Okay maybe this isnt the best demographics here but like I mean as in if you know someone who’s Gen Z, do they have a “idk how to cook” issue?
(Please don’t be like “omg its easy, how could you not know” in the comments, be nice in the comments okay 🙈)
That seems strange, do you remember where you read that? My understanding was that until one or two hundred years ago (like somewhere between our grandparents their great grandparents, depending on where they were in the world), virtually everyone was a subsistence farmer or hunter-gatherer. You’re saying most of these people couldn’t have prepared what they found/farmed without someone there to do it for them? :o
Farming and gathering have been dominant until industrial revolutions took place, and set us on path of urbanization. However, towns and cities have existed since thousands of years. They would have bakeries and pubs. Gobeklitepe that existed ~9000 BCE is the oldest discovered so far. Egyptian pyramids would have been impossible without centralized kitchens.
This isn’t about subsistence farmers but urban populations.
For example, in medieval European cities, poor people didn’t have space for kitchens in their home, so they went outside to get hot food. The main options where buying prepared street food or buying raw ingredients and having a someone bake them into a pie for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_ancient_Rome#Commercial_food_preparation
I know this was a thing in ancient Rome. In theory it makes sense. Much more efficient than everybody having an entire kitchen in their home
Yeah, it seems likely that even if a longhouse had one big kitchen where the whole clan prepared their maize, the skills to run it would have been fairly evenly distributed. Maybe in only one gender, or even a subset of one gender, but if there’s 200 of you and you’re always together, not much will be secret. Ditto for a bunch of peasants on one manor in Europe.