THE TRUTH ABOUT: Useful food hacks - Caught on Camera

The r/FoodHacks Reddit community is dedicated to delivering quick and simple tips and tricks on prepping food that would be delicious, nutritious, and wouldn’t demand architectural nor spiritual sacrifices to make it happen.

The last time Bored Panda covered hacks, tips and tricks from the community, it had 2.1 million members but has since then (almost two years later at this point) doubled and stands at 4.3 million, making it the Top 1% by size on Reddit.

As you probably might have already expected, the community is all about sharing advice that’s both simple and useful for every caliber of cook.

Advice spans across pretty much any domain of the cooking process: everything from preparation to technique and methodology to frugal solutions to make cooking convenient. And fun, don’t forget that! Oh, and creative, definitely that too.

Much, if not all of it, is all about making it approachable for everyone. And once you’ve mastered it, you can go full gourmet all while being an amateur underneath it all.

Now, sure, you can argue that cooking isn’t easy. Skill is only part of the equation, and lacking even that can seem like a hurdle that’s impossible to overcome.

All around food expert and historian Rachel Laudan elaborated on why cooking is hard in a blog post of hers. Besides actual skill, there’s also things like supermarket inventory, food handling and storage, mental capacity for recipes, basic knowledge of chemistry, alchemy, and any other -y to even begin to understand how to turn something raw into something edible.

If you were to consciously consider all the fine detail that goes into cooking, it’s not just throwing peas into a pan and calling it a day. No, Laudan estimates even after decades of cooking, it still takes her at least 8 to 12—at least—hours per week to make cooking happen at all. In context, that’s a work day and a half. Throw in planning, shopping and all that jazz and you got yourself a part time job as a domestic chef without even interviewing for the position.

But, practice makes perfect. Cooking is no exception. If you can get across the initial hurdle of deciding what you want to cook and invest yourself in it, you’ll get progressively better.

Nobody is born a master at it. Blogger Christine Amorose Merrill points that out in a piece of hers on how practice makes perfect in the kitchen. One thing she always hears from her grandmother, who in her eyes is the epitome of cooking, is “I’ve had years to practice. Of course I’m going to be better at it than you!” It takes time, patience and reflection to make it work. No other way about it.

And you’d be surprised how far simple culinary tricks can take you. You don’t need dimensional thinking or the fingers of a god to perfectly line a tray with baking paper. You don’t need to cut yourself, nor be meticulous with how you cut an onion. Heck, you don’t even need to cut open a butter packet at a restaurant and use anything other than a fork and fingers to spread it on bread as an appetizer or side-whatever-those-things-are-called. Learn that and you’re golden!

And if you’re thinking, “Well, you still have to know what you're doing to make sure your food stays healthy and stuff," you’d be right. To some degree.

The way you cook does have an impact on the nutrients you’ll be getting in the end, but it’s also not rocket science. Lay off the salt and use herbs and spices instead, eat fruits and vegetables, focus on the least-processed foods or foods that you know the origins of and you should be more than fine. Heck, salads don’t even need any cooking—just chopping and ingesting. And that is healthy!

Another thing that helps in this case is understanding food. Rob Lapham, an award winning registered health viking, dedicates much of his time debunking food myths, giving out helpful food advice, and straight up educating folks on the things that actually matter when it comes to staying healthy.

One of the key takeaways that Lapham has emphasized time and time again is the idea of being able to eat pretty much anything that is considered food, as long as it is in moderation.

With that said, yes, it’s perfectly fine to eat frozen dinners, it’s perfectly fine to eat McDonald’s or KFC, it’s perfectly fine to put mayonnaise on bread. There are entire sets of laws and regulations that apply to the food industry that make sure what you eat doesn’t kill you. Even if the food does have known carcinogens or stuff you’d otherwise consider poisonous, as long as they are within legal limits, within a chemical context, and it’s being consumed in moderation, the food is for all intents and purposes good.

So, if you’re up for it (honestly, you have no choice, you gotta eat), dig through the endless arsenal of food advice on r/FoodHacks and educate yourself to a degree where you can make casual look like gourmet.

But before you do that, the comment section is open for your own hacks, stories and takes on food, so be sure to share all that you have to say down below!