I’m gen z. Cooking is difficult. I do it sometimes. My trick is throwing things I like into a pan and hoping they get better. It’s easier with some things.

One tip I have is: Do not do thing concurrently. You will fail. Everything I do takes very long, and if I do two things at once it will be a Desaster.

A trick to make it more fun is listening to music or a podcast while you do it.

Also, many things you can get at the supermarket have instructions or suggestions about how to prepare them.

You don’t have to do a whole range of things. It’s okay if you can do one recipe and that’s it for a start.

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

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

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.

I know a couple people at work who consistently bring trader Joe’s microwave food, the rest bring stuff from home.

Time is also an issue, people are working 2 or 3 jobs now that include weekends who don’t have anyone to help.

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.

Learn how to cook a couple new recipes a week and eventually you will be good at cooking

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.

maybe the ones that are still living at home and parents are cooking all thier meals? its a notable increase thats for sure.

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.

Gen Z is not specific enough to be a useful demographic cluster. You have to overlay it over another specification or it’s trying to pretend someone who is somewhere in an ill defined age range, living in Shanghai as the child of a politician is going to have something relevantly similar to someone of a vaguely similar age, though with possibly a full 10 years difference, from Nunavut, put into the foster system.