Millennials Are the Worst Cooks, According to Millennials
According to a new survey, young people today are clueless in the kitchen and more likely to order in or opt for something prepackaged or frozen.
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Maybe it’s time to stop maligning Millennials – especially as they relate to food. It seems they’re willing enough to malign themselves.
Members of the millennial generation (those born between 1981 and 1986) are far more likely to describe themselves as bad cooks than either Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964) or Generation Xers (1965 to 1984), according to a new survey by the home-improvement site Porch.com. Only 64.7 percent of Millennials say they are "good cooks," while 71.5 percent of Gen Xers and 76.1 percent of Baby Boomers described themselves that way, the survey found.
It may be a question of practice. While Baby Boomers report that they prepare their own meals (be it breakfast, lunch or dinner) about 15.6 times a week, on average and Gen Xers do so about 14.5 times per week, Millennials say they prepare their own meals about 13.5 times a week. Meanwhile, Millennials eat frozen or prepackaged food for about 18 percent of their weekly meals, whereas Gen Xers do so 15.7 percent and Baby Boomers 13.3 percent of the time. Dinner is the meal Millennials most frequently punt, Porch.com reports.
"Only cooking for themselves 4.3 nights a week, on average, it seems Millennials are dining out (or ordering in) for supper nearly three times a week," the site notes. They’re also more than twice as likely as Baby Boomers (17.3 versus 8.3 percent) to have used a home delivery or meal subscription service.
Possibly as a consequence, Millennials are nearly 30 percent less likely to know how to roast a chicken than Baby Boomers. Almost half of Millennials have no idea how to cook a rib-eye steak to medium, and fewer than half of them feel confident about cooking salmon, barbecue ribs or shrimp scampi.
Millennials are more adept at baking chocolate chip cookies from ready-made dough than Baby Boomers, but less comfortable than either Boomers or Gen Xers at making chocolate-chip cookies from scratch, according to Porch.
Familiarity with cooking tools may be a factor as well: Just shy of 40 percent of Millennials can’t correctly identify a butter knife or a salad spinner, and just over 40 percent of them don’t know a garlic press when they see one. Oof.
What’s more, although 70 percent of Baby Boomers feel confident carving a cooked turkey, less than 42 percent of Millennials do.
Yeah, so maybe Thanksgiving at mom’s again this year. And if you can’t stand Uncle Fred’s bad jokes, well, it might just be time learn to do the carving yourself.
Photo: iStock
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