One of my favorite parts of eating is the chewing. I also like the tasting, and the swallowing can be good too, particularly when dining on hot miso soup or crunchy shrimp. (Hmm…I want sushi.) But these three, though crucial elements of eating, are not nearly the only things to enjoy. Other fun things to do to food include:
- Cutting (or spooning)
- Digesting
- Cooking
- Remarking (as in, for example, a blog or Twitter)
- Pelting (consider the example at the end of this clip)
The close reader will observe that nowhere on that list appears the word “dishwashing.” Since the dawn of plates, man has wrestled with that scourge, and until the 19th century found no way around it other than not eating, using dirty plates, or subjugating women to do his chores for him. Besides penicillin, which is difficult to spell and therefore not really worth your time anyway, the dishwasher is the greatest invention of the last few hundred years. It allows for stress-free dining, and guilt free snacking. Want a bowl of cereal? Not sure if you feel like cleaning the bowl afterwards? Don’t worry! The machine will do it for you.
They make food easier, apartments cleaner, roommates happier. They could probably improve sex if we gave them the chance. (But really, let’s not.) Frankly, there is no problem a dishwasher cannot solve.
And now mine’s acting up. I think it was all of last week’s chicken grease. My appliance is no powerhouse. Sized for a typical New York apartment, it holds approximately three plates, or two bowls and a cup, at a time. Our decreased water pressure means that its churning is mild, and only gets dishes sort-of-clean. But we’re simple people, and sort-of-clean has always been enough.
But last week, sort-of-clean stopped happening. I think it was the chicken grease cascade resultant from my first steps into the realm of science. The dishes we ate on emerged with their grime caked on, solid as the Berlin wall, and everything else we put in came back adorned with a thin film of slime. Anything that was almost-sort-of-clean got put away; the rest we ran through again, only to find the grime caked harder. A massive backlog resulted, so that nearly all of our mugs, glasses and plates were in the dishwasher, the sink, or hidden somewhere around the apartment. For two days we had no clean silverware at all—you can imagine the trauma. (I was pleasantly surprised that my roommate, who has more love for cleanliness than I, was not killed by the strain.)
I’m speaking in the past tense, hopeful that the present stillness marks the end of this war, and not just an interlude. I waged a massive offensive yesterday, donning yellow gloves and hand washing every dish I could find. (Yes, it is true: I am a valiant human being.) But this could just mean we’re back at parity. If the dishwasher is truly broken, and not just underpowered, I could be back where man was until the 1886, when Josephine Cochrane pioneered the first practical mechanical dishwasher. I am staring down a spectre, a kitchen poltergeist whose trickery ensures that every smudge I make on my dishware stays there until I scrub it off myself.
My hands are too soft to go back to that.
