From my experience, there are three main reasons why people don’t cook more often: ability, money and time. 【小题1】 Money is a topic I’ll save for another day. So today I want to give you some wisdom about how to make the most of the time you spend in the kitchen. Here are three suggestions for great cooking on a tight schedule:

【小题2】 The moments when I think cooking is a pain are when I’m already hungry and there is nothing ready to eat. So think about the coming week. When will you have time to cook? Do you have the right materials ready? A little time planning in advance can save a lot of work later on.

Make your time worth it. When you do find time to cook a meal, make the most of it and save yourself time later on. Are you making one loaf of bread? 【小题3】 It takes around the same amount of time. So save yourself the effort for a future meal.

Try new things. This may surprise you. 【小题4】 It gives you the chance to hit upon new ideas and recipes that can work well with your appetite and schedule. The more you learn and the more you try, the more ability you have to take control of your food and your schedule.

Hopefully that gives you a good start. 【小题5】 And don't let a busy schedule discourage you from making some great changes in the way you eat and live!

Whatever your tastes are, it is highly unlikely that many of you are using 3D printers to create your favorite meals. Still, anyone interested in the future of food can find technologists printing out snacks, from steaks to cakes, at the push of a button. Now laser cooking has arrived and it is adding an entirely new layer of gourmet (美食家) taste.

Columbia’s Creative Machines Lab team is hoping to build a digital personal chef to deliver taste, materials, and food to suit individual tastes. So far their experiments with chicken have created laser-cooked examples that have the same flavor as cooking, but use 50 percent fewer ingredients, and have the double content.

“In fact, our two blind taste testers preferred laser-cooked meat to the conventionally cooked samples, which shows the promise for this burgeoning technology,” said project leader James Blutinger. Scientists are working to promote this technology.

Creating software that would allow chefs to make their own designs—a Photoshop of food—is the next step. “We need high-level software that enables people who are not programmers to design the foods they want,” said group leader Hod Lipson. “And then we need a place where people can share digital directions as they share music.”

All of this could well change the way we think about and eat food. High on the list of positives is the fact that printed food can be healthier, lessen the environmental impact of food production—especially red meat—and cut waste.

Global food waste hit almost one billion metric tons in 2021. So future companies that turn food waste into tasty dishes and food decorations—like Natural Machines or Upprinting Food—are a welcome development. As food printing becomes more widespread, we may see instant printed and recycled meals as the dietary solution we were looking for.

A short cooking video posted by a netizen on TikTok has recently become a popular hit on the site. Bearing the tag “Chinese food”, the video not only showed off the chief’s superb skills in making Chinese dishes, but it also got netizens abroad wanting to get a taste of China’s unique food culture.

Although the video was nothing master-level, just a rather standard homemade fried potato dish, it received more than 200, 000 likes after only three days of posting. In addition to praising the chef, commenters wondered why such a simple Chinese dish could look like a fancy cuisine that had been made through tons of effort. “Even the most basic Chinese dish needs to have three elements: color, smell and taste. For example, color not only requires a chef to have sharp eyes, but also valuable experience,” said Wang, an experienced Chinese chef in Guangzhou.

Chinese cooking is not the only type of content covered by the tag. Other popular videos under the tag include “odd food” challenges, traditional Chinese dishes and Chinese snack tasting, the latter of which has become particularly popular among young omnivore vloggers (video bloggers) living in a world of continually expanding cultural globalization.

“I have been a fan of Chinese food ever since my Chinese friend cooked me di san xian at university. I was surprised by the dish’s taste and its look, which was very different from my home food, but felt it was very familiar to me because I noticed we share similar cooking skills,” said Bianca, an Italian Asian food fan.

“I started my channel by recording my roommate tasting my cooking. These videos got likes and comments gradually. Seeing some people commenting in German or English and saying ‘I want to try it’, I felt these videos can narrow the gap between the two cultures,” said Mr. Bear, a vlogger on Bilibili who promotes Chinese cooking.