If you didn’t film yourself meticulously chopping produce into your 100-piece set of food storage containers, did you even meal prep? You may have thought getting lunch ready for the week just meant packing some salads on a Sunday night as “60 Minutes” plays in the background. But these days, performatively staging your sustenance for the week has become a social media trend all on its own.
A brief scroll of TikTok and you’ll see there’s meal prepping for “lazy girls,” for eating on a budget, nurses on 12-hour shifts, families of five and even college kids (who are apparently no longer just showing up to the dining hall in pajamas to eat cereal at 2 p.m.).
With the surplus of storage containers and prepping hacks you may think meal prepping couldn’t get any more … well, prepared. However, I raise you this all-in-one food prep station.
Instead of pulling out a cutting board, a variety of peelers and graters, all of your containers, you can now slice and dice everything you need with one versatile instrument. It’s a bamboo cutting board with grated drawers and containers packed underneath the board. Depending on the style, they come with their own stackable tops, letting you grate or peel directly into the container you’ll be storing the food in — all on the same cutting board.
And though it’s easy to snark at all the meal-prepping madness, I humbly say, this tool is pretty genius.
One of the most popular meal-prepping stations is the all-plastic Prepdeck, which was first seen on Shark Tank, though feels like an item made entirely to show off on the internet. These cost north of $120, measure almost two feet long and are often sold out on Amazon. They also have a phone stand built-in, so you reference recipe open on your phone or tablet (or film yourself chopping, if that dices your onion).
Yet, if you’re a home chef looking for something a little more budget-friendly and a lot more compact for your kitchen, we found a selection of smaller bamboo options that are completely stocked and just as beloved by home chefs, all under $60. They may not look as “camera ready” but they’re a super adaptable tool that will save you time on prepping and cleaning.
HuffPost and its publishing partners may receive a commission from some purchases made via links on this page. Every item is independently curated by the HuffPost Shopping team. Prices and availability are subject to change.