A reliable source of disagreement in my family is the need, or lack thereof, for rinsing dishes before placing them in the dishwasher. It is pretty much me on one side, and everybody else on the other.
Everybody seems intent on pre-rinsing the dishes to 97% cleanliness, before loading them into the dishwasher. Thus reducing the role of dishwasher to mere sanitizer.
I don't get it. If you read the dishwasher manuals, they say this is not necessary. I don't know, maybe it was necessary generations ago, and everybody internalized that, just like so many people grew up believing that exposure to cold causes colds (although not my family, on that score).
But it definitely isn't necessary nowadays. Even inexpensive dishwashers have soft garbage disposals, and good ones have full-power disposals. So I simply don't see the point in doing the dishwasher's job for it! If my car could wash itself, for instance, I definitely wouldn't interfere in the process.
In fact, I just discovered that our current dishwasher, in addition to "Normal" and "Heavy Duty", has a "Quick Wash" setting. We had been using Normal, with fine results, except that it takes an awfully long time (over 90 minutes, depending on the load--it is one of those fancy "sensing" ones).
Then one day I happened to be in a hurry, and I tried "Quick". It ran in half the time, and the dishes still came out clean. Since then I have mostly been using Quick, with good results. (Though I will admit, if the dishes are really soiled, or really jam-packed, Quick doesn't always get the job done 100%.)
Now, I doubt many people are using quick, I think most just use Normal. Since I get decent results without pre-rinsing even on Normal, that really gives you a sense of the overkill of routine pre-rinsing!
11:01:45 PM 
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