Yeah, I often also do parties, where I cook for 20-ish people, and often have 3-4 dishwasher loads after a party. Speed does matter some.
Where it matters a lot more is that I live in an condo where officially I'm not supposed to run my dishwasher after 10:00 p.m. The difference between 1 or 3 hours is significant there for running it after dinner. (I basically only run it after 10:00 p.m. after parties; got a very quiet model for that reason.) Particularly since I have some stuff I'd like to have clean before the morning.
This is a pretty terrible example for the author's point.
People are different, and that's OK :) Some people have 1-2 really close friends, others have 20 friends that they are not that close with but still close enough to meet every week for dinner, but if you want someone to help you hide a body when you accidentally killed someone, you're probably better off with 1-2 really close friends.
And also, you can invite anyone over for dinner, that's sometimes how you make acquaintances into friends :)
> Well until this as-of-yet unknown person turns you into a body.
Most people won't :) I've probably met 100s of people and invited them home at one point or another, and worst thing I've experienced is rude, stupid, dumb, clumsy people, or a combination of some/all of those traits. No one is perfect though, including ourselves, so most people come with one or two traits you won't like, but don't let that stop you.
> I don't have friends.
Then head out and make some! Even introverts can make friends, although it is a bit harder for us, I guess.
"Recent studies found that: Social isolation significantly increased a person's risk of premature death from all causes, a risk that may rival those of smoking, obesity, and physical inactivity. Social isolation was associated with about a 50% increased risk of dementia."
Hence the "it's a dinner" part. All you need is keeping me distracted with more lamb chops and drinks until I forget that came to kill you, nom, nom, nom. It always work.
I like cooking and having people over, so it's something I do often. I have kids, but most of my friends don't, so the numbers aren't coming from big families.
If it's something that you aspire to, here's the basic algorithm:
- Learn to cook something well. It's better to master one dish, and pull that trick semi-often, than to be able to cook a bunch of stuff mediocrely.
- When you meet somebody interesting, invite them over in the next month. It's easier to do that soon after meeting them rather than, say, a year later. Feels more natural.
- Before inviting said person, check with existing friends (assuming you have a couple) to see if they're in. It's less awkward to invite someone new over if there are already going to be other people.
- Let everyone know that their friends are also welcome.
Bonus points: keep some reserve drinks around for such situations. I've pretty much always got a spare case of beer on the balcony, and a bunch of wine around.
If you don't already have a couple friends, then inviting people to your home is a little weird, but the same rule about inviting people out early applies: do it in the first month after meeting someone and it doesn't seem weird. There you can go to a bar, or do something you know you have in common.
Perhaps curiously given the above: I'm actually mostly an introvert and like spending most of my time alone. But a lot of these things do depend on your own personality and where you live.
Truth be told I found #1 very easy, #2 and #3 seem straightforward enough, but since I've made it a goal to see friends more it's been a herculean task.
I find myself being one of very few people actually taking the initiative to propose in person hangouts and to make them happen usually involves doing everything in my power to make them as low effort/cost as possible for others.
And honestly I'm grateful for the people who actually agree to do things, they're hard to find!
For step 4, I recommend hanging out with the families of friends of the outcome of step 2 & 3.
There are multiple benefits of this approach.
But apart from that, I feel your pain. There should be more people like you, hope you find them instead of having to convince people that are not like you.
You don't need 20. We ran three dishwasher loads for only eight people recently, with simple cooking. One at the start of preparations so it would be empty and we'd avoid a queue of dirty pots in the kitchen, one when the dishwasher filled up during the evening, and another at the end. To my mind, four loads for 20 people sounds low.
I also often have ~20p over for dinner. Not so uncommon when you meet a couple of families with each a bunch of kids.
However - these types of dishwasher loads stack really well, actually the type of dishes dishwashers are made for packing. You can easily fill the dishwasher with 20 plates of the same type, same with cutlery and glasses. And most of the times at these parties the dishes are fresh, so easy to clean.
Another note. In Sweden and Europe the trend has been for slower programs. To be able to meet the energy consumption benchmarks. 30 years ago dishwashers would typically be done in 1h. Nowadays the default program is often set to 3h. (With an option to do it faster and burn more energy)
Imagine a dishwasher that cleans a single dish in a few seconds. You could wash and put away in similar time to loading a regular dishwasher, and capacity would no longer be an issue.
Taking something from being a process to being a single step in a process can have huge impact to how we do things and what is possible.
I haven't worked in a kitchen in thirty years, and I can still recall the feel of my skin after even a half shift of working next to one of those dish cleaners. As envious as I am of their speed, I'm absolutely sure I don't want to reproduce that sensation at home.
I've spent 1 summer (in Maine) manning such a dishwasher (Hobart, can't forget that name even after 20 years). Efficiency monster, but you gotta be careful around it. Everything spot clean and steaming hot, it was actually much work around it since plates and cutlery were coming in very fast, and I had to also shelve the results to free up space for trays... a proper sweat shop
and this specifically disproves the core premise & title of the article.
SOME people DO need a faster dishwasher. Sometimes the next meal is always "now". Along the same lines restaurants are happy to sacrifice energy efficiency for speed, and they've already got better cleanliness than consumer machines because of those efficiency sacrifices.
This also shows why we need diversity in hiring. Only someone who'd never worked in a restaurant or never considered the needs of one would write this. With diversity we can see needs that are being overlooked. With a diverse set of eyes we can see the "obvious" falsehoods in our assumptions.
Also not sure my home dishes would cope with the rapid heating and cooling, I’m pretty sure my plates are not designed to thermal cycles that quickly, to say nothing of the glasses.
Wow, that breaks back some sense memories (scalding hot water that actually felt kind of good) from a Hobart dishwasher of this type I used many years ago.
The good reliable ones cost about $10K USD though you can get less reliable ones for $4K. You can’t run more delicate common household tablewares in them because they run so hot, nor can you use common detergent from the supermarket, they use more energy though some of the newer ones can use very little water (about 3-4 liters per load), they’re loud for the couple minutes they run their cycle, and parts and repair services are available for longer than residential models. In a home, they’ll never cost justify themselves but I still want one despite the trade offs.
Came here to say this. I worked a lot in commercial kitchens as a dishwasher during college time and I love the commercial dishwashers. Super solid, superfast, super high powered, mostly super effective except for the really really greasy stains on plates or where you need to scrub some slow cooking trays or pots. I’ve always wanted to buy one from my house. From what I remember we have three cycles: a 60 second a 90 seconds and a 120 second cycle and all pretty effective. Most of the cafés I worked in (coffee, sandwiches and baked snacks mostly) basically just use 60 second cycles.
That was 20 years ago though, so maybe the tech has changed by now!
I don’t think that’s true. Have you worked in a restaurant kitchen with a machine like that?
Pre-wash? you can just rinse them if there’s junk.
Gut? That’s surfactants, not specifically ones used in commercial dish washers. You can hurt yourself with dangerous surfactants if you don’t rinse them, when washing at home, even by hand.
It’s also totally not true that surfactants are not rinsed off. The speed comes from many more jets and lots higher pressure. They are performance machines!
Maybe it’s different in casinos, if that’s where you’ve worked?
You need to rinse off what you put in if there is a lot of stuff on it, not because it will not be cleaned (it probably will) but because you don't want to have to clean that out of the machine at the end of the night.
What does it mean for the gut barrier to be destroyed? I've worked in such kitchens in the past and there wasn't any material change in how I digest food or how sick I get, so I would suspect it's not as terrible as it sounds.
> I've worked in such kitchens in the past and there wasn't any material change in how I digest food or how sick I get, so I would suspect it's not as terrible as it sounds.
MrBuddyCasino has linked the paper in a comment next to mine. I don't know enough to decide the credibility of the science itself, but that is the one people are referring to.
The only thing I want to add is that it is not a danger for people working with the machine, but for the people eating from the plates cleaned by such machine.
And in addition the concern is that the chemical used by the commercial machines cause chronic issues in some people after repeated exposure. Clearly if everyone who eats at a commercial kitchen would get immediately sick that would be very easy to detect. You don't need scientist to tell you that. So instead of thinking in black and white think in probabilities. The proposed mechanism is that some people (who were either pre-disposed genetically, or got a larger amount of the chemicals for some reason, or both) gets sick after a longer amount of time.
> What does it mean for the gut barrier to be destroyed?
This isn't very nuanced at all - my only point was that it's not as absolute as it sounds when someone says "eating off these plates destroys your gut lining", not that there was nothing to be found at all.
many commercial kitchens use sanitizers which look like but are not washers, but they guarantee (heating and chemically) that the dishes come out germ free. They're not for food-crusted pots and pans, but work great for china, silverware, and glassware.
Yes.. I used one when I helped out after a birthday party with 80 guests. Getting the dishes through the washer wasn't the bottleneck.. everything else was slower.
Or semi reusable dishes where you have a very thin bioplastic film that is applied with a machine, thin enough to make cost and environmental concerns less relevant, and then on the bottom you have an air hole. Compressed air up it blows the film off and you start again.
Then the same hole is used to vacuum form the new film, while a computer vision camera makes sure everything happened correctly.
Could you make it thin enough to be less wasteful than the water to actually wash?
> Imagine if it leaks? Or anything else goes wrong?
I’ve never remained next to a dishwasher for the entire time in order to baby it in case of trouble, have you?
Plus a modern dishwasher uses less than 4 gal water for the entire cycle, there’s likely less than 2 gal in it at any one time.
> I've never heard of a dishwasher so loud it couldn't be run any time.
Then either you’ve never lived in an apartment building or you’re deaf. As a sufferer of chronic insomnia, 11pm dishwashers are a bane (though less so than midnight washing machines).
> I’ve never remained next to a dishwasher for the entire time in order to baby it in case of trouble, have you?
This is from experience actually!
The last two I've had (heavily used before I got them) had a tendency to leak, so I take a peek at them from time to time when they run. Basically the same level of attention I might pay the oven when it's on or a candle.
I would recommend it. A leaking dishwasher can do a surprising amount of damage.
> Then either you’ve never lived in an apartment building or you’re deaf.
Many modern dishwashers are essentially leak-proof. They have a closed bottom, a sensor that detects liquid and use a low-pressure hose with a valve at the end that connects to the wall outlet. The hose is double walled, so even in the event that the low pressure hose leaks, all water will end up in the dishwasher.
In the US, it's usually a cheap plastic hose connected to the sink supply, so same pressure as the rest of the house. I delivered and installed appliances for a couple years, still do on occasion.
This is also telling how thin the walls are where you live. I live in an old house with an old and fairly loud dishwasher. One door closed and there are no vibrations or noise problem.
Probably floors more than walls, contact points with both, and not so much "thin / thick" but "does this transmit the vibration". Like subwoofers on the ground, it changes how the sound carries.
No, I live in a new building with reinforced concrete external walls. But it's a general rule in Berlin. (Other German states have other rules, often with restrictions even earlier.)
And yes, I have been able to hear neighbors dishwashers before. Again, through the floor, not through the walls, though not in my current building (where I'm on the top floor).
Funnily enough here one part of the government, as part of an environmental push, is trying to encourage people to run appliances like dishwashers and washing machines at night to use renewable power that is currently underutilisied rather than contributing to how much of the fossil power is used at times of peak load.
Of course, at the same time, the also government run fire service is trying to encourage people _not_ to do that for fire safety reasons.
Where it matters a lot more is that I live in an condo where officially I'm not supposed to run my dishwasher after 10:00 p.m. The difference between 1 or 3 hours is significant there for running it after dinner. (I basically only run it after 10:00 p.m. after parties; got a very quiet model for that reason.) Particularly since I have some stuff I'd like to have clean before the morning.
This is a pretty terrible example for the author's point.