Maximise how cute your meal looks with these time-saving seaweed sheets!

There’s a famous saying that says that people “eat with their eyes first“, and nowhere is that more true than in Japan. Whether it’s a fancy meal or a homemade boxed lunch, how food looks is almost as important as how food tastes.

Sadly, not all of us are talented enough to create culinary works of art on the regular, but now there’s a way to easily spruce up any meal you have and make it instantly more adorable.

The product is called Nori Art, a pack of dried seaweed with shapes already pre-cut into the sheets. There are a number of Nori Art varieties available, like cherry blossom petals, dinosaurs and trains, but seeing as February 22 was Cat Day here in Japan, we decided to try out the kitty-themed seaweed.

A pack of Nori Art (Cat Version) costs 324 yen (US$2.40) and includes two sheets of seaweed. Various cat-related patterns are cut into the seaweed via a laser cutter. All you need to do is pop out the shapes from the seaweed sheet and place it on some rice, and you’ll instantly have a much cuter lunch.

We were a little worried that we would rip the delicate seaweed and ruin the cat shapes, but they were only barely attached to the seaweed sheet and popped out quite easily. Intricate shapes like a stretching cat or a paw print would be almost impossible to cut out by yourself, but here they were, ready in mere seconds.

Once the shapes were popped out of the seaweed sheet, all that was left to do was place it on our lunch and boom! Instant cuteness level increase!

But it’s not just boxed lunches that can be spruced up — add the seaweed shapes to a simple salad and it’s instantly one hundred times cuter!

Or how about atop a tuna sashimi rice bowl? Not only does this increase how adorable your meal looks, but might encourage fussy eaters like young children to enjoy it, too!

Even the least culinary inclined among us should be able to make something that looks good enough to eat with Nori Art. No matter how much of a hopeless cook you might be, just adding a few shapes of seaweed on top of any meal will make it instantly more appetising.

…Well, maybe not any meal, but certainly a lot of them.

Related: Nori Art
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