Do Millennials have Poor Cooking Skills?

Millennials have different eating habits from previous generations. How is this affecting the new generation’s cooking skills? Generation X (ages 41 to 55), baby boomers (ages 56 to 74), and the silent generation (ages 75 to 95) eat and cook at home everyday while millennials (ages 25 to 40) like to eat at restaurants instead of eating in.

Millennials have the greatest percentage of people who likes to dine in restaurants compared to other generations. They have strong preference to convenience and want everything to be quick and effortless. Of course, they also cook at home like other generations but they have new tools and techniques to prepare their foods. Millennials are using the technology and advancement we have today to make food preparation easier than it used to be.

Traditional cooking takes more time than modern cooking as we now have high-tech appliances, contemporary kitchen tools, and even pre-prepared meals. For instance, cooking beef stew would usually take hours before, now we have electric pressure cookers that decreases the cooking time by 70%. Small kitchen tools make slicing of the ingredients faster and accurate. Moreover, pre-prepared meals such as noodles and sausages are filling and require only a few minutes to prepare.

Millennials may spend time on the meal preparation than the previous generations but it does not mean that they are less interested in food. In fact, they are open-minded and curious. They like to experiment and personalized their meals and try new ways of cooking. This makes them develop new practices and skills to cook with.

Knowing how to use different appliances, tools, and pre-prepared foods are new skills that the new generation has. Some even find ways to use a single appliance for different recipes such as: baking cakes and cooking stew on a rice cooker and making pasta and rice meals in electric kettles. Many are also using pre-packaged foods as an alternative to other ingredients such as: chorizo on pizza instead of ground meat, corned beef in curry instead of raw beef, and bottled preserved fruits in cakes instead of fresh fruits.

New technologies and practices do not lower the cooking skills of the generation. It is in fact helping them to be creative and develop new skills in cooking. It makes them imaginative and adapt to what the modern world has to offer which is good as we all have to accept innovation and change.

Millennials are brought up by parents from the previous generations who cook using the traditional way. Most of them grew up with home cooking and will always crave and look for it wherever life takes them. Millennials who were taught by their parents with traditional cooking skills will most likely continue to practice the skills until they grow old and even past them on the next generation. Although some may not use the same practices and skills that the previous generations used, this will not devalue cooking skills. Millennials value convenience but they also value quality and healthy foods. This makes them treasure the art of cooking and continue to learn more recipes and develop skills in cooking as time goes by.