Viral video reveals that we’ve been using a cheese grater completely wrong this whole time

There are plenty of things in the kitchen that are difficult to get your head around. To this day, I still don’t understand why I can’t pop a bottle of champagne without the cork careering across the room like an alcoholic, wooden bullet, or why tins simply refuse to open as soon as I step near them. But, by and large, there are a few things that we all like to think we’ve managed to master. The cheese grater is one tool that definitely fits into this category.

Even the most shoddily designed, bluntest-bladed grater looks, on the surface at least, to be pretty self explanatory. You get a good grip, you grab your block and you start rubbing away until you’re left with sufficient strands of the good stuff. It shouldn’t really take a rocket scientist to work out what to do. Which makes it all the more irritating that we’ve basically all been doing it wrong from day dot.

A new viral video has been circulating this week, providing further proof that we’re all idiots and shouldn’t be trusted with anything vaguely sharp and pointy. Originally uploaded to Instagram by Menu World, the clip shows a grater resting horizontally on a table top, before cheese is swiped from side to side, rather than up and down. The results are, without being hyperbolic, spectacular. Once again, the internet has found a way to make the everyman or woman feel small and inadequate.

There are several immediately obvious benefits to the new method. For starters, placing the grater on its side means that you minimise the risk of sliding around on the kitchen counter top as you grate. It’s also significantly easier on the arms, and can help reduce any excess mess produced by errant strings.

The new grating discovery has, predictably, sent social media into a frenzy. Twitter user @beasymss was retweeted over 20,000 times after posting the video, commenting “I feel a fool” in the aftermath of the discovery. An article on the method even reached the BBC. Publications from all over the world have latched onto the trend, potentially prompting a grating revolution. Only time will tell whether this comes to pass.

The new discovery has prompted some people to reexamine other attributes of everyone’s favourite dairy divider. According to Mental Floss, another method you can use to take your grating to the next level is to “apply a coat of cooking spray to the outside…to make it less of an upper body workout”. It just goes to show that if you give things a second glance, you can always discover something new

It’s worth noting that there are a few limitations to the new technique. For instance, it will only make life easier if you have a box grater, rather than something flat and flimsy. Nonetheless, the promise of saving aching forearms and hours spent cleaning kitchen surfaces up and down the country makes this new technique well worth shouting about. Whoever it was that ultimately decided to give grating another go; we salute you.