The decline and fall of American kitchen skills. SMH.

I thought I had heard it all when a 50±year-old doctor told me she had no idea you could pop your own popcorn on a stove, let alone in less than 5 minutes.

But now I just had a 63-year-old tell me that she had never in her life whipped cream, had never realized there was any real option to buying that pricey container of Cool Whip or can of Redi-Whip every week to keep DH happy. She had to go find a video on youtube to watch in order to convince herself that it really was as easy as I was saying and write down that she would need to buy heavy cream for it.

Then I had to explain that you can also buy cream whippers and nitrous oxide that let you keep plain sweetened heavy cream in the refrigerator for 2 weeks, ready to spit out unadulterated whipped cream on demand. (And at the price of Cool Whip and her buying a container of the stuff every week, the darn thing would pay for itself in a year.)

Just a reminder to myself that, although we keep saying here that knowing how to cook/prepare your own food from scratch is one of the very most basic and essential survival skills, it is easy to forget how many people these days literally do not know how to boil water.

I mean I know I'm probably going to be one of the last living dinosaurs that know it's as easy to make cake from flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and baking powder as to add eggs and oil to a box of mix--but having to buy synthetic whipped cream because you don't know how to make the real stuff?

Just wondering what other sad tales are out there about dealing with the mix-and-microwave generations. At this rate, I'm thinking pretty soon opsec is going to need to include finding some way to completely hide the oven, not just the food, lol--'cause if they ever figure out you know how to turn a stove on....

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The decline and fall of American kitchen skills. SMH.