That does not sound delicious 
I don’t wash veggies that I’m going to cook, unless there is visible dirt or feelable grit, both of which come off fine with just water.
But when i peel apples for pie, i leave the peels out and my family eats them raw. I usually use a little soap and wash the apples. When i eat berries i don’t usually use soap, but i used to. (Just a tiny dab of dish soap. It all rinses off.)
As an example, the Stop & Shop website (supermarket chain in New England and elsewhere in the Northeast) lists “Veggie Wash All Natural Fruit & Vegetable Wash Trigger Spray” on their website.
Another “it never even occurred to me” person, here. With something like fruit or veggies I’d just rinse it and in the case of fruit, not eat the peels anyway. And I can’t imagine that trying to wash something like noodles with hot water and soap would result in anything edible afterwards.
Some relatives of a friend of mine are anal about everything they do in the kitchen, so, yes, they wash ingredients they are going to prepare with soap, but the same “neurotic” attention to detail in every part of the cooking process results in superb-quality home-cooked Persian food, better than you would get at a random restaurant 
I don’t. I just eat them with the skin.
Same here. I’ve seen people using peeled cukes for something nicer, like a very nice cucumber salad a friend of mine makes from time to time, but for a regular green salad, I can’t be bothered.
Even more funny is the fancy sort where someone cuts lines down the length of the cuke, so the slices have a kind of scalloped edge where there’s peel on part and not on the rest.
I’ve never peeled a cucumber, either. And i have washed them with soap, although I’ve also just rinsed them off. Or even just brushed the dirt off them with my hand.
Did anyone say the wash noodles with soap? Noodles get boiled. And don’t grow outdoors in the dirt, nor get pooped on by birds.
Thread title. Noodles are food.
I’ve washed squash or pumpkins with soap when they had visible dirt caked on them, but otherwise, no, I wouldn’t do that. A scrub brush usually does the job, or a swish in a sink full of water with a little vinegar in it.
Soap is a lathering agent. It aids the water and scrubbing to be more efficient, but it’s still the water and scrubbing that is doing the cleaning. Soap has its place in cleaning, but is not a necessity. I wouldn’t even consider it for cleaning food.
Not sure if I understand you correctly, but soap does more than just lather (‘foam up’)—its molecules have a polar (alkaline) and a non-polar (fatty) end, where the non-polar end binds to oily substances that otherwise wouldn’t mix with water, and the polar one then binds to water, essentially surrounding oily dirt with a water-soluble coating. So for any oily stains that don’t mix with water, soap is essential for cleaning.
I clean all my fruit and vegetables with liquid soap and water. Then I use a towel to dry them well, one by one. This is what my parents did. When I was little, I thought everyone did the same.
Hey, I live in Africa!
I credit my incredible digestion to Ma Bekker, the caterer at my boarding school in Zimbabwe. She was well older than retirement age, and ran a kitchen somewhat impressive to behold. I mean, the food that worked its way out, possibly of its own volition, was so insanely bad.
Tubs of fried eggs, swimming in the oil in which they had been deep fried - yet still had weird green spots… we assumed due to excessively reused oil. We got served tomato sauce with an expiry date from before any of us was even born.
She was particularly famous for her pies. Somewhat like the “mystery meat” that goes into certain brands of sausage, what lay beneath the pie crust was never known, and rarely discussed…
I have travelled reasonably extensively and never had a digestive issue.
I don’t think anyone was talking about noodles.
Think most of us assumed this was about fruits and vegetables. Also, a lot of people rinse rice and/or beans before cooking.
Most people who are just touristing aren’t that lucky. We never had an issue because we were careful. I’m always reminded of my time in Cairo. Our team was doing security for the new embassy. There was a resident Seabee who lived there that was our liaison. Now, the rule of thumb there was: only drink water that comes in an unopened bottle, and never eat raw veggies in a restaurant. We went out to dinner with the resident and I noticed that he was eating a salad with his dinner. I asked him about eating raw vegetables and he says: “This is salad, not vegetables.” 
We didn’t see him for three days after that.
I worked with a guy years ago, who traveled to the Middle East (possibly Egypt) for work. He was careful about consuming only bottled water, except he had ice in a drink at one point.
When my mother visited Egypt, she said they had fabulous-looking fruits and vegetables. And the expats said that if you stayed there for a while, you would eventually decide to eat the produce, and get sick for a while, but usually be able to eat it after that. Their advice was that it was worth it if you were living there, but not for a tourist.
Also, my mom went to a bunch of dinner parties, and she said all the parents talked about the stomach bugs their kids had, in the same way that American parents talk about the sniffles and coughs their kids have.
The only time I’ve had tourist tummy was, weirdly, in Japan. But i wasn’t very sick. I considered it an opportunity to explore the wide range of public toilets that were available. 
Lucky? @Chefguy I had to eat that shit for six years!
In the context of produce, pesticides are often designed to be oily such that rain won’t wash them off the growing crops.
The theory of the overly nervous is that such pesticides can only be removed from produce by a good scrubbing with a detergent able to polarly bind to the oily contaminants and carry them away.
In my own more devil-may-care estimation, the upstream processing before it gets to my local store must be adequate. Both because the evidence is that the public isn’t being sickened by poisons supposedly adhering to food, and because the liability if e.g. Dole was found to be carelessly poisoning the public would crush them.