.

• 32:00Nicola Twilley?

  A lot of videos online where mega nerds have put waterproof GoPros into dishwashers to see what's going on. They're boring, so I'll save you the trouble. It's fundamentally the same mechanism that Josephine came up with. A couple of sets of arms that spray hot soapy water at the dishes.

• 32:17Speaker 07

  And yeah, then the spray arms get turned around by the pressure of the water that is pumped into them.

• 32:25Cynthia Graber?

  Lotta told us that a big benefit of a dishwasher is that the water is used multiple times. The water breaks food down and blasts it off dishes. It falls back to the bottom and then that grime gets sieved out of the water and the newly cleaned hot soapy water is blasted back up on the dishes. This happens over and over again, really quickly, like 10 times per minute.

• 32:44Nicola Twilley?

  That is certainly faster than I wipe soapy water over my dirty dishes in the sink. But is it better? Fortunately, Lotta has tested this scientifically, which is harder than it sounds.

• 32:56Cynthia Graber?

  There's a very specific amount of food and type of food that gets dried on dishes before people are asked to either wash those dishes by hand or put them in a dishwasher. Lotta says it's standardized.

• 33:06Speaker 07

  For example, there are items that should be soiled with spinach that is prepared in a certain way. There are items that are soiled with egg yolk and only the yolk.

• 33:21Nicola Twilley?

  It's the details that matter when you're trying to be scientific about washing up. And so what does science say? Which is better, dishwashing machine or doing the dishes by hand?

• 33:31Speaker 07

  It's clearly the electric dishwasher. So it uses less water, it uses less energy, and it also uses less detergent than manual dishwashing.

• 33:41Cynthia Graber?

  Sorry, Peter, but Nikki and I, as solid members of Team Dishwasher, are very happy to hear this. So to start with water, how much better is using a dishwasher than doing it by hand?

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Anything from 2013 and on, a single use won't use more than five gallons. So a single process won't use more than five gallons of water. If you have an energy star, it's going to be even less, so 3.5 gallons or less, which that might sound like a lot. I mean, like, whoa, five gallons, that's a lot of water. But when you look at hand washing, you know, faucets Go about one and a half to two gallons a minute while they're on. And so if you did, say, five minutes of hand washing and you were on the high end of that, you're looking at 10 gallons. It's like twice what it would take to run a full dishwasher.

• 34:23Cynthia Graber?

  And in five minutes, you're definitely not going to get an entire dishwasher's load of dishes done. So it's really not even close. Lotta told us about an experiment where they measured just how much water people were using to hand wash an entire dishwasher's load of dishes.

• 34:36Speaker 07

  I think the most spectacular finding they had was one participant who had used like 160 liters of water to clean a whole load of dishwasher items.

• 34:48Cynthia Graber?

  For those of us who use gallons, that's about 42 gallons.

• 34:51Speaker 07

  So everything that would fit in a dishwasher, they had to wash by hand. And they used running tap water to do it. So they just were used to doing it like in that way. And of course, that wastes a lot of water.

• 35:05Nicola Twilley?

  And of course, you're also heating up that water. So the more water you use, the more energy you also use.

• 35:12Cynthia Graber?

  But Peter, the dishwashing fan, says if he were in a competition with a dishwashing machine, he'd win.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  If you use the bowl, I would counter that, in fact, I could beat the dishwasher. I could make the cleaning more precise, more accurate, and use less activity.

• 35:31Nicola Twilley?

  The bowl is important. This is Peter's name for his method of hand washing dishes, which Lotta agrees is the scientifically optimized method if you're going to wash dishes up by hand.

• 35:42Cynthia Graber?

  This scientifically optimized method also happens to be the old fashioned way people always did it, but now with detergent instead of soap.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  If you're going to wash the dishes, you need a bowl full of good soapy water that's not over diluted and not messed up by food.

• 35:57Nicola Twilley?

  With that, plus a sponge and a bowl of cold water for rinsing, you are equipped. One by one, working from cleanest to dirtiest, you take a dirty dish, clean it using a sponge in the bowl of hot soapy water, then dunk it in the bowl of cold water to rinse it, and then put it on a rack to dry. Peter is so committed to the hand wash, he often uses his dishwasher. As the rack.

• 36:21Cynthia Graber?

  This method has also been studied. It's been compared to the dishwasher, but also to other methods of hand washing, like if you were to wash your dishes under running tap water. And it definitely beats the running tap water method by a lot. But it doesn't seem to beat the electric dishwasher in terms of water use. Sorry again, Peter, but I can't say I'm sorry about the results.

• 36:39Nicola Twilley?

  Also, no one saves up a full machine load of dishes to hand wash or uses just one bowl of hot soapy water to do that many dishes. That said, of course, not everyone waits until their machine is full to run it. We just aren't living scientifically perfect lives.

• 36:57Cynthia Graber?

  But Lata told us that on average, studies find that the dishwasher cuts water use by about 70% and energy by more than 40%. And the dishes even come out cleaner.

• 37:06Speaker 07

  The electric dishwasher is better in that, believe it or not. Studies show that people actually do not believe that very often.

• 37:15Nicola Twilley?

  So there should be no further discussion here. Dishwashing machines for the win. But sadly, this is not the end of the debates. In fact, in my household, it's the start of an entirely new one. To pre-rinse or not to pre-rinse? That is the question.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  I come from a long background of heavy pre-rinners, right? Like dishes look pretty clean when they go into the dishwasher. And so that's how I've operated for most of my life.

• 37:41Cynthia Graber?

  I have discovered upon doing my research for this episode that I come from a mixed household. My mom thought that everything should be pre-rinced. My dad thought that the dishwasher was supposed to do the cleaning. In this case, turns out my dad was right.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  In learning from our reviews team here and their kind of deeper dive into the detergents that are used in dishwashers, they rely heavily on enzymes. And in order for them to sort of cling to plates and bowls and things like that, they actually need some stuff to gain purchase with. And so like a little bit of food on there is actually a good thing. They cling to that and then they're able to get rid of like fats and proteins and all these other things that are covering kind of all of the plates.

• 38:22Nicola Twilley?

  Just to cut your mom some slack, Cynthia, these enzymes weren't in dish detergent back in our parents' heyday. And so rinsing made more sense back then. Then.

• 38:31Speaker 06

  I mean, I worked in this area for years. I couldn't believe it though, after I was retired, that these companies were in their advertising saying you don't have to rinse your dishes at all. You know, and I said, oh, no, that doesn't sound right. You don't try to scrub the egg yolk off a plate before you put it in the dishwasher? Well, with the formulations they have today, it's amazing well to come off without rinsing.

• 38:54Cynthia Graber?

  Lata says that pre rinsing actually takes away from all the water and energy savings of choosing to use a dishwasher.

• 38:59Speaker 07

  And of course, the worst case scenario would be if you use warm water for that, because then you do not only waste water to pre rinse your dishes, but you would also waste energy to heat the water to do it.

• 39:13Nicola Twilley?

  Okay, so dishwashers rule, don't pre rinse. But here's a question our parents didn't have to deal with, and yet there's a lot of angst about today. The pod, is it safe?

• 39:26Cynthia Graber?

  Dishwashing detergents used to all be powder, then you could buy liquid versions. Then, the first product that was sold as a single dose, one pre-measured amount you put in, was called Salvo, and it came out in the 60s. And again, like all detergent innovations, it was first for laundry.

• 39:40Speaker 06

  The idea was, well, it's very convenient. I don't have to pour a powder into a measuring cup and put it in my clothes washing machine. I just drop one or two Salvo tablets in there. The Salvo tablet was actually rather large and looked kind of like a hockey puck. Turns out it dissolved about as well as a hockey puck. It was a disastrous experiment in the marketplace because it didn't dissolve well enough to work well.

• 40:05Cynthia Graber?

  The tablets for the dishwasher didn't work well either. There was usually some detergent left in a clump in the dispenser.

• 40:10Nicola Twilley?

  But then along came something called PVA, or polyvinyl alcohol, which is a kind of plastic that dissolves in water.

• 40:17Speaker 06

  Then it became clear, oh, now, if we're going to do this, we can seal off separate compartments in the pouch, and then they'll be released during the wash.

• 40:29Cynthia Graber?

  This is actually really helpful. They can use different strengths of PVA to make sure that different products get released at different times. And this is great because like for enzymes, they don't work as well when they're mixed up with some of the other chemicals and It's better to release them separately.

• 40:43Nicola Twilley?

  But surely, releasing dissolvable plastic into your dishwasher cannot be a good idea.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  The plastic pollution issue is not an issue with polyvinyl alcohol. You know, it dissolves and it's it's pretty benign and it it comes out in in sewage treatment and it's really a pretty good actor in terms of the environment. And once it dissolves, it basically never comes back to particles of plastic that are causing all the problems, you know, that we're hearing about. So that's not really the problem.

• 41:19Cynthia Graber?

  So far, that is actually what the studies show. You might have heard of microplastic pollution, bits of plastic that stick around in the water and harm wildlife. But these dissolvable plastics don't seem to lead to the same issue. They don't seem to harm wildlife, based on the few studies that have been done. So far, there's not a whole lot of independent research on this, but the EPA has said it's of lowest concern.

• 41:38Nicola Twilley?

  Onward to the area where I am the undisputed world champion: loading the dishwasher.

• 41:44Cynthia Graber?

  You're gonna have to compete against my partner, Tim.

• 41:46Nicola Twilley?

  Listen, I'm so good, it's not even going to be a contest. But according to Lotta, everyone thinks that about themselves.

• 41:54Speaker 07

  There was one study where people were given a certain amount of of items that should fit in the dishwasher.

• 42:01Cynthia Graber?

  They were given 140 items and told to fit as many as they could into the dishwasher. They didn't know it, but all 140 things could fit in one load at the same time.

• 42:10Speaker 07

  So a lot of people think they loaded it until it was full, but actually you could have put more items in.

• 42:20Nicola Twilley?

  In the study, only a third of participants successfully got all 140 items in, but I would have definitely been among them.

• 42:28Cynthia Graber?

  You just keep telling yourself that.

• 42:30Speaker 07

  So that's maybe a hard point to improve, because if you're already thinking you're doing it right and you already have the feeling that you loaded the dishwasher to the fullest, then you can't really adjust this habit. But maybe just think about if you arrange the dishes in another way, maybe something could still fit in.

• 42:51Cynthia Graber?

  You have to be open-minded that you do have room for improvement. But that said, there are definitely some hard and fast rules to loading the dishwasher.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Most of them are pretty logical and and make good sense. You know, if you are putting plates next to one another and they're touching when you put them in. They're not going to get as clean as if there's a little bit more space. In terms of top rack and bottom rack, there are some good rules to follow. So it's going to be a little bit cooler temperature on the top rack. So it's usually the place for, you know, you're washing plastic containers and things like that, or glassware. It's gonna be a little bit more delicate up there as well.

• 43:24Nicola Twilley?

  The water pressure is typically lower at the top two, so it's less likely to blast your Tupperware hard enough to flip it over, which as we probably have all experienced is a nightmare because it ends up full of grody water.

• 43:38Cynthia Graber?

  And a side note about plastics, harder plastics that might say they're rated dishwasher safe are fine, but softer plastics like single-use takeout containers shouldn't go in the dishwasher because the water heat can warp them. And also, some scientists say that they might be weakened enough that when you next put food in them, chemicals might leach out.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  When you get to utensils, we actually find you get cleaner results by having the spoon head up and the fork utensils up. And I have a friend who swears by putting all of the spoons in one, all the forks in another, all the knives in another, so that when they're clean and she takes it out and she's loading them back in, it's just one hand and goes in. And I appreciate that. I think that is really great efficiency on the backend, but it's not good practice to put spoons with spoons and forks with forks, especially spoons, because they can nest against one another in the same way that two plates can, and they're not going to get as clean in the middle there.

• 44:31Nicola Twilley?

  Spoons cannot be allowed to spoon.

• 44:33Cynthia Graber?

  But I did wonder if Dan corrected his friend on that very incorrect dishwashing loading technique.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  No, I value that relationship too much to try to correct that, you know, and I like, I know, I know for some people, this is a hill that they will die on in terms of dishwashers. I am, I'm not that person. I, in my mind, it's like, it's just amazing to own a dishwasher. That's kind of my mentality. It's like, look, if these dishes are going to go in there and they're going to come out pretty darn clean, and we didn't have to hand wash them, that's a win. So that's the place that I am. And I have to do that because if I allow myself to go the other way, I think I would be a horrible person to live with.

• 45:09Nicola Twilley?

  Dan knows the rules, but he's pretty liberal on most points. But he does put his foot down when it comes to things that should never go in the dishwasher.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  So obviously really delicate stuff. If you've got stemware and sort of beautiful glasses that are best hand washed, that you're going to want to go with that.

• 45:24Cynthia Graber?

  Keep wood out of the dishwasher. It'll crack and fade.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  A lot of pots and pans will say they're dishwasher safe, but they're not, and they can cause kind of pitting and. And then nonstick cookware, which is obviously so common these days, that nonstick finish doesn't do well in a dishwasher. So you'd want to not do that.

• 45:41Cynthia Graber?

  And finally, there's one thing that Dan feels particularly strongly should absolutely never go in the dishwasher, and that's his good, sharp knives.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  It has happened to me. I've, you know, taken my knives with me to an Airbnb or something with friends and then like, I like, where's my knife? And it went through the dishwasher, right? And so something like that where it's really valuable and the dishwasher does a ton of damage to it, like a prize chef's knife, I would say that's, that's grounds for divorce, you know, depending on the couple, that can be really bad.

• 46:10Nicola Twilley?

  He's not wrong. Even though I am on team dishwasher for life, some things really do have to be hand washed. So hand washing still has a role to play.

• 46:21Cynthia Graber?

  And even though the dishwasher has changed people's lives for the better, Susan Strasser said there was something lost. When she was doing research for her book, she heard that getting a new dishwashing machine changed the dynamics in families. This chore had been something for kids to do, for grandparents to do. She read us the interviews from her book.

• 46:38Speaker 05

  A lot of elderly women curse the dishwasher. It takes away the one thing that they were useful for. If we didn't want our mothers around, at least we would put up with them because they would do what we didn't want to do. They would do the dishes. But with the advent of the automatic dishwasher, we got rid of our mothers.

• 46:55Nicola Twilley?

  This seems a little harsh. Grannies have value beyond doing the dishes. But I will say that I can see how it would change family dynamics. As a kid, I often did the drying up while my dad washed and it was a nice chance to chat.

• 47:09Cynthia Graber?

  Speaking of drying up, the science of whether you should use a tea towel or just let things air dry, we saved that for our special supporters newsletter, as well as some hot takes on what you should or shouldn't do with your dishwashing sponge. Here's a hint, you should probably switch up your colorful sponges for the beige natural ones because of microplastics. Go to gastropod.com/support to get the scoop.

• 47:30Nicola Twilley?

  And speaking of support, we were originally inspired to make this episode by an email from one of our generous supporters. He had come across a dishwashing technique that shocked and disturbed him. Hi, my name is Kyle Stevens. I am from Boston, Massachusetts. I remember the first time I visited my husband's parents in London and seeing that his mom- Just didn't really rinse all the soap off the dishes. And I thought this was really strange. And then I found out it's kind of a common occurrence. And I'd like to know, is that safe? Kyle, welcome to my world. As you listeners know, I am British and I grew up in England. And my dad, who, as I mentioned, typically did and still does the dishes.

• 48:14Nicola Twilley?

  He also uses this method. He starts by washing the dishes in a tub of hot soapy water, as specified in Lotta and Peter's optimized method. But he doesn't rinse them. He just puts them on the rack with the suds still on them. And then I would wipe those suds off with the tea towel as I dried them. This is how I grew up. And when my American soon to be husband Jeff first witnessed this, he almost had an aneurysm.

• 48:41Cynthia Graber?

  Dan was also pretty shocked when he heard about this method.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Well, all right. So my first thought is that's very water conscious. Like, that's great. You're not using a lot of water. My second thought is the British love beer, right? They have a really old school, long held beer culture. Have you ever tried to pour a beer into a glass that has soap residue in it? So soap and bubbles and that kind of stuff is just not going to work well together. You're going to get some really funky results there.

• 49:10Nicola Twilley?

  To be fair, traditional British ales are pretty flat compared to a bubbly IPA or lager. So maybe the fact that soap residue collapses foam isn't such a big deal.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  But beyond that, like, I just think, I don't know. I mean, if you have a sensitive palate, I just feel like that it's kind of, you're going to run into a lot of soapy taste in a lot of different foods.

• 49:31Cynthia Graber?

  I was thinking about this recently because I hand washed a tea strainer and I thought I got all the soap off. And I poured hot water into it like two or three times. And I could still taste soap on it. The British method sounds a little suspect to me.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  But I don't know. If it's, if it's a whole nation of people do it and it's worked for a really long time, like, I guess more power. But I don't know. I would, I would really encourage a rinse after that, just to get, to get that soap taste off.

• 49:55Nicola Twilley?

  Listen, I don't think food tastes soapy at my parents' house. And honestly, neither does Jeff. And researchers say there's no health risk at all. But that said, soap literally encapsulates dirt particles. So leaving soapy suds on your dish is probably not the best plan. I have Americanized my ways in my own home.

• 50:15Cynthia Graber?

  And to cut the Brits some slack, just like we cut my mom some slack, the most popular British dishwashing liquid brand, it's called Fairy Liquid, their ads always show people not rinsing off the suds. If it's on TV, it must be right, right?

• 50:28Speaker 00

  I don't know, there's, you're kind of blowing my mind right now, to be totally honest.

• 50:31Nicola Twilley?

  There is no science that can explain the British.

• 50:34Cynthia Graber?

  But as you all have now heard, there is science out there that can be used to diffuse basically any of these arguments. But as for Lotta, her spouse doesn't even bother to argue with her when it comes to anything about dishwashing.

• 50:46Speaker 07

  I studied it for like five years, so there's no dispute on who knows it best. Because of course I know it best.

• 50:54Nicola Twilley?

  I mean, she did get her PhD in dishwashing. That could sound kind of silly and all these debates might seem kind of low stakes. But Lotta says getting dishwashing right actually does matter.

• 51:06Speaker 07

  Because it's this everyday task that everyone is doing and has to do if you don't want to end up in a messed up kitchen. So I think it's really important to see how you can make it as efficient as possible. And if we all could like implement these best practice tips, then we could save a lot of resources. And if everyone around the world is doing it, that would add up to a huge amount.

• 51:36Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks this episode to Lotta Keenitz, Dan Souza, Alan Klaus, Susan Strasser, Peter Miller, and our supporter Kyle Stevens. We have links to all their research websites and books on our website, gastropod.com.

• 51:45Nicola Twilley?

  And thanks as always to our fabulous producer Claudia Geib. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.

• 51:56Speaker 07

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 52:23Speaker 07

  Running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go-to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.