As one who has dealt with the dinner dishes for more years than I care to admit, one thing I will admit is that this headline kind of floored me. Dishes must be clean! Clean them all the way! Well, that's what I tried to teach my children. Then I stopped to think, I use two coffee cups over and over, one for tea and the other for coffee. I don't wash them often; I just rinse one as I switch to the other. Yes, they get stained, but a little Comet will fix that ...later. So no one is perfect, and some people would like to wash their dishes less.
For real: So what if there’s a little sauce residue here, or a bit of caked-on food there. I mean, a half-assed rinsed-out glass of lemonade isn’t going to hurt anybody, right?
Incredibly, the experts agree. “Unless you’ve been working with raw meats or a plate that’s been used by someone who has been sick, the risk is quite low, and so [keeping your dishes perfectly clean] may not be as important from a microbiological perspective,” says Jason “The Germ Guy” Tetro.
Read what's important and what's not important in dishwashing from a microbial viewpoint at Mel magazine.