Let Them Cook

The Joy of Cooking, one of the most popular cookbooks in American history, entered kitchens in 1931 with a simple premise: Anyone can learn to make a meal. The Depression had disrupted the food supply, leaving a generation of new homemakers doubting their ability to furnish healthy, varied dishes from sparse pantries. The book’s popularity lay in author Irma Rombauer’s approachable, if I can do this, you can too tone, an attitude that would help change how everyday Americans made dinner.

Nearly a century later, another generation of young cooks has faced another global catastrophe, and emerged with their own relationship to cooking. While the coronavirus pandemic sent millions of Americans away from restaurants and into their kitchens, its culinary impact was formative for Gen Z, many of whom were in their teens or early 20s when it began. Whether stuck in their parents’ homes or on their own, these young people embraced cooking as an act of independence and, as one researcher told me, coping. On TikTok, cooking tutorials have hundreds of millions of views. Today, cooking has become a major generational avocation and source of pride.   

The pandemic fundamentally disrupted many young people’s day-to-day life—school, sports, spending time with friends—and, with it, the anchor of routine. For example, Mia Kristensen was 16 when her high-school classes shifted to Zoom. Around this time, she first downloaded TikTok. The bright vegetable bowls she saw her peers making—familiar to her as a vegan, but somehow finer, more inspiring—became aspirational. Cooking was something to look forward to during the day, she told me. Making dinner from scratch became an achievement.

TikTok certainly helped with cooking’s proliferation, as it dished out entertaining, accessible cooking tutorials by and for young people marooned at home. The medium met the moment, just as it had before: Irma Rombauer paved the way for Julia Child on television, J. Kenji López-Alt on YouTube, and now TikTok creators, whose pandemic-era videos helped convey that everyone was managing as best they could. People were in their own kitchens, yes, but displaying their handiwork in one global digital setting.

[Read: The best kind of food to cook during a pandemic]

There seems to be no sign of “kitchen fatigue” now, according to MaryLeigh Bliss, the chief content officer at YPulse, a marketing firm that researches Gen Z and Millennial habits. In fact, saving money is an additional motivation to keep cooking. As more and more Gen Zers enter the workforce, they face steep housing, goods, and education costs. According to one report, more than half of Gen Zers surveyed have an anxiety disorder, citing worry about the future as the top cause.

Indeed, researchers told me that knowing how to cook—even if it began as pandemic escapism or an economic consideration—has become a key identity marker for Gen Z. This generation tends to define itself through hobbies, many discovered online, like mastering a video game or knitting a scarf. Cooking as a pastime—like being a “foodie” before it—can signal a number of values, according to Kathy Sheehan, a senior vice president of Cassandra, a market-trends research firm. It might say someone is interested in different cultures, or prioritizes shopping for local, seasonal produce.

Zoomers are particularly concerned with building well-rounded lives, and cooking reflects this, Roberta Katz, a cultural anthropologist and the author of Gen Z, Explained, told me. Cooking is a creative act that can serve as a quiet interlude, largely free from technology. For young people who’ve spent nearly their whole lives with the internet and the iPhone, cooking’s tangibility can be stabilizing. “It grounds you in a world that’s in constant motion,” Katz told me.

That tactility was important to Celeste Mosley, 21, who told me she became depressed during the pandemic. After finding a rice-pudding recipe on TikTok, making it became, “the only thing that got me out of the bed half the time,” she said. Pour the rice. Slice the butter. Stir, stir, stir. The process became meditative for her. This isn’t a surprise: The process of cooking can improve one’s mood as well as one’s anxiety, according to Nicole Farmer, a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center who studies behavior and nutrition. Following directions connects the task at hand with past experiences—I’ve strained tomatoes like this before, or This pasta is new, but I know how to use oregano. Cooking’s combination of new and familiar actions can boost the brain’s “effortless attention” and executive-planning function, which can alleviate depression symptoms. In one study, adolescents skilled in the kitchen reported lower levels of depression than less culinarily inclined peers.

In simple terms, cooking commands your full attention and all of your senses. You must juggle skills, whether culinary (slicing), cognitive (planning), or creative (constructing a meal from ostensibly incongruous leftovers in the fridge). You might feel raw rice through your fingers, hear knives clattering on cutting boards, smell a turkey roasting. Cooking, Farmer suggests, can boost self-confidence; it also facilitates social bonding when meals are shared.

[Read: What home cooking does that restaurants can’t]

Now in my 40s, I remember one college summer, proudly leaving my shifts at a bakery heaving an enormous black bag over my shoulder, Santa-style, with the day’s bounty of unsold treats. My five roommates and I largely subsisted on leftover muffins for dinner—they were both filling and free. And weren’t the berries lodged in them part of a major food group? Among the skills I acquired in the winding thicket of young adulthood, cooking was not one.

But my friends’ teenage son, who told me he hadn’t known that he liked to cook before the pandemic, recently served eight of us a dinner of chicken with lemon and garlic sauce, red-lentil soup, and flan. He is preparing to leave for college, but learned how to make shakshuka for breakfast from a viral video. He can taste something in a restaurant and replicate it at home. Whether or not Gen Z has read The Joy of Cooking, it has navigated its own relationship with food through historical disaster, and ended up with both a life skill and a craft.