1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
@WongKaKui
Nothing is better than practicing. On the fly is fine, repetitions help. Others have said as much. :))
If the Taiwan flag in your avatar is an indicator for location, go ask grandma for tips, or go to any night market for cheap, varied food. Cheap and convenient. If that fails, there's a 7/11 near you I'm sure.
Don't fall into the trap "which kitchen appliance to buy". Buying isn't the first thing to learn here.
I am a litteral self taught cook. Cooking all from scratch and can tell you how to exactly cut appart and use every part of a bird
The first few zoomers I think of cook just fine. Although, there's one that undercooks everything, because she's impatient. A couple are actual foodies who will put serious effort in.
What exact age group are you thinking of? Teenagers haven't really had much time to learn.
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.
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.
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 donβt 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, thatβs garlic and kale fried together in a skillet).
So like I know how to cook. But I donβt 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.
I mean, I'm Gen Z and I've pretty confidently cooked my entire adult life. I realized pretty young that dad wasn't gonna cook for me forever and started helping with dinner sometimes to learn how. One of the best decisions I ever made.
Older millennial here, I have been cooking since I was in my early teens. But I also know people my age that would struggle to boil water. It isn't an age or generation thing, it is something else.
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.
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)
I really wish cheap public cafeterias were more of a thing. We don't spin our own clothes, or weave our own baskets anymore...
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.
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.
I eat dirt and drink rainwater.
Yes, that's called "growing up." You have to teach yourself. It's a frustrating process, because you don't understand how to select recipes that suit your needs. 1/2 the recipes I found online usually resulted in a fail, because I couldn't tell the difference between a good recipe and a bad one. I love the first cookbook I bought now, but at the time, what was I going to do with buckwheat blinis or tea-poached pears in chocolate sauce? I needed a basic pancake and chocolate cookies recipe. That book was basically useless for the first 5 years I owned it.
If I could go back, I would start with:
"I can cook vegan" by Isa Chandler
Chef John on youtube https://www.youtube.com/@foodwishes
Cooking is a skill. You learn it one meal at a time. What you want to start with is building a repertoire of simple, 15 minute meals that you love and that you can crank out with your eyes closed. Once you have like 3-5 of those, then you have a separation between "I need to eat" and "I want to learn to cook." That separation is what lets you not feel frustrated and focus on your skills.
Since I see a few people just posting their favourite websites, I've gotten some good vegetarian stuff off Cookie and Kate.
Lol. Seeing what people in this thread consider cooking makes me wonder if I should be a chef.
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 went through the pandemic and came out with a passion for making tasty things. It is probably a result of the combination of my being cheap, hungry for tasty things, and hungry to understand how things are made. But yeah I can cook.
Learning to cook takes time, energy, and willingness to endure repeated failure (or just a sub-par result). In contrast, packaged food requires only money and has the bonus to some of being approximately the same every time. One also needs a kitchen to muck about in, and a lot of my peers haven't had access to that after moving out and may not have been too involved with cooking before that.
Every Human needs to learn to cook. Not a gourmet 12 course meal. Just cook simply to feed yourself. This is a basic skill.
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.
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.
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
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 Iβd rather work an extra hour for a meal prepared by a professional whose food I enjoy.
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.
From my own experience, I had to learn it all by myself, mostly online videos and recipes. I very vividly remember living on my own for a couple of weeks and deciding to cook some fresh food instead of frozen dinners and pizza. I actually called my mom to ask how to cook broccoli cause I had no clue.
You just boil that shit how did I not know? I was never told
I like to think I'm a pretty good cook now. YouTube really is a invaluable source of cooking info
