Personally, I think the person who cooks should clean the cookware and the kitchen. The incentives are then aligned, and at least for me, it makes me a much tidier cook.
Also, cooking can be fun, cleaning not so much. Separating cooking/cleaning duties just punishes the person who doesn’t get to cook.
In our house, as in a lot of houses, the person that does all the effort to make the food has completed their portion of the labor exchange. They’ve already spent a couple of hours cooking. Why spend another 30 minutes cleaning when there’s a person who has done nothing but eat the food available to clean it all up?
Of course the person cooking the food should make sure to make this job easier by stacking and soaking and doing the other things so that it’s not chaos for the person who enjoyed eating the food but hadn’t participated in its making.
Cleaning also takes less time, especially if you include all the planning that goes into cooking. Then if you consider the amount of time it’d take for the same meal to be made by other members of the household, you start to see that cleaning is actually a bargain. You also have to remember that even when you enjoy cooking, it is stil exhausting. They have less energy to clean than those who didn’t cook.
Obviously there is a limit. If the cook is making an excessive mess due to doing some particularly fancy cooking out of ambition, they should probably help out. But if you regularly reap the benefits of someone else’s skill in the kitchen, yes, you should help clean.
That’s awesome! I’m borrowing it, thanks.
Jeez. What a thing to complain about. I wish we had a dishwasher.
