If you tend to write off millennials as lazy, entitled people who still live in their parents’ basements, you will probably enjoy the results from a new Porch survey. According to the survey, nearly 60 percent of all millennials don’t know how to make salad dressing, while more than a quarter of participants proclaimed themselves unable to make a birthday cake from a boxed mix. Perhaps most unfortunate of all, when millennials were shown a picture of a butter knife, only 63 percent of millennials could recognize what the strange contraption was.
While it may seem from these statistics that popular beliefs about millennials must be true, there is more than meets the eye. The Washington Post writes that part of what seems like incompetence really just boils down to age. While 70 percent of baby boomers know how to carve a turkey, less than half of millennials can say the same, and that makes sense because millennials are younger and have less life experience than baby boomers do. What may have made the survey fairer was to ask boomers what kitchen skills they had when they were the age that millennials currently are, and compare the results with the answers from current millennials.
However, it’s worth noting that even if the survey had been adjusted to be fairer, boomers would likely still have pulled out ahead. When the boomers were growing up, home economics was still regularly taught in school. They were also responsible for cooking for themselves from a younger age, while today’s young people are not quite held to the same standards. Furthermore, the convenience of the internet and modern-day technology has put less pressure on young people to learn cooking skills from older generations — after all, the internet has pretty much every step-by-step recipe you could ever want to cook. In fact, a Google study revealed that more than half of millennials — 60 percent, to be exact — cook while holding a smartphone in one hand (probably with some AllRecipes link pulled up).
If you’re a millennial and you’re worried about your lack of kitchen skills, it’s never too late to start learning. Just pull up a recipe and try it out in the kitchen. And maybe take a break with the Seamless and GrubHub deliveries.
