Op-Ed: The Dishwasher Is Dirty

No, not the dishes in the dishwasher. The dishwasher, the thing that’s supposed to clean our plates between meals — the washdishes-er, for you Spanish speakers — is dirty. No surprise, then, that dishes often come out of it hardly any cleaner than they went in (once this was particularly true, when Sam unwittingly unloaded before even a wash). Blinded by our faith in technology and soapysuds, we ignore this charade, and every day we load and unload, load and unload, immune to the little clues that tell us that a fundamental axiom of our lives is broken. And I don’t think it’s like refrigerators, where the outside gets warmer in order to make the inside colder. No. In its capacity as a dish washer, a dishwasher should most certainly also be an itself washer. A dishwasher should be a beacon of hope — the capstone of cleanliness in the household, through and through — but instead my cereal bowl is covered with crusty lies.