A finger? You were lucky. I had to use a stump, and we didn’t have any water or soap either. Just our tears.
Tears? You had tears? We had to use gravel - and we were glad of it.
(I had wondered if TomScanlan’s post was a setup line)
Another data point - my (admittedly rough) measurements of my sink give about 13x15 inches. I usually fill it about 4 or 5 inches deep with very hot water and let dishes soak for a while. I wash them, placing them in the other basin. Then I rinse them off quickly in running cool water from the tap.
This gives a rough upper bound of 4.22 gallons + whatever is used for rinsing. Given that I live alone and don’t need to wash lots of dishes, I’d say the total is definitely no more than 6 gallons. I usually wash dishes once every two or three days, so let’s say 6 gallons * 4 times in a week = 24 gallons a week.
I haven’t used a dishwasher in years, so I have to ask - can you adjust the amount of water used if you have a smaller load, and end up with equally clean dishes? This is trivial to do when hand washing.
I suspect that if you looked at enough situations, you’d find that hand washing is most efficient for small loads but dishwashers are more efficient for larger loads. For someone living alone (like me) I don’t think a dishwasher really makes sense. In order for it to be water-efficient for me, I’d have to wait until I have a large load of dishes. But by that time I probably wouldn’t have clean dishes left. The efficiency curves for hand-washing and machine-washing probably meet at about the “3 or 4 people in a household” level.
My kitchen isn’t huge about 8’X17’ if you measure to the walls. Open floor space is about 4’x 15’. When we remodeled, I put base cabinets everywhere I could, same with the uppers. If I ever win the lotto, I am building a house where I design the kitchen of my dreams.
I have to wash mid prep also sometimes.
My, you’re rude.
I do know what I’m talking about, having worked in restaurants. Of course there’s the overhead sprayer, but the standard method I’ve used is spray/wash sink and rinse/disinfect with bleach sink. Two sinks. You can use three if you want one to spray off all the gunk in and one to scrub in.
You aren’t stating where you live, but here we have a rating system for restaurant cleanliness. Would those be the ones that get a “C” in the window here? I believe in LA County the 'ol “dunk and swipe” is against the health code. Dishes must be washed in a certain temperature water that eliminates hand washing as a possibility. Even in small Ma and Pa places you can often see their industrial dishwasher if you peek in the kitchen. I know the open kitchen Chinese place I go has one right there, and they serve out all of their stuff on disposable dishware, so they obviously thought it was worth it just to do the cooking utensils. Frankly, when kick-ass industrial dishwashers are only $10,000 a shot, I don’t see how hiring a manual dishwasher could ever pay. Even the illegals here want minimum wage.
I realize that different regions have different standards of cleanliness. Visiting NYC, for example, grosses me out at some of the stuff I see going down. People actually eat in grimy places that smell of rotten grease, where they don’t clean the windows or dust or do anything. That would never fly here. I always get food poisoning when I visit there unless I stick to McDonald’s and such. Here in LA, not so much. There is almost nothing that LA County does right, but at least we have good health code enforcement, and a grading system that informs the public.
I sometimes think that being forced to work in a small space helps me - makes me focus a bit more (BTW, my measurements are to the walls - there’s about 6 by 2.5 foot of floor.
No option for chemical sanitizing? Here in Washington it’s either/or.
When you’re talking about a “mom & pop” type of restaurant where somebody has poured their life savings into just buying the business, you’d be amazed at how difficult it is to then convince the owner that they’re going to be better off spending $10,000 on a new piece of equipment. These are people who, to the eternal frustration of their cooks, will go to Sears and buy a toaster that was designed for home use and stick it in the restaurant kitchen. So this $30 toaster, which was simply never designed for making 100 orders of toast per day, every day, burns out after three months and gets replaced with another one just like it. Repeat ad nauseum until they’ve spent far more than the $400-$500 dollars they could have spent on a commercial toaster that would have lasted 10+ years. (Side note: this is why, if you look closely at the warranty on most home appliances, there will be a disclaimer in there declaring the warranty void if the appliance is used for commercial purposes.)
Likewise if they already have a big piece of equipment that came with the place when they bought it and that equipment keeps breaking down, they’ll spend the money to repeatedly repair, repair, repair, repair, even when that means they’ll eventually spend far more money than they would by simply replacing the piece of shit. They simply can’t wrap their heads around the price tags on new equipment. Hell, I work for a multi-million-dollar corporation that makes excuses about why they “can’t afford” to spend $10,000 to replace the old, broken-down equipment in the kitchen.
Don’t all these studies and such assume that someone runs a dishwasher entirely, or reasonably, full? What about people who live alone, and thus would take a much longer time to fill up the dishwasher, if they ever did? Wouldn’t the fact that those people would never run a full, or maybe even half-full, dishwasher then change the entire equation, and thus making hand washing an overall better option for them?
Dishwashers can be run on light settings when they aren’t full. And even using the dishwasher multiple times will use less water than most people.
Not a setup line. 5 months of hiking the Appalachian trail. I would just scrub the single pot and spork with my finger and some water. Drinking what came off. Cooking the next meal was enough sterilization, in my mind. Not your ideal conditions for around the house, but it wasn’t a set up 
(must admit, I did wash it with the finger and hotel bar soap a few times along the way, but probably didn’t use more than a few gallons of water for sinking washing the whole time. Rinse, lather, rinse).
You’re both right. Most restaurants have an industrial-style dishwasher that relies on short cycles and extremely high temperatures for sanitation, but yet the bartender can be found washing and reusing glassware from his sinkwash.
Since I get an enlarged uvula every time I go out and get drunk, I assume it’s the unsanitary conditions of the bartender.
I think they call that “character” or “atmosphere” and claim it’s an asset that justifies the prices 
Or else your New Yorker connections are having fun at the expense of the Angeleno and pointing you into utter dives 
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:eek:
You’re looking at it the wrong way: eating in New York works out your immunological system! If you stayed long enough you’d develop a resistance to many different toxins! 
There’s probably something to be said for this. When I first started working in Mexico, I got pretty sick pretty much right off the bat. Every once in a while I’d still get sick, but it was progressively less and less so. Now I can eat pretty much anything without so much as a hint of sickness. You know, unless it’s hygiene related.
As for restaurants, back before I was a real adult I did my rounds at a couple of national chain restaurants. There were no dishwashers, period. It was hand washing, pure and simple. We used sanitizer in the rinse.
Later, in the Army during the couple of times I ever had KP duty, the rinse sink was a recirculating boiling water type of thing. Let me back up; the eating utensils, plates, trays, etc., ran through the industrial dishwasher. But all of the kitchen materials were hand-washed. The rinse portion was boiling water. If you didn’t use the tongs, you would burn yourself.
I can’t speak for Happy Wanderer, but what grosses me out about the two-sink method isn’t the end-product (I have no problem eating off dishes cleaned that way). No, it’s dipping my hands into the water that’s got all the dirty dishes. I’m squeamish, I know, but that just really wigs me out. Especially if it includes a big greasy nasty pan or whatnot. (I’m also really clutzy with those rubber gloves; believe me, I tried 'em).
(for the record, I do fill said greasy nasty pans with hot water and some soap, and let them soak that way, but I don’t submerge anything if it means sticking my hands into the skeezy water to pull it back out)
Clearly Your Mileage Varies, but I don’t see the problem here - So my hands are coming into contact with water containing suspended particles of food and grease - so what? - fifteen minutes earlier, particles of the same food and grease were in contact with my lips, teeth, throat.
It’s rediculous to think in terms of giving up a dishwasher as anything but PC nonsence. Unless you’re making your clothes from sun dried dandelion stalks you are going to use energy. There is a practical limit to what is expected. Every time I hear this kind of hand wringing it makes me want to throw a couple of tires on the fire, dance around it naked and pray to the god of common sense.
You want to make a difference, buy a couple of LED bulbs and give them away as presents. That or hire a private jet to fly around the world telling people not to use their dishwasher. Whatever works for you.