Okay maybe this isnt the best demographics here but like I mean as in if you know someone who’s Gen Z, do they have a “idk how to cook” issue?
(Please don’t be like “omg its easy, how could you not know” in the comments, be nice in the comments okay 🙈)
When looking at younger people who don’t know how to cook, it’s not about them being stupid - someone failed them. Yes, to your point, cooking is easy. A rice cooker, a single pan, you can make a great meal…
But no one ever mentioned what temp to cook chicken at. What the hell’s a 4 (out of 10) and how much oil (or how little) should I use? Rice cooker comes with instructions and lines but that just makes plan rice - at least Zatarans has some flavor.
I learned how to cook a grilled cheese as a kid… And I hate cheese.
Then I was working in kitchens for seven years. So, yeah, I’ve got a leg up on people who’ve literally never cooked a meal for one, let alone 1,500 over a lunch period. It’s hard to ‘learn’ to cook entirely by yourself because fucking up your meal means not having anything to eat.
It’s not just Gen Z because no one taught their parents and Gen Z will probably fuck up their kids the same.
fucking up your meal means not having anything to eat.
You gotta fuck up pretty bad to have something literally inedible.
And you’ve never seen someone almost burn down a dorm because they didn’t put water in their instant noodles? People royally fuck up all the time.
Cooking doesn’t scale well until you are cooking for at least 2 people or batch prepping.
Oh yh, you have a point tho
Yes, it’s universal. There isn’t a single millennial or gen Z person that knows how to cook in the entire world. This will finally put an end to our species.
On our tombstone it’ll say “here lies humanity, fallen victim to shitty parents who didn’t think to teach their children how to cook.”
Reject Cooking. Return to eating tree bark.
Return to raw berrys
So cinnamon rolls without the roll.
Disagree on the shitty parents part. For some, yes, but for others they are probably shitty cooks too. If my culinary education is any indication of that, there are ~20 family recipies that I have notes of or have done myself and my folks keep a small box of note cards written by their grandparents in the “we will run into a burning building to get this” box. They are instructions, not study material, and thats how I learned a patchwork of skills, but nothing formal.
I was never taught the science of “how the fuck to make bread” or “what alchemy mayo is”, that is something ive had to actually study myself (thanks anerican schools). I feel the defect is education on why we cook things the way we do, the basic building blocks are not taught by default to a level where people are confident in building something on their own.
I had a friend who was completely incapable of doing pretty much anything for themselves because their parents always insisted on doing everything for them, and berated them when they tried for themselves. They’re now in their 30s and have a breakdown any time they have to do anything, and frequent depressive episodes because they lack agency and self-worth. So there definitely are parents out there who completely fail their kids.
My mother was a terrible parent in the other direction. The expectation was on me to do everything as soon as possible. I was cooking full meals on my own by six, and when we moved countryside I was the firekeeper, in charge of the entire supply line of stacking, chopping, and transporting wood, to cleaning and ensuring the fire was kept in our boiler by eight.
I don’t think parents need to teach about gluten formation, how it traps gases and makes the bread rise, or emulsions. Just foundational knowledge so that they’re able to explore that and take a keener interest should it strike them.
Idk if it’s Gen z. I’m millennial and I didn’t really know how to cook when I was younger. I eventually learned from YouTube and recipe websites.
I’m a single, Gen-x male and I despise cooking. Twenty minutes to prepare something, five minutes to eat it, and then another 20 minutes to clean up afterwards is, IMO, the most insanely inefficient use it my time.
Frankly I have better things to do. when a pill comes out that I can just pop in my mouth a couple of times a day I will be the first person in line.
For now, sadly, the best I can do it keep things as simple and as easy as possible prep wise (or order in… which gets to financially prohibitive sometimes)
Huel and similar is as close as you get to your pill now but you can skip cooking entirely
They sell huel black at Costco now. Chocolate flavored vegan soylent 🤤
I really wish cheap public cafeterias were more of a thing. We don’t spin our own clothes, or weave our own baskets anymore…
Its been noted in studies that all generations starting from Boomers have had less people who “know how to cook”. With instant meals came less cooking, and less cooking brought less learning how to cook.
I think that isn’t the issue. The problem is that “proper” food costs more than prefabs, and Cost-of-Living keeps growing while worker wages are stagnant. It is harder to afford perishable food that needs to be handcrafted, because that costs time, risks spoilage, and costs more for what it does.
Money is getting tighter, and consequently every loss feels worse.
I think it’s probably a bit of both, skill being lost to parents having less time to cook and everything being more expensive.
The cheapest way I know of one can survive a very long time is rice and beans with any source of fat. I personally like peanut butter, but understand that’s very much a US thing. But prepping beans over night requires having the time and know-how to do it.
35 here: my cooking before I could afford to eat out every meal was boiled chicken and rice. The prep time for meals that I enjoy are multi hour affairs, and I’d rather work an extra hour for a meal prepared by a professional whose food I enjoy.
Anecdotally, one of the best cooks I know is gen Z. In general though, I think this is part of the predictable result of not teaching anything like home ec anymore for decades.
I don’t meal prep because the meals are rarely as good after 5 days lol. I try to cook simple foods for breakfast (oatmeal, or bagel and cream cheese), and make sandwiches to take to work for lunch. Dinner is something like pasta with sausages and a side of veggies (99% of the time for me, that’s garlic and kale fried together in a skillet).
I eat dirt and drink rainwater.
Lol. Seeing what people in this thread consider cooking makes me wonder if I should be a chef.
I mean I do know gen Z kids who can’t cook at all, but I knew a lot of young men back when I started college who couldn’t cook either and that was way before gen Z was around.
Is this really a thing? My kids regularly help with the coooing, they know meal prep, we have them sometimes cook entire meals for the family. I did the same as a kid, although it was largely due to having a single parent who often worked nights.
I can’t really imagine a human growing up without at least some culinary skills. Enough to feed themselves and have basic nutrition literacy anyway.
I found this Food Theory video right after I posted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLk1qGdnGU
👀
Wild, I honestly hadn’t heard this before, but it really does make sense considering some of the hilariously novice cooking instruction videos that I’ve seen popping up recently.
I’m involved with scouting so most of the kids I know are a good bit more self sufficient than average I’m guessing.
I think you touched on a good point, cooking is often a generational skill, for different reasons - you were poor so your meals were cheap and made at home - you were poor so your parents worked too much and never had time or money for “real” food - you come from a single parent household and cooking for multiple people is too much to do daily as the sole bread winner. Or the other side of the coin, your family was wealthy enough so you never leaned life skills. I guess my point is there’s a lot of lifestyles that would require you to learn to cook, to some degree but not in a dedicated way taught by a competent home cook and a variety of techniques. I started cooking for myself when I was probably 10 because my mom decided she didn’t want to do it anymore and I was plenty competent at making poverty meals but I didn’t really learn “how to cook” until well into adulthood when I was the mom; I used a steak knife for everything, all prep work, until I was like 30, for example. Learning to cook well makes cooking a lot more enjoyable and delicious and it’s just not a skill that is being passed on because most of us are too over worked to do it and that’s been true for a few generations now.
To counter your anecdote with my own, not that I’ve seen. My Gen Z sister and her cohort of Z friends have a “chosen family” dinner every weekend where they come over and cook. One person takes lead, the rest help as needed, and almost every single one finds recipes and learns techniques from Instagram or TikTok.
They’ve come up with some crazy good dishes that I wouldn’t have stumbled across via traditional cookbooks and more millennial + oriented websites. My sister also has much better and more varied techniques than I ever got the old way, learning from mother and other relatives.
I’d probably be the perfect example of that stereotype since the only thing I actually know how to cook from the top of my head is scrambled eggs and ramen (if you can even count that). I always just prepare frozen meals (e.g. breakfast bowls) since I rarely give myself time to actually cook something. Tbf though, I feel like if I was forced to cook something, assuming I had access to the internet to get instructions, I could cook anything basic just fine. Though maybe that’s just cope, lol
So like I know how to cook. But I don’t have the energy for it anymore. The world around me has pushed soo many task off to me in order to maximize profit I just have a ton more to do than I did 20 years ago. And the frustration of doing even simple stuff due to corporate cuts saps more energy per hour than anything used to.
I think my secret is to do simple meals in batches. That way you only really cook once or twice a week.
For instance, my favorite meal is a tomato pasta thing, don’t know what it is called.
Dice up as much garlic as you want, fry this in oil, add 4 cans of crushed tomatoes, as much black pepper as you want, bay leaves and then cook until boiling. Remove bay leaves and add to pasta. Boom! your done. Can feed me for a week and for about $5-$6 of ingredients. I also add nutritional yeast for extra pep to it, but you can just do cheese if you roll that way.
Home cooking doesn’t have to be complex but it does take motivation to get started.
Still takes more energy than I have left in a day.
That is a shame, I hope your situation improves.
Thanks. It will be a race. When I get to retirement will older age rob me of as much energy as I currently burn on all the BS in life. Or will the extra free time dilute the BS enough to have some surplus energy again. I’m closer to retirement than I am to the day I started working. So there may be a light at the end of the tunnel.
So long as you can ignore taking on new BS, it should dilute. Easy to say, difficult to do depending on the person and circumstances.
I don’t think it’s a generational issue, just young people. Once you get kids you’ll learn to cook.
Maybe there are more singles and child free people or they take longer to settle down or whatever.
