The ‘Rate My Plate’ Facebook group celebrated its second birthday a few months ago. The public group was founded in mid-August 2020, and welcomes members from all over the globe, so long as they promise to follow the rules.

One of the main rules that everyone ought to follow is to set their egos aside. “The group is meant for comments to be made on people’s food so don’t get offended if somebody says something bad about your food,” the team running the show explains. They add that anyone “caught being a snowflake” will end up suspended.

At the same time, members of the group are encouraged to be kind to each other. Criticism should never grow into something more, like bullying or degrading comments.

Keep it all food-related, and there shouldn’t be any problem. Post something unrelated to gastronomy, on the other hand, and you might find yourself suspended for a couple of days. The rules are pretty simple to follow, to be fair, and all you have to do is be a decent human being and talk about food pics. Sounds easy, right? At the time of writing, the Facebook group was run by a team of three administrators and one moderator.

Cooking, pretty much like any other skill, relies on a person’s ability to focus and learn from their mistakes. Sure, some people might be ‘naturals’ and quickly move on to making complex dishes while the rest of us are stuck looking at our sad scrambled eggs. However, pretty much everyone has the ability to improve.

How much improvement you’ll see really depends on the time you spend in the kitchen and how willing you are to apply the lessons you learned when you failed, massively. Having someone to bounce your cooking ideas off of is absolutely great. Getting them to taste your culinary concoctions is even better.

Broadly speaking, cooking is made up of two (arguably, unequal) parts. On the one hand, you have the taste. It’s the essence of cooking and will make or break absolutely any dish.

Even if everything looks delicious, the effort wasn’t worth it if the person eating your food ends up disappointed. Personally, we’ve tasted so many meals that look gorgeous but are bland/oversalted/overwhelmingly garlicky. And it ruins the entire experience.

On the other hand, you have everything related to aesthetics and presentation. And that’s really the docs of the ‘Rate My Plate’ Facebook group. We don’t have the smell and taste to go on, so we’re left to make judgment calls using just one sense: our sight.

And here, things get tricky. We think that you’ll agree that many of us have seen horrible-looking dishes that actually tasted wonderful. But, on the flip side, we've also tasted tiny, beautiful dishes that work as art, but not as food.

It’s actually very hard to judge a meal by just the visuals because some weird flavor combinations can definitely work while others are bound to fall flat. For instance, Bored Panda previously looked at various weird vintage recipes. And though they sound extremely peculiar to us in the 21st century, some flavor combinations actually work quite nicely.

For example, Professor Nathalie Cooke, from McGill University, explained to us during an earlier interview that vintage party food recipes from the 1950s are the result of food fashion, but weren’t just a fad.

“That is, the basic flavor combination is something that reaches across the decades. What you’re describing may seem very odd to us in the 21st century, but the taste combinations—savory and sweet (tuna waffles, ham and bananas) or sweet and sour (mayo with lime) are surely very familiar,” she explained to us earlier.

“There were ‘fads’ at mid-century: think of cookbooklets demonstrating how to decorate one’s ham with slices of canned pineapple, topped with the bedazzling red of a maraschino cherry, for example! And you don’t mention the jaw-dropping recipes incorporating marshmallows in main course dishes, recipes that were brain children of corporate marketing departments,” the professor said.

“But if we were to create one of today’s favorites from scratch, say Pad Thai, we would start from the same basic taste combinations you describe in what at first glance seem like bizarre plate partners,” she told Bored Panda before.

“Cooking bitter tamarind with water, raw sugar and fish sauce will build the basic foundation (sour, salty and sweet). To that one would add the requisite green onions, bean sprouts, and noodles—and likely some additional flavor notes such as shallot, garlic, and perhaps dried turnip (salty and sweet) to deepen the flavor.”

In other words, tasting the dish is paramount. And we’d love to try most of the food in this list, just to see if they taste as good as—or better than—we imagine.