Ask Lemmy

I don't know if they are worse or not. Every gen has people who get to adulthood completely unprepared. Don't know what their parents were thinking. I'm early Gen X, and remember first year living in a student house and only about half of us knew how to shop and cook. Thankful for the weekly cleaning service for the common areas because cleaning and laundry were also things that many had no clue about. Quite a few arguments about cleanliness in the common kitchen.

I'm seeing a lot more apartments without kitchens than I did 20 years ago.

COVID broke people. I know people who cooked their own food all the time, and they've shifted to 100% online ordering or going for take-out -- even breakfast and lunch -- and they're paying through the nose. But this just seems like the New Normal to them.

I don't think the problem is unique to Gen Z but it definitely skews toward the younger generations.

My boomer mother can burn water, so wtf are you on about the kids for?

im a gen z with insane executive dysfunction thanks to adhd. for a while when I was living on my own, yes I was living on microwave meals. they're really cheap to get a bunch where I live and they have some variety, and I grew up on them due to my parents not really cooking often and being a latch key kid so they were a little nostalgic. but once I realized I never felt full after eating one and making some more money I started meal prepping for the whole week. i know how to cook and I can make some banger meals but my main problem is cleaning up everything afterwards. I'm learning to enjoy cooking and i always try to make a meal for any guest I have over.

I think not knowing how to cook is common when young. Today in my early 40's I'd say I'm pretty decent, but I was useless in my 20s.

What got me started was necessity due to all of a sudden having kids. Trial and error.

What clicked was when I learned that being a half-decent cook didn't mean knowing recipes by heart (although I'm sure many do), but more generalized approaches that work well for various ingredients. If you know them oven temp for various stuff, the rest is mostly just preference when it comes to flavoring, and that's something you learn to measured with your heart over time.

My kid is gen-Z and he loves to cook. When he was still living at home he used to have to cook once a week, and now he's living on his own he gets inspo from Sorted.

Exactly my point

I work with a lot of Gen Z and it’s been fun talking to them about cooking! They are learning techniques, recipes, and talking about how they are improving each time they make something.

We share recipes and have fun with it. Ofc everyone eats out, or brings microwave meals. That’s life. But watching them learn and grow as people is pretty awesome. Some boomer probably asked the same about my millennial self.

I'm on the older side of Gen Z and absolutely love to cook (and consider myself pretty good at it). I don't really like meal prep though. Something fresh each day for dinner, and if there's time, lunch. I also try to source as much as possible (herbs, vegetables) from my terrace/"garden".

I'd say it's about 10% of the time trying a new recipe, 70% of the time just cooking from memory based on past recipes we liked (adapted for what's available, of course), and 20% just trying something new from scratch.

Food is also one of my biggest expenditures each month. We don't really eat out at all, but still. Good ingredients and not going by price in the supermarket is the main luxury I splurge on.

My younger brother is essentially the same, though a bit more budget-aware. He also cooks at least once a day. I quite often get pictures of his food, and it always looks delicious.

Funnily enough, we cook pretty differently, and both completely differently than our mom.

Friends in the same generation also all either like to cook, or, well, just cook.

So, can't exactly confirm your hypothesis. We're not US-American though.

It's not necessarily something to be ashamed of. In some societies, people rarely cook for themselves at all. It's all done by professionals and the restaurants are cheap and plentiful enough to support that. The problem is that this is definitely not the case in the places you are probably referring to

As far as I know cooking (and no, shoving something in a microwave is not cooking ) isn’t an ability you’re born with, you need to learn it from someone.

Yes, I do know Gen Z who cook. I even know Gen Z who meet up with friends to cook together. Not because “cooking is so easy”, most of them learned it from their parents, but that’s to be expected because where I’m from most people cook on a daily basis.

I guess it depends on where you’re from and whether cooking is a regular thing there, then you just learn it like you learn how to use the washing machine or the hoover.

I'm gen z and everyone I know cooks elaborate meals. We love it

I'm a millennial and I know how to cook, but I absolutely hate it, and food is so expensive. I live alone, so either I eat the same meal for a week straight or seem to waste half the ingredients for a meal. I started using a restaurant that does a meal prep service and I can buy 10 dinners for ~$75. They're all healthy-ish, give me dinners for 2 weeks, and all I have to do is take them from the freezer and heat them up in the microwave. In contrast, last time I went to the grocery store I bought 2 limes, 5 lemons, a loaf of bread, a cup of soup, and a bag of pretzels and it cost over $30.

I'm 27 and perfectly fine at cooking! But yeah, just like someone else here mentioning it's because I have a sibling who's 10 years younger than me so I basically raised them. I was cooking for the family by like age 12.

I don't know many people my age who blatantly don't know how to cook. My husband isn't the greatest at cooking with no recipe, but he can absolutely keep himself fed with the dishes he does know. He can even fry an egg, despite the fact I only let stainless steel pans in our kitchen.

It's not that hard and can be a mindfulness exercise with the washing, cutting and other prep, and then cook it and smells delicious and enjoy the food when it's ready. It can be as healthy as you want. Ina Garten videos/books explain well and she's like a kind and helpful aunt! Mr. Money Mustache also has some good advice on food and nutrition and cutting costs too.

Stay under 25 g added sugars a day, have them after/with fiber, good fats and proteins to slow the sugar hit to the brain and liver. Check fasting insulin and C-reactive protein along with the usual checks to look for metabolic and inflammatory issues earlier. Homa-ir and TG/HDL are useful to check your health for your gender and age, before you need treatment for something. You can eat great, spend less and be healthier!

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

I call myself a cook, and my son a chef. I have a few dishes that I know so well that I just wing it on measurements. He creates dishes on vibes. He has this intuition about what he does. Part of that does come from his mom and I, but I think a lot of it comes from his maternal grandma.

I did not know how to do much “grown up” stuff when I moved out 20+ years ago. I don’t think this is a generational divide. If anything, Kids These Days™ have short form videos that they can lean on for cooking and even basic home maintenance. Car repair videos on YouTube are ubiquitous. They’ll be fine.

I'm a millennial who's just learning to cook, definitely not gen Z lol. I dated people that cooked but mostly it was out food, microwave food, and extreme basics like spaghetti that's noodles and jar sauce.

My parents both grew up extremely poor with both parents working. They didn't really get taught how to cook. And being poor meant, no extra money for anything with flavor. My parents spice cabinet had salt, a 5 year old container of pepper, and a probably older container of Italian seasoning. That's it.

For most of my life I thought I just didn't really like food until I moved out. We didn't have a lot of money either so we didn't really go out. Having my own job and living with other people meant I had money to go out and holy shit, out food was delicious! Never occurred to me until years later that, this could be made at home much cheaper if I just take the time to learn how.

This is actually a problem at my work, that gen z do not know how to cook at much higher levels than others.

I work in residential mental health, so we have some cooking to do. The overwhelming majority of gen z co workers seriously struggle with anything more than heating up. It affects how we divy up job duties and caused issues when we tried to save money by doing more cooking in house.