These kitchen hacks have millions of views - but do they actually work?
More often lately, our social media newsfeeds are littered with cooking or baking hacks videos (Facebook especially). These enticing videos promises beautiful results, but what if I tell you that most of these videos are actually set up for us to fail?
Everyone loves a good life hack, and there's nothing more enticing than anything involving kitchen hacks, namely cooking and baking. Admittedly we are lazy creatures, anything that cuts time and cost appears to be very enticing, not to mention they often serve as bragging rights, as people look smarter when they come up with genius hacks.
It’s likely you’ve seen those Facebook or Youtube videos where a pair of hands whip up three-ingredients ice-cream, or make simple meringues from few ingredients. By reducing the cooking and baking time down to cut down the steps and ingredients, these videos make you feel as if cooking and baking are as easy as scrolling through your social media.
As a designer I would spend time at Pinterest to look for ideas and inspirations. Once in awhile I would look for something I can try to cook and oftentimes I would stumble upon a plenty of beautiful cooking and baking hacks photos. One thing I've learnt about being a designer is that beautiful designs and photos can easily attract people, that’s how marketing works. So it doesn’t come as surprise for me that I and many others are attracted to try out these so-called hacks. Just like how moths are attracted to lights.
Please note that I mentioned "most". Nobody's sponsoring me for my endorsement, but some channels like Buzzfeed Tasty puts up reliable videos with working recipes (trust me, I've tried most of their recipes and tricks, and they do work), but with some other widely followed channels, I couldn’t get them right. It was frustrating, it makes me wonder why can’t get them right? They made it look so easy and yet I couldn’t get any of them right. Was I that stupid?
Honestly these thoughts plagued my mind. They made me question my capabilities and it lowered my self-esteem. I also grew envious to those who "managed" to make them work.
Little did we know that most of these hacks are blatant lies. That’s why we see more failures than successes. The truth is that a large proportion of these recipes simply don’t work. We'll be in the kitchen discovering for ourselves that these instructional videos waste ingredients, yield disgusting results, and makes a mess out of our kitchen.
For many, these failures eventually turned into tongue-in-cheek jokes, with several social media groups dedicated to these failures, created for the sole purpose of humor.
But did they know how these failures could be detrimental for their mental health? As I mentioned earlier, I spent some time questioning myself. Yes I could laugh at myself at first, I was even eager to post my failures online for the laughs. But after several failures, I don’t think I could laugh anymore. At this point it really felt like a serious failing.
I had mentioned many times in my previous blog entries how little things can accumulate over time to make yourself feel like a failure, and this is no exception. Many would consider cooking as one of the basic life skills and to see yourself failing repeatedly makes you feel like you can’t do anything right. And the worst part? It's not even your fault!
We are naturally wired to strive to be the best. It's actually natural for us to admire others and strive to be equal or better than them, especially if it helps to improve our situation. We learn from them, but what if these so-called lessons don’t actually work, instead setting us up to fail? And we don’t even realise that, ending up feeling like a failure for nothing.
Most of these channels share these so-called hacks to gain likes for financial gain. They put little to no regard to their viewers wellbeing. Some of these videos are even downright dangerous! Imagine recommending putting strawberries into bleach to bleach its red skin to white and only to have them later consumed?!
Ann Reardon, a qualified food scientist and dietitian and currently a Youtube personality with her channel How to Cook That had been vocal regarding online food hacks.
Ann had been very vocal in exposing dangerous how-to videos by 5-Minute Crafts and So Yummy at her Youtube channel, How to Cook That. While these hacks seem simple and very irresistible to try, they’ve been proven to not work and in some instances, downright dangerous.
According to Ann, these videos have been serious problem on Youtube especially to children. With YouTube and phones becoming more easily accessible to children, they would innocently try out these hacks and eventually end up getting hurt, especially when they do it on their own without adult supervision.
Even if you put aside the potential physical harm, setting up these children for failure at an early age is very cruel in my opinion. Imagine already beginning to think of themselves as failures at an early age? Self-esteem takes years to build and cultivate but what if they're brought low from the start? What if the constant failures hinder them from even trying to raise it?
Ann Reardon graduated from Curtin University in Bachelor of Science, Nutrition and Food ScienceField Of StudyDietetics/Dietitian is a food scientist, dietitian from Western Australia and is one of YouTube's biggest baking shows with over 3M subscribers.
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