Do millennials know how to cook? A new survey shows that 60 percent of millennials don’t know how to make salad dressing. More than 20 percent judged themselves incapable of preparing a cake from a boxed mix and when shown a picture of a butter knife, only 33 percent of millennials knew what it was. While these statistics provide plenty of fodder for all those who share the commonly held notion that millennials are just spoilt and immature, there’s much more to it than that. According to these statistics, 70 percent of boomers, that is people born between 1946 and 1964, can carve a turkey, but for millennials the percentage drops to 40. That’s arguably because boomers have hosted way more Thanksgiving dinners. I think it would be interesting to see the results of a study which asked boomers what kitchen skills they had when they were in the age range that millennials currently are. This would seem to be fairer and less biased towards older respondents. It’s also worth noting that the survey didn’t measure a person’s actual skill, so some respondents may be downplaying or overestimating their skills in the kitchen.
Perhaps part of the reason for millennials’ lower expertise in the kitchen is their familiarity with technology. According to the survey, millennials were more likely to get their recipes from the Internet than boomers, and they also reported watching online cooking videos far more than older generations. This might have made it harder for them to learn how to cook. Blame it on “cognitive offloading”, which means relying on search drives like Google rather than committing a recipe to memory. The survey showed that millennials’ searches are usually incredibly basic, like “How to make the best baked potatoes” and while cooking they do not experiment, alter the recipes to suit their preferences or make use of the ingredients they have available, at least a great majority of them don’t.
The survey has also revealed that millennials are anxious about their lack of skills. This low confidence leads them to repeat rote, uninspiring meals and rely on a handful of dishes they know well. If you are one of those millennials, we’ve got some recipes for you on our website voraciously.com. They’re not intimidating, we promise. And if you don’t know what a butter knife looks like, we won’t judge.