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Comment by drdeca | Hacker News Reader

My contrarian impulse leads me to ask whether for a small portion of people, having a short period of time in which they wash clothes by hand, and afterwards go back to the more convenient and efficient way of doing it might have some benefit by resetting something.

But I'm guessing the answer is "probably not, and if so, probably for exceedingly few people. If something like that was a good idea, washing clothes probably wouldn't be the ideal form of it."

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Clothes washing machines do seem to be one of the unmitigated "goods". Machines use less water, less energy, are gentler on clothes. Reportedly, manual clothes washing is also very hard on the body- physically laborious combined with scalding water and caustic chemicals. There was some article here on HN a little while ago in which the authors were surprised that women of decades past voted the clothes washing machine as the single greatest invention & engine of their emancipation, instead of planes or semiconductors or medicine or-

By all means though, gardening, cooking food, human-powered travel, repairing & making things of all kinds, etc I do believe can have great value.

The sewing machine was also a great emancipator of women.

Yes, now thinking about it I think they had been asked about inventions of the 1900's.

I don't think machine washes are gentler on clothes. Maybe gentler than the traditional whack-against-a-river-rock technique, but certainly hand-washing is generally less physically abusive than a machine wash, in my experience.

Americans still inexplicably prefer the top-loading washing machine, rather than the front-loading type that dominates the market in nearly every other developed country. The agitator in a top-loader makes mincemeat out of delicate items, versus the much more gentle lift-and-drop action of a front-loader.

A sweet spot might be things which are 'harder' but have other advantages such as cost/health. Commuting by bike, instead of car is one example, though not possible for all.

Should we also all eat spoiled food to reset our appreciation of the refrigerator?

More on point would be owning a cellar, or not eating food that requires refrigeration.

Reduction of traditional food preservation methods that didn't require refrigeration has been a very large health benefit.

Traditionally, during the many "out of season" months a large part of your diet would involve pickled, cured, salted, smoked, etc products, in quantities much larger than nowadays. These preservation methods are quite carcinogenic - over last hundred or so years we've achieved something like 80% reduction in stomach and colon cancer simply by mass use of refrigeration causing people to eat less of those highly processed foods than they did. Those types of cancer used to be very "popular", but the lifestyle change caused by refrigeration has made them quite rare - and intentionally returning to traditional methods of food preservation is likely to be bad for your health (in the long run) and should be done with deliberation.

Given that people are urbanizing, urban densities are increasing, family units are shrinking and people love convenience, I believe the end-game is people living in apartments without kitchens and eating out or eating takeaway food most of the time. This would save a lot of waste as well as carbon waste through supermarket shopping trips. In the future, a kitchen will be seen as a luxury... after all, who has time to shop, cook and clean?

Full disclosure: founder of Infinite Food - http://infinite-food.com/ :)

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