Food is important. It’s a deep part of human cultures, it’s necessary to continue living, and most of the time it’s delicious as well. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to finding new and exciting things to do with food. New ways to cook it, new ways to grow it, new ways to eat it or present it. They spend years developing techniques to keep food viable for longer and longer stretches of time, so you can keep your freezers stocked for years.
SEE ALSO: 10 Ridiculous Myths You Believe About Fast Food
No matter how you slice it, the core of civilization always comes down, in one way or another, to food. Sometimes, we even find uses for foods that go beyond eating. Spices used to dye cloth, or in pagan rituals. Fruits and vegetables used on the skin and in cosmetics to make us look better.
Then we go even farther beyond that, using food for improving our homes, even! Don’t just take my word for it, however. Here is a nice, carefully curated list of 10 different uses for foods that go far beyond eating.
10 Ramen—Fix A Broken Sink
Have you accidentally chipped your sink, or worse, broke a chunk off of it? I think at one point we’ve all dropped something on that porcelain behemoth that makes up the bathroom sink and accidentally smashed off a chunk of it. The good news it, you can apparently fix that right up with…ramen noodles.
In a viral video, a man in China showed himself filling a gaping hole in his sink with dry blocks of ramen. He then pours water (and, weirdly, the seasoning pack) into the ramen to soften the noodles. He squishes the noodles into place, lets them dry, and then chips and sands it into shape, making it nice and smooth before finally putting down a layer of white spray paint, blending it in so well that you can’t even tell the sink is now roughly one quarter noodle paste.
My only real question is…why did he season it?[1]
9 Egg—Hair Conditioner
Eggs, one of the major building blocks of the average meal. Easy to get, easy to store, delicious, nutritious, and oh so useful. Even for your hair, it seems!
According to hair care aficionados, nothing does your hair good quite like an egg yolk. There was several all natural hair care remedies out there, but this one seems to take the cake.
You start by cracking an egg and separating out the yolk from the whites. What you do with the whites from there doesn’t seem to matter, but the yolks go into a bowl with a teaspoon of olive oil or baby oil and a cup of lukewarm water. From there you take your fork, whisk, spoon, or other stirring device and beat it all together into a smooth yellow mix. Take it to the bathroom, pour it on your head (but NOT your face!) after a nice shampooing, and you’re good to go!
Leave that on for five minutes and after you rinse it out, you’ll have the silky, soft, shiny hair of your dreams.[2]
8 Flour—Steel Polish
Who knew flour was for more than just baking? According to some lovely housewives, it can also be used to polish steel kitchenware to one beautiful shine! The instructions given are fairly simple as well, so it’s easy to do.
First, you wash the steel you intend to polish (sink, fridge, bowl, etc) with the standard soap and water, getting it as clean as you can. Then you take a rag and dry it off. Be thorough, as wet flour will just make a horrible, goopy mess that won’t help you at all. Next, you take a dry rag and absolutely cake it in dry flour, which you then apply to the steel surface. Now you scrub!
The longer and harder you scrub, the shinier your steel will become! Once you think it’s done, just wipe that puppy down with a paper towel or yet another rag to get the excess flour off and then step back to admire your handy work. If you’ve done a proper job, you might even be able to use that steel as a makeshift mirror![3]
7 Sugar and Baking Soda—’Black Snake’ Fireworks
This one is my personal favorite. Remember when you were a little kid on the 4th of July, and you weren’t allowed to play with the big fireworks just yet, so while your teenage cousins were given the Roman Candles and cherry bombs, you got to sit on the porch on on the picnic bench with the sparklers and, if you were lucky, the Black Snakes.
Apparently, if you have some sand, sugar, baking soda, and lighter fluid, you can have those wonderful curling snakes again right now, and any time you want them from now on!
It works like this: you fill a metal or glass bowl with sand, and just douse that sucker in lighter fluid. Then, you pile up a little hill of baking soda and sugar, and light the whole thing on fire. The carbon dioxide from the baking soda combined with the decomposing sugar causes this crazy long tube (or snake) of black ash-like substance to come spiraling out of the bowl. If you do it correctly, you’re in for 20 minutes of expanding snake![4]
6 Milk—Repair Cracked China
Oh no, you’ve dropped your fine china and now it has an incomplete hairline crack! Haven’t we all been there, buddy, china plates are easier to ruin than the sink. Never fear, however, because the enterprising young housewives of the world have a solution for this issue, too: a milk bath.
Apparently milk is good for more than just your bones, who knew? The way it works is that you fill a pot with two cups of milk and place your cracked plate in there. You heat it on low for about an hour, then turn it off and let the whole thing cool, milk and all.
When it’s cooled off enough, you take the plate out, rinse it, and voila! The crack should have repaired itself! Supposedly the proteins in the milk fill the crack and then bond to the china, becoming a part of it.
Sounds like magic to me, but what do I know?[5]
5Green Apples—Headache Stopper
An apple a day keeps the doctor away, and apparently quite literally in some cases. If you have frequent headaches, you might want to invest in a bag of Granny Smith apples, according to Researchers from The Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation.
According to their research, in 15 out of 50 cases of migraine sufferers, the smell of green apples was so pleasant that it actually reduced the severity of their headache to bearable levels.
What I wouldn’t give to have a green apple in my purse at family gatherings![6]
4 Moonshine—Gasoline
Did you know that moonshine and gasoline are almost the same thing to a car? Apparently it’s true. Since the federal mandate that gasoline must contain at least 10% ethanol, which is really just corn liquor, people have found out that you can dump moonshine into your car and it runs more or less the same as on gasoline. In fact, you can totally replace gasoline and save yourself a pretty penny by brewing up some harsh, strong moonshine and pouring it right into your tank.
Granted, it doesn’t work well long term for cars built before 2000, and it needs to be at least 150 proof, but if you have those two terms met you can pretty much run indefinitely on white lightning!
Just make sure you have a licence to brew before you buy a whiskey still, okay?[7]
3 Banana—Silver Polish
Silver is the pride and joy of any jewelry collection. Bright, delicate, and with that gorgeous shine to it, silver is sure to make your special someone jump for joy when presented as a gift and makes your friends and enemies jealous of you and your fabulous life.
The only real drawback is the tarnish that wraps its gross, discolored tendrils around the silver’s bright surface after a while. Luckily, we can combat that now!
With just a blender, water, and a banana peel, you can save your silver jewelry from the clutches of times corrupting fingers. You simply pop the peel and the water into the blender and grind that little flap of yellow fruit skin until you have a nice, thick banana paste.
Cover your jewelry in said paste and let it sit for a few minutes, then rinse it off and pat it dry. Tada! Good as new![8]
2Lemon—Insect Repellent
Lemons are one of the most perfect fruits in nature. You can use them to highlight your hair, make a refreshing drink, remove stains from your dishes, remove plaque from your teeth, add flavor to any meat, lemons can do it all! Truly a perfect being!
Did you know, however, that they can also protect your home from bugs? Insects, such as roaches, spiders, and ants, have an extremely strong sense of smell that at times can overwhelm what little brains they have. That sense of smell is particularly sensitive to the smell of citrus, specifically citric acid. Oh, wow do they ever hate citric acid!
Lemons, being the perfect fruit that they are, are one of the strongest members of the citrus family, containing a ton of citric acid. Simply squeeze them, spritz the juice around your doors and windows, and rest easy, knowing that bugs wont even cross your threshold as long as that acid line is there to smell up the joint. As a bonus, you get to enjoy a nice summer scent all year round![9]
1 Bones—Telling The Future
What would any list be without a walk on the wild side?
Bones are great. They provide a handle for your ribs, you can boil them to make broth, crack them open for their marrow, grind them for gelatin or bone meal, use them for spooky Halloween props, give them to your dog, the uses are endless! In fact, one of those uses is appropriate for Halloween even more so than as decoration: witchcraft!
According to many pagan sites, bones are extremely useful in divination (in other words, reading the future). There are two ways to go about this.
First, there’s casting the bones, wherein you roll them like dice and read their positions on the table to see what the future holds. It’s a bit like reading tea leaves, but with more necromancy and grease stains.
The second method involves the burning of bones. A bone is tossed into an exceptionally hot fire and left there until it begins to crack and split. Once it’s cracked all it can without exploding, the witch, shaman, or whomever is doing the reading will remove the bone from the fire and read the future from the cracks and splits, like a road map of life etched in burnt grooves.[10]
Spooky!
About The Author: Deana J. Samuels is currently unhappily slurping down a ton of ramen, as her roommate made the horrible mistake of spending all the grocery money on 12 packs of the stuff because it was cheap. Please send help, and vegetables.