There Are Two Types of Dishwasher People

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration.

由 ElevenLabs 和 News Over Audio (Noa) 使用人工智能旁白制作。

Listen to more stories on the Noa app.

在 Noa 应用程序上收听更多故事。

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.

这篇文章发表在《今日必读的一个故事》时事通讯中。

Sign up for it here.

在这里注册。

When the couples therapist inevitably asks, I’ll have an answer ready: The trouble began in August 2017, when my boyfriend and I moved in together, and I quickly revealed myself to be an absolute ding-dong at loading the dishwasher.

当夫妻治疗师不可避免地问到时，我会准备好答案：问题始于 2017 年 8 月，当时我和男朋友搬到一起，我很快就暴露了自己在装洗碗机方面绝对是个“叮当”。

I am not what you would call “precise” or “tactical” in really any aspect of my life, but certainly not in front of an open dishwasher.

在我生活的任何方面，我都不是你所说的“精确”或“有策略”的人，但在开放式洗碗机前更是如此。

I lack the structural engineer’s mind for space optimization, or maybe I lack the functional adult’s patience to figure it out.

我缺乏结构工程师对空间优化的思考，或者我缺乏功能成年人的耐心去弄清楚。

I don’t totally understand how the water moves around in there, or how the soap gets dispersed.

我完全不明白水是如何在那里移动的，或者肥皂是如何分散的。

(Also, because we’re being open and honest with one another, I have never been sure about prerinsing, though I do get the sense that the rules have changed recently?) I don’t have a philosophy about what should go on the top or the bottom—I basically just put things in the first semi-logical place I see, close the door, smash some buttons, and hope for the best.

（另外，因为我们彼此开诚布公，所以我从来不确定预冲洗的问题，尽管我确实感觉到规则最近发生了变化？）我对什么应该放在顶部或底部没有什么哲学——我基本上只是把东西放在我看到的第一个半逻辑位置，关上门，按下一些按钮，并希望得到最好的结果。

I walk away and hear my plates rattle.

我走开，听到我的盘子嘎嘎作响。

Judging by the sheer volume of dishwasher-loading advice, commentary, and anxiety on the internet, I am not alone in any of this.

从互联网上大量关于洗碗机的建议、评论和焦虑来看，我并不孤单。

There are YouTube videos with titles such as “ You’re Doing It Wrong!

YouTube 上有一些标题为“你做错了！

” and “ Passive Aggressive Tutorials .” There are articles broken out by brand and by subtopic, thousands of words devoted to the intricacies of scraping, stacking, sorting, eco-washing, half loads, knives, pots, plastic, and more.

”和“被动攻击教程”。有一些文章按品牌和副主题分类，有数千字专门讨论刮擦、堆放、分类、生态清洗、半负载、刀具、锅、塑料等的复杂性。

There is a post from a woman who doesn’t understand how her “genius” husband “can do ANYTHING, but load a dishwasher sensibly,” and one from a person whose wife does it like “an escaped mental patient.” There are Wirecutter articles explaining how to use one’s dishwasher better, and people who write into Wirecutter to complain that they don’t like the way the dishwashers in those articles’ photos have been loaded.

有一篇文章来自一位女士，她不明白她的“天才”丈夫如何“能做任何事，但要明智地把洗碗机装进去”，还有一篇文章来自一位妻子的帖子，她的妻子这样做就像“一名逃跑的精神病人”。 Wirecutter 上有一些文章解释了如何更好地使用洗碗机，还有一些人在 Wirecutter 上写信抱怨他们不喜欢这些文章照片中洗碗机的装载方式。

There are so, so many guides for couples who can’t stop fighting about the dishwasher, a large number of which suggest that the issue might not be the dishwasher at all but perhaps something with its roots in childhood .

对于那些无法停止为洗碗机而争吵的夫妇来说，有太多太多的指南，其中大量指南表明，问题可能根本不是洗碗机，而可能是源于童年的问题。

Sure, but I actually think the dishwasher itself is a great place to start.

当然可以，但我实际上认为洗碗机本身就是一个很好的起点。

It is uniquely confounding.

这是独一无二的令人困惑。

No one is standing in front of her refrigerator, flummoxed as to where to put the milk.

没有人站在她的冰箱前，困惑于把牛奶放在哪里。

The American household is not being ripped apart by arguments about the correct way to operate the oven.

美国家庭并没有因关于烤箱正确操作方法的争论而分崩离析。

But last year, when YouGov asked 38,000 American adults about how cutlery should be loaded into the dishwasher, no single approach achieved a majority.

但去年，当 YouGov 向 38,000 名美国成年人询问如何将餐具放入洗碗机时，没有任何一种方法能够获得多数票。

Maybe it’s no wonder that the dishwasher is the most underused major kitchen appliance: In 2020, just under 90 million American homes had a dishwasher, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration; 19 percent of them were used zero times a week.

难怪洗碗机是使用率最低的主要厨房电器：根据美国能源信息管理局的数据，2020 年，近 9000 万美国家庭拥有洗碗机；其中 19% 每周使用零次。

Dishwashers are finicky: Loading them right depends on what kind of dishes you have, what kind of mess you have, and what kind of dishwasher you have.

洗碗机是很挑剔的：正确装载洗碗机取决于你有什么样的盘子，你有什么样的混乱，以及你有什么样的洗碗机。

They’re also inscrutable—a black box, sometimes literally.

它们也是高深莫测的——一个黑匣子，有时甚至是字面上的黑匣子。

“You close the door; you don’t know what you’re gonna get until you open it,” Carolyn Forté, who has worked for more than 40 years at Good Housekeeping and currently runs its Home Care and Cleaning Lab, told me.

“你关上门，在打开它之前你不知道会得到什么，”在 Good Housekeeping 工作了 40 多年、目前负责家庭护理和清洁实验室的卡罗琳·福特 (Carolyn Forté) 告诉我。

We can’t see our dishwashers doing their job, so most of us don’t know how they work.

我们看不到洗碗机在工作，所以我们大多数人都不知道它们是如何工作的。

“Some people even think it fills up with water,” Forté said, to illustrate this point.

“有些人甚至认为它充满了水，”福特说，以说明这一点。

I chuckled along knowingly, but the truth is, if she had told me that’s exactly how a dishwasher works, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

我会意地笑了，但事实是，如果她告诉我洗碗机到底是如何工作的，我不会感到惊讶。

I was talking with her, in fact, because I’d decided enough was enough.

事实上，我正在和她说话，因为我决定受够了。

It was time to finally understand the dishwasher.

是时候终于了解洗碗机了。

As soon as I started trying, one sentence began to haunt me.

当我开始尝试时，有句话开始困扰我。

People repeated it to me; it showed up over and over when I searched online for information about dishwashers and dishwasher conflict.

人们向我重复这句话；当我在网上搜索有关洗碗机和洗碗机冲突的信息时，它一遍又一遍地出现。

It was this: “In every relationship, there’s one person who loads the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect, and one who loads it like a raccoon on meth.”

事情是这样的：“在每一段关系中，都有一个人像斯堪的纳维亚建筑师一样把洗碗机装满，而另一个人则像吸食冰毒的浣熊一样把洗碗机装满。”

It’s the kind of trope-y Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus aphorism that bounces around the internet like a beach ball at an outdoor concert, endlessly rediscovered and reshared.

这句比喻句“男人来自火星，女人来自金星”在互联网上流传，就像户外音乐会上的沙滩球一样，被不断地重新发现和分享。

The dishwasher makes for evergreen online humor for the same reason it acts as a password for entry into low-stakes conversation with just about any other adult: It’s incredibly relatable.

洗碗机在网上成为常青的幽默，其原因与它作为与几乎任何其他成年人进行低风险对话的密码的原因相同：它具有令人难以置信的相关性。

In that same YouGov poll from 2024, more than a third of respondents admitted to having disagreements with others about dishwashing best practices.

在 2024 年的同一项 YouGov 民意调查中，超过三分之一的受访者承认在洗碗最佳实践方面与其他人存在分歧。

The issue comes up in group chats, on web forums, and even, occasionally, in couples-therapy sessions that the famed psychologist Julie Gottman facilitates.

这个问题出现在群聊、网络论坛上，甚至偶尔出现在著名心理学家朱莉·戈特曼主持的夫妻治疗课程中。

Andrea Barnes, who covers large cleaning appliances for Wirecutter , told me the emails she gets about the dishwasher are much more “social” and “behavioral” than the ones about other appliances.

安德里亚·巴恩斯 (Andrea Barnes) 负责 Wirecutter 的大型清洁电器，她告诉我，她收到的有关洗碗机的电子邮件比有关其他电器的电子邮件更具“社交性”和“行为性”。

In January, Forté invited Reddit users to ask her anything about dishwashers .

一月份，Forté 邀请 Reddit 用户向她询问有关洗碗机的任何问题。

She received hundreds of questions, more than Good Housekeeping has ever gotten for a Reddit AMA.

她收到了数百个问题，比 Good Housekeeping 在 Reddit AMA 上收到的问题还要多。

A large number started with the poster invoking a spouse’s or a roommate’s wrongheaded approach to the dishwasher and asking Forté to adjudicate.

很多人首先在海报上提到配偶或室友对洗碗机的错误做法，并要求福特做出裁决。

“There’s a lot of psychology behind the dishwasher,” she told me.

“洗碗机背后有很多心理学，”她告诉我。

“There’s a lot of angst.”

“有很多焦虑。”

The dishwasher is not just the weird wet box we share our homes with—it’s the site of so many of our cultural and individual values.

洗碗机不仅仅是我们共同居住的奇怪湿盒，它还是我们许多文化和个人价值观的所在地。

Loading the dishwasher is, don’t get me wrong, about loading the dishwasher , but I’ve come to understand that it is also about efficiency and optimization, space and time, cleanliness and disgust.

不要误会我的意思，“装载洗碗机”是关于装载洗碗机的，但我逐渐明白，它还涉及效率和优化、空间和时间、清洁和厌恶。

The Scandinavian architect’s dishwasher is a beautiful thing, but it’s also, in a certain light, self-indulgent and fussy, more art project than act of service.

这位斯堪的纳维亚建筑师的洗碗机是一件美丽的东西，但从某种角度来看，它也是一种自我放纵和挑剔的艺术项目，而不是服务行为。

The stimulant-addled raccoon’s is arguably something much worse: negligent and unsanitary, evidence of a failed commitment to the family.

服用兴奋剂的浣熊的情况可以说更糟：疏忽和不卫生，这是对家庭失败承诺的证据。

(To be clear, if the raccoon is a woman, especially a mother, society looks even less kindly on her.) In both cases, the criticism is not completely superficial.

（需要明确的是，如果浣熊是女性，尤其是母亲，社会对她的看法就更不友善。） 在这两种情况下，批评并不完全是肤浅的。

Dishes are what we eat off of, after all, and eating is how we take care of one another.

毕竟，菜肴是我们吃的东西，而吃饭是我们互相照顾的方式。

Household maintenance has been freighted and intimate since we’ve had houses to maintain.

自从我们有房子需要维护以来，家庭维护工作就变得繁重而贴心。

“Our homes and our home possessions and what meaning we ascribe to them is one of the most personal things we can experience,” the sociologist Michelle Janning told me.

“我们的家、我们的财产以及我们赋予它们的意义是我们能经历的最私人的事情之一，”社会学家米歇尔·詹宁告诉我。

(In 2017, she published a book on the subject, The Stuff of Family Life: How Our Homes Reflect Our Lives .) The internet has encouraged only more comparison, and more consternation—more places to argue, more pressure to make even the most banal parts of our lives beautiful.

（2017 年，她出版了一本关于这个主题的书，《家庭生活的东西：我们的家如何反映我们的生活》。）互联网只会鼓励更多的比较和更多的惊愕——更多的地方可以争论，更多的压力让我们生活中最平庸的部分变得美丽。

“The message everywhere is that our home is supposed to be a signature representation of who we are,” Janning said.

“到处都在传达这样的信息：我们的家应该是我们身份的标志性代表，”詹宁说。

“Our home is supposed to be the most meaningful, almost sacred place and space that we hold near and dear.”

“我们的家应该是我们所珍视的最有意义、近乎神圣的地方和空间。”

Bringing any kind of technology into these sacred spaces saves time, but it can also alienate us from the labor of caring for those we love.

将任何类型的技术引入这些神圣的空间都可以节省时间，但它也会使我们疏远照顾我们所爱的人的劳动。

Maybe this is why so many people don’t trust, don’t use, or want to command their dishwashers.

也许这就是为什么很多人不信任、不使用或不想控制他们的洗碗机。

“The strong opinions associated with how to do it could be people trying to retain some semblance of control in a world where technological devices are doing things so much for us,” Janning said of the dishwasher.

“对于如何做到这一点，人们的强烈意见可能是人们试图在一个技术设备为我们做很多事情的世界中保留某种控制权，”詹宁谈到洗碗机时说道。

“I do wonder if there’s a little bit of fear of losing the humanity associated with our domestic lives.”

“我确实想知道是否有人担心失去与我们的家庭生活相关的人性。”

Gottman speculated that part of the reason people get so upset about the dishwasher is that dishwashers are “there to just do a mundane task—very mundane.

戈特曼推测，人们对洗碗机如此不满的部分原因是洗碗机“只是用来完成一项平凡的任务——非常平凡。

There’s no creativity within the scope of the dishwasher.” Cooking is fun; cleaning up is not.

洗碗机的范围内没有创造力。”做饭很有趣；清理则不然。

But it must be done, and done well, in order for the rest of the household to function.

但为了让家庭的其他成员正常运转，这件事必须完成，而且必须做得好。

Some years ago, Sandrine Bèrges, a professor at the University of York, in England, became interested in applying concepts we usually use to understand countries and governments to the smallest unit of human coexistence: the home.

几年前，英国约克大学教授桑德琳·贝尔格斯 (Sandrine Bèrges) 开始有兴趣将我们通常用来理解国家和政府的概念应用到人类共存的最小单位：家庭。

She called it “the philosophy of domesticity.” In 2015, she published a paper that asked, “Is Not Doing the Washing Up Like Draft Dodging?”

她称之为“家庭生活哲学”。 2015年，她发表了一篇论文，问道：“洗碗不就像躲避风雨吗？”

Obviously, seeing this sent a shiver down my spine.

显然，看到这一幕让我脊背发凉。

I don’t think being bad at the dishwasher is a moral failure, but being unwilling to get better at it might be.

我不认为洗碗不好是道德上的失败，但不愿意变得更好可能是道德上的失败。

It isn’t cute—it’s poor citizenship in the very small nation that is my home.

这并不可爱——这是我家乡这个小国的贫穷公民。

It’s learned helplessness, voluntary ignorance, bad vibes.

这是习得性无助、自愿无知、不良情绪。

I have lived in my apartment since 2022 and have been, the entire time, confused by my dishwasher (a Bosch, 2018 model, slightly dented but in fundamentally good shape).

我自 2022 年以来一直住在我的公寓里，一直对我的洗碗机（博世，2018 年型号，略有凹痕，但基本状况良好）感到困惑。

I have rolled my eyes at it, disrespected it, misused it, and left its loading to my boyfriend (a John, 1988 model, slightly dented but in fundamentally good shape).

我对它翻了个白眼，不尊重它，误用它，把它的负载留给了我的男朋友（约翰，1988 年的模型，略有凹痕，但形状基本良好）。

Three years is a long time to live with something you’re not very nice to.

三年对于你不太喜欢的事情来说是一段很长的时间。

Eight is even longer.

八甚至更长。

After weeks of talking with cleaning experts, watching internet tutorials, reading cleaning guides, peering into my dishwasher as though it were an ancient cave, and, at one point, asking one of the aforementioned cleaning experts to do the same over Zoom, here is what I can tell you about how to load the dishwasher.

经过几周与清洁专家的交谈、观看互联网教程、阅读清洁指南、凝视我的洗碗机，就像它是一个古老的洞穴一样，并且在某一时刻，请上述清洁专家之一通过 Zoom 做同样的事情，以下是我可以告诉你如何装载洗碗机的信息。

Each machine has two or three spray arms, at least one on the bottom and one on the top: This is where the detergent-y water comes from.

每台机器都有两到三个喷臂，至少一个在底部，一个在顶部：这就是洗涤剂水的来源。

If you are confused about how to load your dishwasher, understanding this is half the battle.

如果您对如何装载洗碗机感到困惑，了解这一点就成功了一半。

Barnes, the Wirecutter expert, recommends looking into your dishwasher and seeing where the holes are, “just to get an idea of the pattern of your own dishwasher.” (She, and almost everyone else I spoke with, also recommended reading the manual.) “And you want to make sure that when you load the dishwasher that those streams of water are going to hit.” Crucially, this means that you should not be overloading your dishwasher.

Wirecutter 专家巴恩斯建议检查你的洗碗机，看看孔在哪里，“只是为了了解你自己的洗碗机的模式。” （她和几乎所有与我交谈过的人都建议阅读该手册。）“而且你要确保当你装载洗碗机时，那些水流会撞击到洗碗机。”至关重要的是，这意味着您不应该让洗碗机超载。

Make sure your plates are separate, your bowls aren’t nested, and nothing is sitting where water can’t reach it.

确保你的盘子是分开的，你的碗没有嵌套，并且没有任何东西放在水接触不到的地方。

The second thing is to make sure your stuff is stable in the machine, because if it isn’t, it’s much more likely to break.

第二件事是确保你的东西在机器中稳定，因为如果不稳定，它就更有可能损坏。

The general rule is that the bottom rack is subject to more forceful spray, so you want your sturdier items there and your daintier stuff on the top.

一般规则是底部架子会受到更强力的喷雾，因此您希望将坚固的物品放在那里，而将精致的物品放在顶部。

Clean your filter periodically, if you have one (you might not!).

如果您有过滤器，请定期清洁您的过滤器（您可能没有！）。

If your dishwasher smells, you can run a sanitizing cycle with vinegar, baking soda, or one of the many specialized dishwasher-cleaning products on the market.

如果您的洗碗机有异味，您可以使用醋、小苏打或市场上众多专门的洗碗机清洁产品之一进行消毒循环。

Also, no cast iron, no wood, no crystal, nothing with delicate painted-on decorations, like china with a metallic rim.

此外，没有铸铁、木头、水晶，也没有带有精致彩绘装饰的东西，比如带有金属边缘的瓷器。

Here’s the third big thing: Rinsing isn’t necessary.

这是第三件大事：不需要冲洗。

Oma Blaise Ford, a senior executive editor at Better Homes and Gardens , told me that overrinsing is “one of the most common mistakes in modern dishwasher loading.” She recommends scraping leftover food off your dishes into the trash with a rubber spatula and immediately loading them into the machine, without even turning on the faucet.

《更好的家居与花园》杂志的高级执行编辑奥玛·布莱斯·福特 (Oma Blaise Ford) 告诉我，过度冲洗是“现代洗碗机装载过程中最常见的错误之一”。她建议用橡皮刮刀将盘子上剩下的食物刮到垃圾桶中，然后立即将它们装入机器中，甚至不需要打开水龙头。

(The main exception, she said, is fatty proteins such as peanut butter or eggs, which tend to be stubborn.)

（她说，主要的例外是脂肪蛋白，例如花生酱或鸡蛋，它们往往很顽固。）

This is, indeed, new advice—I wasn’t wrong.

这确实是一个新建议——我没有错。

Perhaps part of our problem is that the way dishwashers work has fundamentally changed since many of the people currently fighting with their loved ones about dishwashers learned to use them.

也许我们问题的一部分是洗碗机的工作方式已经从根本上改变了，因为许多目前与亲人争论洗碗机问题的人学会了使用洗碗机。

In the late 2000s, according to Barnes, we switched from phosphate detergent to enzymatic detergent, which works like a little Pac-Man, eating dirt and making room for the soap to do its job.

巴恩斯表示，在 2000 年代末，我们从磷酸盐洗涤剂转向了酶洗涤剂，它的工作原理就像一个小吃豆人，吃掉污垢，为肥皂腾出空间来完成它的工作。

“So if you don’t leave a little bit of food for these enzymes,” she told me, “you run the risk of it starting to break down other materials,” such as your actual dishes.

“因此，如果你不为这些酶留下一点食物，”她告诉我，“你就会面临它开始分解其他材料的风险”，比如你真正的菜肴。

Everyone thinks the way they grew up loading the dishwasher is correct, so this one is hard for people to hear, but she was insistent: The detergent is designed to work on a little bit of dirt.

每个人都认为他们从小到大装载洗碗机的方式是正确的，所以这对人们来说很难听到，但她坚持认为：洗涤剂的设计目的是对一点点污垢起作用。

You need, she said, to “trust the machine to do its job.”

她说，你需要“相信机器能够完成它的工作。”

Isn’t it amazing how the answer to everything is always the same?

所有事情的答案总是相同，这难道不令人惊奇吗？

Pay attention.

注意。

Trust the process.

相信这个过程。

Seek to understand.

寻求理解。

Question your assumptions.

质疑你的假设。

Read a book.

读一本书。

Here is what else I can tell you about dishwashers: They are a miracle.

关于洗碗机，我还能告诉您以下几点：它们是一个奇迹。

The modern water-pressure-powered dishwasher was invented by Josephine Cochran, a socialite who was expected to host a lot of dinner parties but hated cleaning up after them.

现代水压动力洗碗机是由约瑟芬·科克伦 (Josephine Cochran) 发明的，她是一位社交名流，预计会举办很多晚宴，但讨厌在晚宴结束后进行清理工作。

She built a dishwasher in the shed behind her house and, in doing so, helped kick off what Helen Keller would later call the “ startling revolution ” that rearranged women’s domestic responsibilities, and therefore their sense of what was possible.

她在她家后面的棚子里建了一台洗碗机，此举帮助开启了海伦·凯勒后来所说的“惊人的革命”，这场革命重新安排了女性的家庭责任，从而重新安排了她们对可能性的认识。

Today’s dishwashers save about 230 hours of labor a year: Nearly 10 days, every year, to do something other than wash the dishes.

如今的洗碗机每年可节省约 230 个小时的劳动力：每年有近 10 天的时间用于做洗碗以外的事情。

In a water-scarce world , they are even more valuable.

在缺水的世界里，它们更有价值。

Rinsing dishes takes one and a half to two gallons of water a minute ; a really good dishwasher, Barnes told me, takes three to five gallons a wash.

冲洗餐具每分钟需要一加仑半到两加仑的水；巴恩斯告诉我，一台真正好的洗碗机一次清洗需要三到五加仑。

Dishwashers do a lot for us, and we hold them to a high standard.

洗碗机为我们做了很多事情，我们对它们保持高标准。

“I’ve seen people put, like, a Thanksgiving dinner in their dishwasher and then be surprised their filter is clogged, or that dishes don’t come out clean,” Barnes told me.

“我见过人们把感恩节晚餐放进洗碗机里，然后惊讶地发现过滤器堵塞了，或者洗出来的盘子不干净，”巴恩斯告诉我。

We take them for granted: “People get so angry and obsessed with the ones that don’t work,” she said, “and we often overlook how many of them do a great job.”

我们认为它们是理所当然的：“人们对那些不起作用的东西感到非常愤怒和痴迷，”她说，“而我们常常忽视了其中有多少人做得很好。”

Last week, I purposefully subjected myself to the real-life version of an anxiety dream.

上周，我故意让自己经历了现实生活中的焦虑梦。

I stood in front of my boyfriend and my parents—three of the people who mean the most to me, and who have offered the most, uh, feedback on my dishwasher-loading abilities—and tried to do the thing.

我站在我的男朋友和我的父母面前——这三个人对我来说最重要，并且对我的洗碗机装载能力提供了最多的，呃，反馈——并尝试做这件事。

Plates on the bottom, don’t cram too much in there, think about the spray: Honestly, it wasn’t that bad.

盘子在底部，不要在里面塞太多，想想喷雾：老实说，还不错。

I thought about the hard work, and the help, required to keep a home.

我想到了维持一个家所需的辛苦工作和帮助。

The dishes came out clean.

盘子端出来很干净。

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission.

​​当您使用此页面上的链接购买书籍时，我们会收到佣金。

Thank you for supporting The Atlantic

感谢您对大西洋月刊的支持