I was talking to my mom the other day about my childhood and how I was generally the one who did the cooking. My mom likes to clean, and I like to cook, so it was a pretty fair trade off.

But, something I’m ashamed to admit is that although virtually everything I cooked while I lived at home was made from scratch, very little of what I make today is. My life is insane and the culinary world has made life easier for us by pre-packaging food that we just need to heat and serve. I’ll be the first to admit there are days that I’ve been left completely drained and I’ll run into the grocery store, pick up something pre-made and serve that as a meal for my family.

My mom wasn’t much of a cook when I was a kid, so I owe most of what I know about cooking to watching my grandparents, the Italian lady who lived next door, and to obsessing over the Joy of Cooking, but there’s no doubt that even those of us who learned to cook from scratch have become really lazy.

I don’t know if it’s because my generation was one of the last to have stay-at-home moms and grandmas that we learned to cook, and not out of a box, but it seems like a lot of younger people don’t know even the basics in the kitchen. I read something the other day that said the majority of today’s young people today don’t even know how to cook one meal from scratch.

I think maybe that all goes hand in hand with this- Instagramming food. Instagram is an awesome place to show off every little thing while playing with filters, so it makes sense that we now spend more time looking at delicious food on Instagram than we do cooking delicious food.

A survey found that the average person spends more than five hours a week looking at photos of food in Instagram, versus four hours actually cooking meals. And although cooking channels might give us great ideas, few of us are actually doing anything with those ideas. 52% of people in the survey says they’d rather watch the cooking shows than they would cook.

[via Telegraph]

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