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.

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:

budgetbytes.com

noracooks.com

"I can cook vegan" by Isa Chandler

Chef John on youtube 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.

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.

I don’t think it’s generational in a way that GenZ is any different. This is an age thing.

Most people never need to cook before they’re 18. They just got fed at home. When people first start to move out, things start to shift. Some people get into relationships where the other person cooks. They’re still being provided for.

Others learn a bare minimum of things to cook and do it badly. They do feed themselves but self describe as “can’t cook”.

And some step up and learn the things you need to know to cook that isn’t taught in school.

Time goes by, and more people find themselves in situations where they now need to cook. The population of cooks grows and the non-cooks shrinks.

Whether it’s because of changing interests, financial pressure, divorce, whatever, people need some pressure to develop the skill, and over time they do.

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 suddenly 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.

I wouldn't qualify it as a Gen Z thing. As a Xennial, I have a quite a few Gen Z coworkers and most of them actively talk about recipes and meals they're making and they are not just slapping some Mac and Cheese together and calling it. Some of the meals they're talking about cooking are fairly advanced. At least two have dedicated pizza ovens and make their own dough. A number of them are cooking involved multi-course meals I'd never have tried until I was in my late 30's... Hearing their recipes and such I'm fairly impressed on a regular basis.

I think it's more related to experience and available time and CASH. One of them has fallen a bit back into hello fresh, a few times a week, but they just had a kid, so no blame there.

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.

The Zoomers i know are either amazing cooks or can cook 1 meal but eat out 90% of the time. But for every one that can cook there are 3 that dont cook. I dont know a single millennial or gen xer who cant cook or couldnt cook at 16. I dont think the problem is universal to gen z. Its just an issue in wealthy urban populations.

Im not good with meal prep so I just heat up a frying pan throw some meat in, throw some veggies in and season it. Its quick, tasty and cheap. I rotate the meat and veggies so im always eating something different. I buy the veggies frozen and presliced so no prep or wastage.

Gen Z has a basic competence issue apparently because everyone complains about their ability to do everything. Weaponized incompetence or whatever they are calling it. The good news when it comes to being able to cook is that anyone can figure it out for themselves. If you can make instant ramen noodles then you can cook.

I highly recommend anyone who wants to learn to cook get a hold of the Fannie Farmers CookbookFannie Farmer Cookbook find a used copy somewhere because $50 for a book first published in 1869 is friggin ridiculous.

This book is basically a reference book as well as a recipe book. It explains just about everything from measuring to prepping to storing things in your pantry. It is stuffed with recipes for basic things and then a bunch of recipes that build on those basics.

My mom was a lifelong food lover and taught herself to cook because her mom couldn’t. She had a library full of cookbooks from all over the world and through the ages. The only cookbook she gave me when I moved out was the Fannie Farmer Cookbook which is a tome to be sure. She told me it was the only one I would ever really need. Everything else is just recipes.

Gen Z, millennial, Gen X it doesn’t matter who you are it is flat out cheaper to cook your own food. If you are single then soups and casseroles are your buddy. If you make a different one every other day and freeze the rest you will have a constant supply of a variety of meals you can reheat at will so you don’t get burnt out. If you are a couple just about every meal feeds four which is dinner plus leftover lunch for the both of you.

I live in Houston, TX which is one of the most diverse food scenes anywhere with some of best restaurants for every kind of food and I can’t find a steakhouse that consistently makes a better steak than me. The closest I’ve come was from a guy selling steaks at a bar I used to go to 15 years ago. No one makes better pancakes than I do. I’ve never been hesitant to order pancakes when I’m out but I’m always disappointed and feeling ripped off. The difference is staggering. Pancakes are cheeeap and making them better costs next to nothing. The only restaurant food I buy is food I don’t make yet.

Stop giving your money to people who really don’t deserve it. Learn to cook. One thing at a time. Every success leads to more success. The knowledge you gain is for life. You pass some of it on and one day far in the future every human will be a master chef because what else is there to do?

I'm personally a kind of mid-to-younger millennial (and a pretty damn good cook if I can toot my own horn)

I have a few friends who are a bit younger than me who are older zoomers. Those friends are all at least competent cooks, not necessarily amazing chefs, but capable enough to follow a recipe and feed themselves.

But the catch that should probably be mentioned is that most of those friends are guys I was in scouts with. They were the younger kids in my troop as I was aging out.

So, I (or one of my millennial peers) are at least partially the ones who taught them how to cook

And learning to cook in scouts is sort of a trial by literal fire- if you can make breakfast over a campfire, bake a cake in a Dutch oven on hot coals, etc. cooking with a regular stove or oven is kind of easy in comparison.

But anecdotally, my gen z coworkers do seem to be pretty clueless about cooking. But then again, I'm a poor judge of that because I do cook at a pretty high level and a lot of people seem kind of clueless to me in general, so I'm probably not the best judge.

They're fine. We talk about cooking before class on occasion and my students tend to be pretty on top of that, and baking. This is especially true of women who take care of their siblings. Honestly, it's on par for the age, but there is one more unique aspect and that's reliance on Tiktok or IG for recipes.

That means that I'll sometimes run into people who love cooking but they're often making what's popular at the time. But... my cohort, millennials, aren't too different in using our online recipes. They're just a little less... creative, compared to what you see on Tiktok. Plus, video format is trash for cooking, but that's my own opinion.

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 don't think it is a "idk how to cook" more than "i don't need to cook" problem. You don't need to know how to cook to survive when food delivery services is just one click away and if that is not your thing you can always takeaway or dine-in at the restaurant/shops instead.

I can cook, i enjoy cooking, i prefer cooking but sometimes i am lazy so i do takeout or dine-out instead. Most of the people i know don't know how to cook (by that i mean anything more than reheating precooked food, frozen food etc) if anything i am in the minority.

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.

Both my kids are Gen Z and at least from my experiences talking to them and their friends, one of the big factors is no one taught them when they were young. I'm not talking anything formal, just helping out in the kitchen, chopping veg, grating cheese, whatever. Either their parents don't cook or they didn't let them be active participants in meal prep.

My kids however do know how to cook, as they've helped out since they were little. Learned from my own experience as a picky eater - get your kids involved in making stuff and you won't have to worry about them only eating chicken nuggets or whatever. Once they were teenagers, they got assigned meal prep once a week - they'd pick a recipe, help with the shopping, and make dinner (with help if they asked for it). And now they're both adults who can make their own food. It's shocking to me though how many in their generation just were never given the chance to learn the basics when they were young.

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.

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.