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 🙈)
Just for context, a hell of a lot of Boomer men (and those men before them) could barely warm up a can of soup because cooking was women’s’work, despite most “great” chef’s being men at that time. Gen X men were a little better, but not by a lot. I’m Gen X for context.
It really only became widely desirable / fashionable for men to cook with the Millennials came along. Before then, the ladies were expected to learn how to cook from other ladies, but of course only some of them had role models to teach them.
tl;dr everyone cooking is a relatively recent phenomenon, and as all the commenters here say, it’s a skill one needs to learn. Thanks for coming to my mini-TED talk.
As a millennial, I only learned to cook as self-defence; my mother was a shitty cook. On top of that she regularly did some diet stuff while I was underweight. Virtually none of my male peers did much beyond heating stuff up.
My friend’s boomer aged parents got a divorce at like age 75. Nobody really saw it coming. His dad sent us a picture of some stew he tried to make and I didn’t even know you could make stew so bad. I could just tell from the picture. My chef roommate went over and showed him some instructions and tips on how to cook.
Every Human needs to learn to cook. Not a gourmet 12 course meal. Just cook simply to feed yourself. This is a basic skill.
I don’t disagree, but the number of things “every human needs to learn” has become utterly impossible.
Cooking, sure.
Cleaning and housekeeping, yeah, okay.
Managing your money, banks, pension, boring stuff. Ugh.
Media literacy (understanding author’s biases, checking sources, etc.), uhh, getting pretty hard, but not learning this can end up destroying your life.
How to use a computer, and how to use Windows and MS Office in particular, because you’re going to have to do that at some point whether you want to or not. Ugh, getting a bit tedious now. And the software keeps changing so you have to re-teach yourself every now and then.
Identifying scams and phishing, and what to do when you encounter one. That’s a real tough one, and keeps getting harder faster because scammers continue to invent new tricks.
Politics. Gotta know a thing or two, and who to vote for (if you live in a democracy).
Detecting deepfakes and AI propaganda. Maybe count this under media literacy, but it’s a totally new thing that everyone needs to know.
How to use public transportation. Can be really difficult in some places, and always very intimidating the first time you do it.
The list goes on and on and on. Every single human is expected to be Superman now. No, I refuse. Fuck that.
I’m shit at cooking. I will avoid cooking as much as possible unless my life depends on it. And I rely on my family and the society around me to keep me fed. I repay in other ways. I can fix just about anything around the house. And almost any computer trouble. My family relies on me to do those things.
I’m not surprised that people can’t cook. The world is impossible to navigate.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein, 1973
Eh. We’re more like bugs than we like to pretend.
Thank you… Perfect quote.
I dunno what you think life was like before the cities, but you had a lot to learn. There is not more stuff you have to know to survive. I will agree that it is far more abstract though.
My brother in Christ that stuff is NOT impossible 😭
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Well said. Don’t even need to spend money to learn. Go to web. Find interesting tasty recipe… Try it out. Leftovers for lunch or freeze. I’m gen x and grew up cooking. Trust me - eat microwave pre made crap too much and you’ll be fat with ass cancer before you know it.
Not a gourmet 12 course meal. Just cook simply to feed yourself. This is a basic skill.
It’s a massive distinction that nobody explained to me when I was a kid, too. 10% of the effort gets you 90% of the result. The gourmet shit, where you hunt for a million weird heirloom ingredients, is mostly a flex.
Bread and topping exist, you don’t even need cooking to feed yourself.
Fun fact - Throughout much of recorded human history, there is evidence that much of the human population has relied on centralized food services and kitchens.
Not knowing how to cook is not as uncommon as people seem to think.
The fast food joints in the ruins of Pompei are fascinating. Stone tables with circles cut out so you could put food on the table and warm it from below, it’s basically a modern street vendor setup without the glass.
That seems strange, do you remember where you read that? My understanding was that until one or two hundred years ago (like somewhere between our grandparents their great grandparents, depending on where they were in the world), virtually everyone was a subsistence farmer or hunter-gatherer. You’re saying most of these people couldn’t have prepared what they found/farmed without someone there to do it for them? :o
This isn’t about subsistence farmers but urban populations.
For example, in medieval European cities, poor people didn’t have space for kitchens in their home, so they went outside to get hot food. The main options where buying prepared street food or buying raw ingredients and having a someone bake them into a pie for you.Farming and gathering have been dominant until industrial revolutions took place, and set us on path of urbanization. However, towns and cities have existed since thousands of years. They would have bakeries and pubs. Gobeklitepe that existed ~9000 BCE is the oldest discovered so far. Egyptian pyramids would have been impossible without centralized kitchens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_ancient_Rome#Commercial_food_preparation
I know this was a thing in ancient Rome. In theory it makes sense. Much more efficient than everybody having an entire kitchen in their homeYeah, it seems likely that even if a longhouse had one big kitchen where the whole clan prepared their maize, the skills to run it would have been fairly evenly distributed. Maybe in only one gender, or even a subset of one gender, but if there’s 200 of you and you’re always together, not much will be secret. Ditto for a bunch of peasants on one manor in Europe.
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.
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).
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.
I eat dirt and drink rainwater.
My problem is that I can cook but never have the willpower to after work, so I usually don’t eat or eat some junk
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.
