What should go in your dishwasher?

Often the debate for couples on if the dishes should be just scraped or scraped and rinsed is about as contentious as which way the TP roll should go on the holder.
When it comes to scraping and rinsing or just scraping dishes it does not matter. It just matters how much soap you use.

If your dishes go into the dishwasher basically clean, you need very little soap, because there is very little for the soap to do. 
If you just scrape your dishes you will need a little more soap, but still only a tablespoon or two.

However, you should never use your dishwasher as a garbage disposal. Dishwashers never haven been, nor will they ever be, able to do what a disposal can do. No matter what an ad, salesman, or anyone or anything tells you, a dishwasher cannot handle more than incidental bits of food.

Many years ago, Maytag, to my great dismay, had a commercial for one of their dishwashers and it showed someone putting an entire cake into the dishwasher and of course when the cycle was done they took out the cake plate and it was clean. It made me cringe. There is absolutely no way that could actually happen, not even in a commercial dishwasher.

Think of it like mopping your floor. What happens if you try and mop the floor without sweeping first? A mop isn’t designed to get the large debris from the floor, it is just designed to clean the small particles of dirt. If there is larger debris on the floor when you mop, you just end up swishing it around. If you allow to much food debris in your dishwasher it is even worse – it will clog up the filter, clog up the drain and it will stay in the dishwasher through the rinse cycle, causing your dishes to be rinsed in dirty water.

So I will leave the argument between scraping and rinsing or just scraping to your own household. But if you want your dishwasher to work correctly and don’t want your dishes rinsed in dirty water, always at least scrape the dishes.