It’s good for washing scraps of food off your finished plate rather than scraping everything off into the trash. That’s about it. And if you left any larger pieces of uneaten food, drop those in the trash on the way to the sink.
Ugh, when we moved into a prior house the last tenants had left a bone from a pork chop or something similar inside the disposal, and it indeed made a horrible racket until I was able to remove it. Absolutely disgusting.
I have no idea why. It’s a Miele that I got when i remodeled my kitchen a couple years ago. I don’t think I did it at all on the KitchenAide that I previously had for like ten years and then gave to a friend. That one might be nasty.
Having run a large older condo building …
This
and the various comments about cooking grease which coagulates a couple / few feet away from the drain. There to stay until rootered out of there by a plumber after a clog.
Typically there’ll be one vertical drain line that services an entire column of kitchens. It’s often the same size as ordinary household drains, 4" or maybe 6". But instead of one suburban home’s worth of coffee grounds and cooking grease, it’s absorbing the effluent of 10 or 20 kitchens.
Which means that disposal practices that’d clog a suburban home after 20 years will clog that building once a year. Every year. Gee thanks folks.
Now consider that a big building will have 10 or 30 or whatever apartments per floor. Which means 10 or 30 stacks of kitchens. If each clogs once a year on average, then they’re dealing with a stack clog every 2 weeks or so. With all the attendant expense and, for folks on the lower floors, possible effluent from upper floors flowing up out of their sink and onto the floor.
We would prophylactically water jet the verticals from the roof down to the ground floor every couple years, but even then we had clogs in stacks where the residents simply refused to stop running 100% of their organic waste through the garbage disposal and down that pipe.
And of course some owners objected to the expense of us having plumbers out doing work before there was a mess. In their mind preventative maintenance was pure wasteful extravagance. At least apartment management doesn’t have that problem. In some cases they do have to deal with cheap-ass building owners who likewise want to squeeze every penny out of their property.
I see that recommendation a lot from dishwasher and dishwasher soap makers. Every time I’ve followed that advice, all I got in return was dirty plates.
Would you put ordinary food scraps down your drain without a disposal? IME that leads to a clog.
What i got in return was an incredibly filthy and disgusting dishwasher filter, quickly. No thanks. Cleaning that filter is one of my least favorite household tasks.
We used to have a dishwasher with it’s own integral grinder, and that never needed to be manually cleaned. But none of the highly rated ones had that when we last bought a new dishwasher. So I’m stuck with this nasty filter.
Same here, altho we learned we have to run it periodically to keep it from seizing up. I try to flush it out weekly, whether bits have gone down or not (we have a strainer in the opening.
We’ll run ice occasionally to “clean the blades” - I assume it works.
Agreed. It’s (mostly) marketing puffery on the part of both dishwasher and detergent makers.
Lotta room for different experiences depending on whether somebody runs their dishwasher twice a day or once a week.
And whether they prefer e.g. runny eggs or scrambled eggs. A dinner of steak, steamed veggies, & a baked potato leaves a very different residue on a plate than does the same beef, veg, & potatoes served as a gluey stew.
Filter cleaned, disposal run, dishwasher started. 
Sounds like a too-wordy entry in the “Your day in 3 words” thread.
Kinda like the long-lost Doper Bell Rung Book Shut Candle Snuffed.
I run a citrus peel occasionally to clean the blades. I would think ice just puts wear and tear on the edge. 
Mine mostly worked, at the cost of needing to clean the filter a lot more often. And to be fair, it uses less water to only use the dishwasher and clean the filter with a lot of water every week than it does to rinse every dish before putting it in the dishwasher. (Why do i feel like this is a companion thread to my complaints about my washing machine.)
I compromise by only rinsing “clumpy bits” off my plate.
And unlike my efficient and slow clothes washing machine, my efficient and slow dishwasher actually does an excellent job of washing the dishes. So long as I’m careful not to stack them in a way that leaves parts protected from the water, the dishes all come out great. And unlike the faster and more powerful dishwashers of my youth, this one never chips a plate.
Because why not, I just skimmed through my dishwasher manual. It has all sorts of useful advice like load the silverware handle up, don’t use on a ship and don’t let children play inside of it. It recommends just scraping off the food so you don’t have to bother to rinse. The filter clean warning apparently happens every 50 uses. I know that every machine is different.
But I now realize that this is about garbage disposals. Everyone recommends citrus rinds and ice but I read one tip that is genius. Chop up a lemon or a lime and then freeze the pieces. Use that to clean the blades.
Huh, why not?
I had a neighbor who had 5+ lb of leftover meat from a pig roast. Instead of the rational solutions of portioning and freezing it, or offering it to his neighbors, or the irrational decision of putting it in the trash, he went with the insane decision of putting it all down the disposal. After the plumber disassembled the drain and spent a few hours trying to extract it all with a power snake, he wound up having to cut a hole in the ceiling basement & replace a 5 ft length of PVC drain pipe. He said the final cost was about the same as a mortgage payment.
Years ago my sister, who didn’t ordinarily cook, was making a giant batch of stuffing for Thanksgiving. She chopped way too many onions and decided to make the insane decision of running them down the disposal all at once and clogged the sink. Plumbers love Thanksgiving. They charge holiday rates and make bank. She called me and told me and was about to buy Draino to try that before the plumber which would have made the onion goo caustic. I told her not to do that and I’d be right over. It took me like five minutes to unscrew the trap and empty it into the trash. If you must use the disposal, just a little bit at a time.
Yup. Chopped onions go through the disposal just fine. These days, i would freeze them for some future soup, or put them in the compost. But i used to run them through the disposal with no problem. A little bit at a time is always the right choice, though.
That is, indeed, an insane decision. Meat is hard to cut and while i do put little meat scraps through the disposal, even small scraps take a lot of processing. Meat is something i avoid putting down the sink.
This could be the start of a horror movie. Fed on a steady diet of ground up pork shoved down the disposal, the sewer rats multiplied… And grew larger… And hungrier. Soon, scraps fed into the disposal were no longer enough to date their hunger, and so they emerged from the sewers, searching for flesh.
For the first time ever, I put a bunch of ice down my disposal. All at once because ice doesn’t need to be fed in slowly. It briefly backed up into the basin and it was brown dirty water. I am so glad that I did that. Then I grabbed two immature oranges off of the tree in the yard and fed those in. My disposal is now sweet and clean.
I’ve been on septic for more than 40 years and my practices are much like @puzzlegal’s. I compost everything I can. Fat is poured off and frozen. Unused meat scraps are bagged and frozen until my next trip hauling trash. I do that about every 6 months. Between recycling and composting, I can get rid of most stuff. I produce about 1 full Hefty-sized bag of actual trash per month. It’s mostly the commercial plastic detritus from wrapped meats and other foods.
I do have a sink disposal. I find it handy for taking care of the bits that are just too fussy to be handled by composting or freezing. I really don’t use it beyond that. “Sparingly used” is my vote, too, although that is driven more by my fears of having septic issues than whether the disposal can handle more stuff.
I am careful to have my septic pumped as recommended (every 5 years) and they are always surprised at how “clean” the effluent is. I haven’t to date had any plumbing issues with respect to drainage. (Fingers crossed!)