An American Redditor has sparked a debate about the best practice after you wash your dishes - with people seeming to have two very different opinions about what you should do once you have given your dishes a wash in the sink.
On Wednesday, u/criticalthinker225 posted in R/Ireland asking people "Do you rinse the soap off your dishes?" Adding in brackets: "Is this an Irish thing??"
In a lengthy post on the discussion site, the US native who has been living in Ireland for eight years made an observation that when dishes are hand-washed here, usually they are not rinsed after being cleaned with a sponge, adding that they are curious if this is an Irish tradition or just a strange habit of the people they know.
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The question seemed to divide people, with some posting about how it was "weird" that people would not wash their dishes with water after applying soap, but others explaining that due to a Fairy ad from the 1970s that showed dishes don’t need to be rinsed, people never got into the habit.
On the camp for washing your dishes again, one person posted: "Only weird people want soap on their food!"
While another added: "I always rinse, on the grounds that I don't like licking soap."
However, some people explained why this is a thing.
One person posted: "My mum never rinses properly. It’s especially noticeable in travel mugs because before it dries, the soap pools in the hole that you drink through so your drink tastes like soap.
"She said that when she was a kid they washed the dishes with borax and they had to rinse it over and over to get the borax off. Once Fairy came out it was advertised as not needing to have so much rinsing.
"I guess they all took it to mean that it needed no rinsing and they probably didn’t notice that everything tasted like soap because at least it didn’t taste like borax."
Another poster agreed, explaining that it is not just an Irish thing: "I was about to make a similar comment about Fairy dish soap.
"Their ad on TV in the 1970s showed the soap running down the drying dishes as they stood in the rack. No rinsing needed.
"I lived in England at the time and it was common to not rinse the soap off. So it wasn't just Ireland."
Another US poster who had lived in Ireland said: "No kidding! I (American) studied in Northern Ireland for a couple of semesters in college, 20 years ago, and I lived in a hostel with other students from all over the place.
"We had some really heated discussions about dishwashing. I was horrified that the N. Irish, Irish, English, Manx and Dutch folks didn't rinse their dishes. The other Americans, the Korean and the Polish students were as appalled as I was."
Do you rinse your dishes after washing them with soap? Let us know in the comments.
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