My roommate/friend has no idea how to wash dishes, but he thinks he does, and I'm worried for my health!

• My roommate/friend has no idea how to wash dishes, but he thinks he does, and I'm worried for my health! Quick background: I'm 20, male, a junior in college, and I'm living in a 5 person house off campus this year. My friend doesn't know how to wash dishes. Seriously. But, he offers to wash them all the time, and it scares me. This is his idea of cleaning something: 1) Turn on the cold water (seriously, he'll move the faucet all the way to the right) 2) Put *some* soap on a sponge. 3) Swish around the water a bit, lightly rubbing the plate/pan/whatever 4) Pour out excess water, place in drying rack. He does not rinse. He even leaves soap bubbles on the pan! It boggles my mind how he thinks this is clean. Seriously, how can you leave soap bubbles on something and think you've cleaned it? Because of his bad ability to clean dishes, just about every other time I grab something to eat off of, I have to rewash it. I even saw him today take a spatula out of the sink, that had been sitting there all day and just wipe the egg off of it with a towel, and then he used it. It's ridiculous. So, now the real question--how do I tell him that he's washing everything wrong? I've dried dishes as he's washed them before, and I've handed back ones that still had soap or food on them, but he doesn't seem to get it. He's one of those people that gets offended if you criticize him on something like this, something he should know, but clearly doesn't. The really passive-aggressive answer would be to put up some kind of sign above the sink stating how to clean dishes. Clearly, this isn't the best idea. I was thinking of, next time I send a message to the entire house (usually through Facebook, our normal means of communication), I could just include something like "I've noticed some dishes aren't getting clean, can everyone make sure to use hot water, lots of soap, scrub hard, and rinse?". We're never really all together at once, so doing it via a message might be easiest, and it won't seem like I'm singling him out. This still seems a bit like I'm avoiding the confrontation, though I really don't know how that would go. I *wish* I had the problem that he never did his dishes, because then at least I would know they would be clean when I washed them :). Just to note: I'm not being a clean freak and overreacting to the dishes not being pristine. He literally has left food chunks on the plates, and, like I said, soap bubbles are still on them when they go to the drying rack. What do I do?

• Answer:

  Have you ever stopped to consider why we wash dishes? Obviously if you've cooked meat and don't wash it, bacteria will grow. But how likely are you to actually get sick from a dirty dish? How much of a difference does it make if you scrub a lot vs a little, use hot water instead of cold, rinse the soap or don't? People eat off of dirty dishes all the time -- I've certainly done it, when in a hurry -- is it really necessary to wash them so thoroughly every time? I think most of us would be throwing out wild guesses if we said we had an absolute answer. I submit that the desire for perfectly clean dishes is less about science and more about our cultural fixation with sanitation (see also: showering every day, washing clothes after one use, etc.) If you believe me, then you have a cultural difference here, not a right vs wrong difference, which calls for a little more sensitivity. In other words, because you're sharing dishes, you ask your roommate if he would do you a favor and clean them to your standards because it bothers you otherwise. Or, you get separate dishes.