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 🙈)
My son is 22 now, when he was 14 I started giving him “serious” cooking lessons, as in not just helping mom in the kitchen but making whole meals with only guidance from me. When he was ~19 in college all the boys on the floor of his dorm decided they wanted to do a 4th of July cookout. My son was the only boy on the whole floor who knew how to cook. They winged it on the grill and that was fine but even like potato salad was too much for anyone else to make. He called me to tell me how proud he was of himself for essentially running the whole thing because it would have just been meat and chips without his cooking lessons. Obviously this is just one kid in a dorm for a mathematics/computer science college so big grain of salt of course but both my kids (20 and 22) are the only ones in their friend groups who can cook
Maybe more broadly, consider that it’s not always simply “kids these days” but often just the stage of life one is in. Don’t worry, they’ll come around to seeing most things your way - just that you’ll again have moved on to a yet later stage and not notice that they’re now in agreement with your former self
im ahhh. not proud but kinda a sterotypical guy in the kitchen and I live large on the largess of my wifes skill. When I was single pizza was a very common meal for dinner and fast food for breakfast and lunch. Freezer filled with microwaveable options and plenty of cereal on hand at all times along with bread, peanut butter, jelly, lunch meat and cheese.
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.
Is this more of a white people problem? I feel like most of the other Asian kids I grew up with learned how to help in the kitchen before they could really reach a stove top without a step stool. This might just be an immigrant family thing though.
At that stage of my life, my cooking was rudimentary. While my parents made sure we could cook, it was limited to grilling and baking
Multiple times as a child I had the sudden urge to cook something for fun, got up to prepare, and realized I don’t know where my parents put which ingredients.
I did learn a decent amount when I lived away from parents for a while and could actually experiment daily now I knew where everything’s stored.
But the gen Z housing crisis has hit me too and now I only know how to cook very basic stuff off the top of my head again.
Could you not just learn where things were when you lived with your parents?
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.
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.
My niece and nephew are young but can both cook. if you don’t know you learn the same way you learn any other skill. When I was figuring it out I looked up simple recipes and mastered those and then moved on to more complicated ones. If I didn’t know how to do something I watched someone on Youtube do it first. Even when I was starting out it was rare that I ended up with a meal that was inedible. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
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.
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.
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
Thank you… Perfect quote.
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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.
Bread and topping exist, you don’t even need cooking to feed yourself.
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.
or is that just a minority?
I mean, where? Things like this depend entirely on your local culture and policies.
I read that theres a global phemonmeon ranging all the way from US to China and im not sure if the mainstream media is right and kinda wanna hear annecdotes. But I’m gonna assume mainstream media probably excludes “poor” countries (since they dont have the luxury that “rich” countries have)
Apparantly this issue is even worse in China because of high tech (in terms of smartphones and app usage) combined with the labor is cheaper so Gen Z Chinese can afford delivery services to be used frequently.
You make it sounds like that’s a lot but what’s between the USA and China? It’s just Japan and a few islands neither group of citizens could find on a map no?
Ah, I see, not a big fan of the Prime Meridian being in the center of everything, right? xD
Dunno, it’s as good a choice as any but isn’t that the long way around? Or am I projecting my Atlantic Ocean scale sense onto the Pacific too much 😅
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
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.
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
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.
