Skip to main content

Why can’t millennials cook? Blame tech, survey says

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.

Recommended Videos

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).

Please enable Javascript to view this content

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.

Gia Liu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Robot mops can’t sanitize your floors. Here’s why
braava robot mop deal free mopping pads cleaning cloths m6

In the modern world of smart devices, you can automate nearly any part of your day. Robot vacuums can clean the floor. Smart dishwashers can turn on when you leave so you have clean dishes when you come home. Now, even mopping can be taken care of by automatic devices.

No one really enjoys mopping. It’s a time-consuming chore, and even though products have come along over the years to speed up the process, no floor is ever cleaned as much as it should be. Robot moppers help by doing the task every day and significantly reduce the amount of dirt and grime on hardwood and tile floors -- but are they really clean?

Read more
Awesome Tech You Can’t Buy Yet: Ultrafast toothbrushes and a laptop/phone hybrid
awesome tech you cant buy yet screen shot 2020 04 03 at 4 13 08 pm

At any given moment, there are approximately a zillion different crowdfunding campaigns happening on the web. Take a stroll through Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you’ll find no shortage of weird, useless, and downright stupid projects out there -- alongside some real gems. We’ve cut through the fidget spinners and janky iPhone cases to round up the most unusual, ambitious, and exciting new crowdfunding projects out there this week. Keep in mind that any crowdfunding project -- even those with the best intentions -- can fail, so do your homework before cutting a check for the gadget of your dreams. 
April 5
Eyesy -- video synthesizer

When it comes to creating and mixing sounds, there are countless tools available to help you out. We’ve got musical instruments, MIDI controllers, synthesizers, loop pedals, drum pads, and all manner of digital audio workstations to help you mix it all together. But when it comes to visuals, there aren’t really a lot of tools available to artists. Eyesy aims to change that. It’s a video synthesizer that allows you to create reactive visuals that respond to music in real time.
Arebo -- whole body dryer

Read more
You don’t need to be an experienced chef to cook dishes with the Julia system
CookingPal Julia System

The late legendary chef Julia Child is synonymous with fine cooking, and now a new Julia is arriving on the culinary scene. Julia, the "Intelligent Autonomous Cooking System" by CookingPal, can shop for food and cook it for you. It can also chop, stir, knead, steam and can even wash itself. It will be unveiled at the CES 2020, with demonstrations and meals taking place at the CookingPal booth.

“Whether someone is juggling a hectic schedule, is known for burning meals, or frequently forgets important recipe steps, we can all use a little extra help in the kitchen,” said Anna Khomenko, marketing manager at CookingPal. “Julia makes mouthwatering, healthy, homemade meals fun, easy, and fast. Ideal for complete beginners, frantic family lives and those working long hours, the system has been designed to take the chaos out of culinary creations.”

Read more