i could talk forever about how terrible of a cook my parents were growing up. I used to think I was a really picky eater, but turns out, when everything is over cooked to the point of being like sand in your mouth, you'd be a picky eater too.
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Same! It wasn't until I learned to cook that I developed a good understanding of flavours and textures. Or maybe I should say, I learned to take joy in cooking. My mum did teach me to cook and bake but she and I have very different pallettes. She actually likes her cannelloni soggy 😭
I got pretty lucky, my folks were both decent cooks if (in my childhood) a bit unadventurous, but I did get into my 20s before I learnt that steaks aren't actually MEANT to be like shoe leather.
Turns out I'm an 'if a good vet could get it going again...' girl.
I, Gen X, learned the basics of cooking definitely not from my parents but from home-ec. Is that not a thing in middle schools or high schools anymore?
Until I went to my first steakhouse as a teenager, I thought it was normal for a steak to have a half-inch of charred crunch on the outside. Also, Mom never had to call us to the dinner table. The smoke alarm did that for her. God bless her, I miss her very much, crunchy steaks and all.
I can relate. Salt, pepper and cinnamon were the only spices I remember my mother using. She always boiled canned vegetables to mush, and turned meat into shoe leather. Thank goodness ketchup was cheap.
And I do think there's something to the fact that a lot of gen z'rs are lacking in "adulting" skills, but remember: we millennials were too! My 20s were full of frozen pizzas and awful ready-to-eat meals because I didn't know what the fuck I was doing.
Yeah, if you don't have a learning environment and (or) the means to get started cooking, it's not likely you'll automagically know the signs of doneness or what goes together, why
Learning by doing only works if you get to do (and don't have discouraging teachers)
One of the weirder things in learning to cook for me (and teaching Spouse things now, but not to this yet) is that ground turkey is usually cheaper and so damaging to make mistakes with when learning to brown ground meat, but it's also a heck of a lot less forgiving in telling you when it is done.
I feel bad for gen z because of all the weird "hacks and tricks" that things like tiktok is teaching them that are just plain wrong and might just be trolling, and not helpful to their learning curve.
Just as "millennials are killing X industry" was the defining story of our generation, I think "Gen Z'rs don't know how to do Y basic thing" is going to be theirs. All that is, really, is just generalizing a basic Learning to Be an Adult thing into a generational failing.
we got some of that "doesn't know how to do stuff" flak, too. for fixing cars etc which was barely relevant anymore because barely anyone has the kind of car you can maintain yourself anymore
Agreed. Some of it does come from the attitude of ppl who don't want to learn but we gotta remember that when we were young and didn't know anything, we were not anywhere close to as online as ppl are now, showing their whole asses on the internet from childhood!!!
My Mom was terrific at teaching me and my brother how to cook and do other household things. My Dad only taught my brother handy things, and was a flawed, impatient teacher.
I really think youtube videos and tiktok makes it easier to teach yourself skills, compared to the “fix-it”
book I tried
Gen X was pretty much left alone, raised in benign neglect, so we/they have been fending for ourselves forever. But of course we didn't make our kids do that so they're maybe not as independent as we were forced to be.
I think the internet is so much worse in 2025 than it was 10-15 years ago that Gen Z is further disadvantaged. A hapless Millennial flailing around trying to figure out how to be a person circa 2010 had access to more & better "here's how to do this thing" resources than young adults do today
I think it's a matter of knowing where to look. I have encountered that a lot of gen z'rs simply lack the skills to know what or HOW to google something to get the answer they need, and with fucking AI shoved into anything, trust in the answers is very hard, too.
Yeah if you don't have someone trustworthy to point you to the right parts of the internet I can't even really imagine trying to navigate it against the deluge of slop & scams :(
My Gen Z kids: "They want us to use Google for research, but no one taught us HOW to use Google for research!". Gen Z was failed in a lot of ways. It's not the teachers' faults. They can't teach what they haven't been trained to teach.
My mother always cooked from scratch. She absolutely never had the spoons to teach me. Everything I've learned I've taught myself. But it's frustrating because I can absolutely tell the difference from scratch cooking and box cooking and so few people can
I think we’re also slowly starting to reckon with the idea that parents can be many things, but many of them are not teachers in all aspects. Pedagogy is a hard skill to learn, and other than teacher training, even parenting classes don’t teach how to teach a child to do $N.
The skills to teach math or reading are not the same as to teach cleaning a room or making a grocery list.
You’re also not the first teacher or preacher kid I’ve heard say that. The job itself does damage to life skills because they require so much uncompensated time.
Also, if somebody can’t learn the normal way, it’s even harder. I didn’t learn to tie a knot, including shoelaces, until college because the way my family taught it was incompatible with my blind brain/concept of spatial relations. Add in neglect and they just never bothered trying to teach me.
I learned how to cook more than just eggs by watching cooking shows and trying stuff out (admittedly on my parents, but this was after college and I paid for the ingredients myself). My mom still doesn't know how to meal plan.
I was an EXTREMELY parentified child, but the one thing I never taught myself was cooking. I decided my vision + the absolute HELLSTORM that would ensue if I set off a fire alarm and the 11 year old alone in the house all day got found meant it wasn’t worth it, but I’m figuring it out in college
I had one section of Home EC in middle school and managed to get into another in high school, BUT the budget had been cut so much by 25 years ago that we got to cook with cheese ONCE and all meat safety was pure on-paper theory. Never touched a peeler at school, all produce was too expensive.
Yesss!!! My mother used the worst cut to make steak, then cooked the shit out of it. If you looked real close, you could probably read the words Buster Brown on it. Not until adulthood did I taste a good cut, cooked appropriately. Garlic? Spices? Herbs? What are those?
There are a number of foods that I I didn’t like as a kid and learned as an adult that my mom just didn’t cook those things well. Salmon and rhubarb things in particular I learned to like from my wife and MIL. (tbf, my mom cooked a lot of good things in addition to some real duds)
It's been a highlight as an adult to learn to cook, try everything I hated growing up. There are a few things I still can't deal with (I call it fish trauma) but 100% came down to how and what was cooked growing up.
My grandmother was a wonderful woman, but the stories my mom told about her cooking 😬 Turns out there were a lot of vegetables my mom actually DID like when not dumped out of a can and boiled until grey...
It took me far too long to work out that my parents' cuisine (boiled till it was mush) was a function of the fact that they got false teeth in their 30s.
That was my dad's exact situation! Everything unseasoned and boiled to mush or burned. My mom introduced him to the wonders of salad, and he introduced us to such delicacies as KD with hot dogs 😋
I can't stand beans, and I'm convinced it's that the only option was 100x 'all beans are different, you didn't try these' and the exact same boiled unto death legume texture *again*.
(And then I buy a cookbook for picky eaters and find out the author thinks that's a universally acceptable texture.)
Mom was the most DISMAL cook ever. She just had no interest in food or patience with it. Didn't want to let me in the kitchen because I would "make a mess". Learned less than nothing from her!
But if you can read, you can learn to cook.
My father used to do this thing where he would take all of the assorted leftovers in the refrigerator, throw them into a casserole dish, and bake them for dinner. We lived in fear of the nights he cooked. 😅
My parents weren't great either, and they were the oldest of the boomers! My dad had a bit of an excuse (his parents died when he was young) but my mom's parents were good scratch cooks. They were very much about cans and boxes and packets and frozen things. I say I learned to cook in self defence 😂
My mother was and is still not great in the kitchen, so I've spent a lot of time since I was a teen teaching myself via stuff like Food Network and Youtube.
I thought I was picky too, but it turns out that my parents had no business in the kitchen. Seriously traumatized by some dishes I was forced to eat...
I didn’t know pork chops could be chewed until I was an adult. My mom fried them in butter until well done, or shoe leather as my dad referred to them, just the way he liked them.
My family didn’t have much money when I was a kid, so all of our veggies were generally canned. Realized when I got older that I actually like green beans, I just can’t stand canned produce.
My mom made a ground beef monstrosity that we privately referred to as “shit over noodles”. Sometimes my cousin stayed for dinner and she absolutely loved it.🤣
My MIL was a terrible cook according to my hubby. He said he never knew what eggs really tasted like because they were caked in salt and she would cook chicken beyond recognition.
so real, my mother used to use the worst possible meat for the soups so I had to fish out chicken skin and bones out of it yuck 🤢 ofc I hated it
once I discovered you can put decent meat and fats (cream/lard) in the soups I fell in love with them
And when you're growing up you don't really notice as it's all you're used to. My Mom tended to overcook everything as well which I only realized after I left home. And when my Dad grilled steaks to "Medium" meaning there was almost some pink left or "Well Done" which was boot leather.
And coffee. Used to think I hated coffee, but I loved the smell. Started working in a cafe as a teenager, discovered that I quite like coffee, I just don't like the instant powdered stuff.
OMG!!!! I so feel you! My mom was not only the same, overcooking everything, she HATED cooking too!!!! Now I love everything cause it actually has TASTE and can be chewed. 😂
This is something I have steadily learned as an adult. I used to think I didn't like chicken or turkey, because they were always overcooked to being too tough and flavorless. I hated vegetables because they were always frozen and then boiled.
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I also think the use of margarine instead of butter doesn't have any health benefits.
To this day I can't stand vegetables boiled in unsalted water.
I sat for countless hours over a plate of orange or green mush until mom gave in and let me go to bed.
Still prefer most veggies raw.
Turns out I'm an 'if a good vet could get it going again...' girl.
So many truths. So many bad parental cuisine experiences.
Learning by doing only works if you get to do (and don't have discouraging teachers)
And ingredients cost
I really think youtube videos and tiktok makes it easier to teach yourself skills, compared to the “fix-it”
book I tried
Autocucumber
The skills to teach math or reading are not the same as to teach cleaning a room or making a grocery list.
You’re also not the first teacher or preacher kid I’ve heard say that. The job itself does damage to life skills because they require so much uncompensated time.
Caltech sponsored them because so many students would otherwise have been eating takeaway and instant noodles.
Although I may just not have been adequately accounting for what CalTech students are.
Something like this may be expected the first time someone is introduced to flambé.
I just don’t like burned steak.
Fresh, not canned.
(And then I buy a cookbook for picky eaters and find out the author thinks that's a universally acceptable texture.)
But if you can read, you can learn to cook.
I thought I was picky too, but it turns out that my parents had no business in the kitchen. Seriously traumatized by some dishes I was forced to eat...
once I discovered you can put decent meat and fats (cream/lard) in the soups I fell in love with them
And coffee. Used to think I hated coffee, but I loved the smell. Started working in a cafe as a teenager, discovered that I quite like coffee, I just don't like the instant powdered stuff.
Everything my parents cooked was bland, and either too tough or complete mush.