Tech Shortcuts for Life

How I Cook 84 Meals in 3 Hours

All it takes is science — and an Instant Pot

Tech Shortcuts for Life is a weekly column from Thomas Smith on Debugger exploring the apps, automations, gadgets, and other tech tricks that can make your life more efficient.

It’s the New Year, and if you’re like nearly half of Americans, you’ve probably resolved to eat healthier, save money, and lose weight. According to Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and basically all of Instagram, one of the best ways to accomplish these goals is to start doing meal prep — cooking all your meals for the week at once, so you can ensure they’re healthy, cheap, and convenient.

With all its measuring, portioning, and focus on culinary and financial efficiency, meal prep has a kind of geeky appeal, for the same reasons that many Silicon Valley types love Soylent. But meal prep can also be difficult and time-consuming — certainly more work than dropping some weird powder into a glass of milk and calling it a meal. Luckily, there’s a magic appliance that uses automation, physics, and the Ideal Gas Laws to make it far easier — the Instant Pot.

When I first heard about the Instant Pot, I assumed it was some kind of glorified slow cooker. It’s not. Instant Pots are automated pressure…