by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-18 01:22:54+00:00
Speaking of wastefulness and dishwashers, I rent an apartment which does not include a dishwasher. In fact, no apartment I've ever rented included a dishwasher, although many have included a clothes washer and dryer installed.

My kitchen does include a garbage disposal, which is a nuisance, because even though my ex-girlfriend called it "dispose-all", it disposes of nothing, except it effectively annoys 10-30 neighbor families if you manage to clog up the lateral drainpipes, and I don't rely on it to chew up food or any solid waste at all. The only reason I activate it is because it speeds up the draining of water in the dual sink. And also because, if I don't run it on a weekly basis, the motor will seize up in a way that requires a maintenance call, and you don't want to call in maintenance.

Anyway, I wash my dishes by hand, and the bane of my existence is dirty dishes in the kitchen sink when I'm quite hungry and it's 7am and I just want to get breakfast started, but the sink isn't clear and everything I need is dirty, and needs soaking time before the residue will budge, and so I end up punting and ordering delivery anyway.

Washing dishes is a pipeline, a process, that can take 2 hours, or it can last 12 hours, or it can take 3 days to complete. I often don't get around to that magnificent endgame of putting away the dishes but I leave them in the drying-rack until I need them again. It's like my "L2 Cache" for kitchenware, that drying rack. And guess what, when I go to wash dishes again, I often discover there's no room in the rack, and I rip out my hair a little bit and I stop washing the dishes long enough to empty the rack, and then I'm exhausted and I go to lie down in bed instead of washing dishes, or starting dinner, and guess who's ordering delivery again?

So one of the sanity-preserving hacks I've developed is using paper plates, paper bowls, plastic cold cups, and plastic flatware. And this works great for cold cereal, and the raw eggs I drink, and microwaved frozen meals that I can plop into a bowl or put on a plate in order to cut them into pieces.

And I thought that cloth napkins and dish towels were cool, because I was Saving the Earth, and for a couple of years I owned not a single roll of paper towels; I used cloth napkins and I laundered them, and now I use both, and if something is going to stain my precious cloth, then I use paper towels or a disposable sponge on it first.

And they called me "wasteful" for using disposable kitchenware, but in reality I only own a single tablepspoon and a single teaspoon. I own about 3 forks, and 2 butter knives. I recently purchased a set of 4 identical steak knives, because a good sharp knife to cut meats is essential. But most of my flatware is disposable, including semi-disposable chopsticks (set of 8 for about $4).

And guess what? None of the delivery services include plasticware anymore. None of the restaurants tuck it into your bag. They used to give you, like, a packaged knife-fork-spoon-napkin-salt-pepper, sealed in cellophane. Then COVID-19 happened, and plasticware is a cost center, and restaurants hate delivery services for many reasons, and no restaurant carries knives, even plastic butter knives. They are still usually sending me plastic straws, but I nevertheless keep on hand a stock of plastic bendy-straws to use with every beverage.

So basically whether I order delivery or I make food at home, my plasticware suffices, and yeah, it's wasteful and I do not wash or rinse or reuse any of them, and I don't really care, because it is a sanity-preserving strategy that works quite well, because it is much easier to just tuck into a meal when I have flatware ready to use.