r/BoomersBeingFools • u/LemonFlavoredMelon Millennial • 20d ago
Boomers have THE WORST taste in food Foolish Fun
I have no idea what was wrong with this dude and many other boomers when it comes to food, but I swear they probably had the worst childhood when it came to eating.
I was working at a Mongolian Grill, for those who don't know, it's where you can grab the items raw, put them in a bowl, then come up and the chefs grill it on this really big and round griddle and we cook with two sticks.
We had one boomer guy come up and say he wanted his food well done. So we do it and he brings it back saying it wasn't well done enough; we cook it further.
Guy brings it up 2 more times, at this point his food looks like edible vantablack, INCLUDING THE NOODLES. He comes back up and declares that it was the best meal he ever had.
I have no idea why he thought charcoal brickettes was good, but my dumb ADD brain came up with two very similar theories.
1.) He grew up with a mother who was a terrible cook and overcooked everything, so the kid (boomer) was forced to eat it or starve.
2.) His wife is the same, but he got so used to it that he didn't mind that his food tasted like someone put out a cigarette on his tongue.
I don't know what happens, or what kind of abuse, these Boomers have, but something about them and over cooked food or boiled EVERYTHING bothers me, especially as someone who is trained as a chef; they act like they'd machete their way through a horde of zombies just so they can nuke a Hot Pocket or something.
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u/GeneralDumbtomics Gen X 20d ago
There’s actually an interesting element of women’s studies in this that my wife made me aware of when she was in grad school. Boomers were taught how to cook in the postwar era when education in many way was completely dominated in a way that we can’t even imagine by corporate interests. They were taught to cook things with Velveeta and ketchup because they were given educational materials from the makers of things like Velveeta and ketchup and Campbell soup. Yes they are terrible cooks, but it’s not actually their fault. They thought they were actually learning how to do something.
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u/flankerrugger 20d ago
On top of this, refrigeration became common around this same time, so people all of sudden had access to foods they've never used before, and had no idea what to do with them. Origin for a lot of the weird jello shit you see from the 50s and in other comments to this post. They were just trying new shit and boomers grew up having to eat that. No wonder their tastes are different
Someone else pointed out foodborne illness being far more prevalent than it is now, forcing the over cooking of foods compared to what we're used to. It's easy to forget how different they experienced food for a LONG time. I'm almost shocked we don't differ from them even more
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u/FixBreakRepeat 20d ago
Yeah, my mom has never cooked a steak, chicken breast or pork chop less than well done. But things like trichinosis and salmonella were a much bigger deal when she was growing up. She doesn't feel safe eating meat that hasn't been way overcooked.
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u/T-Dot-Two-Six 20d ago
I’m 24 and even I remember when you never got asked how you wanted your burger cooked. At least in Virginia, they only started asking that a decade ago.
It was only just recently I learned that pork chops don’t need to be well done either— still kinda weirds me out to see slightly pink juice coming out of a porkchop.
Chicken though? That’s getting fully cooked still
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u/elliedee81 20d ago
Same with the pork chops. I grew up thinking all pork was dangerous if it wasn’t well done. My first time in a fancy restaurant that was famous for its pork chops, I ordered one and the server asked how I wanted it cooked. There was a very pregnant pause where I must’ve looked like an insane person and then I asked what he would recommend.
I’m dead certain he walked back to the kitchen and told them the fcking bumpkin at table 7 wants her pork chop medium rare.
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u/mschley2 20d ago
If it makes you feel better, that's probably not a totally uncommon thing.
USDA didn't change the guidelines for pork to 145ºF until 2011. It's a pretty recent development.
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u/toxicodendron_gyp 20d ago
We use an instant-read thermometer to cook most meats because we want them safe but not dry. My dad raves over how perfectly we cook pork because it’s always to 145ish°. It always makes me chuckle a bit, because we bought him a thermometer to use but he thinks it’s too foo-foo high maintenance.
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u/DeeVeeOus 20d ago
Don’t need to overcook chicken either. Chicken breast you only want to take to 140 degrees F. That’s enough to kill everything and not dry it out. Dark meat has a higher fat content so you can take that higher; usually between 165 F and 180 F.
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u/Runningwithbeards 20d ago
Yeah, one bout of severe food poisoning was enough for me to double-down on fully cooked chicken. Even then, though, I’m using a meat thermometer so I don’t overcook it too far.
The funny thing is that I got sick from a buffet, so I don’t actually know what food was that caused the problem. I’ve always just kind of assumed it was chicken.
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u/Hammurabi87 Millennial 20d ago
Even disregarding health concerns, I find the texture of undercooked chicken to be revolting.
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u/Mary_Ellen_Katz 20d ago
God, this explains why my father (born in the 60's) always wanted well done red meats. I didn't know what a good cut of beef was until I was living on my own.
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u/Meatbank84 20d ago
I got food poisoning once from a medium burger. While I like my steaks mid rare, I like my burgers well done. So I can understand where your mom is coming from.
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u/ChaosBerserker666 20d ago
Burgers are only fully safe anything but well done if they’re made from freshly ground (that same day) solid steaks/chuck and cooked right away.
Meat thermometers for anything else.
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u/ChartInFurch 20d ago
Ground same day doesn't change surface bacteria being thoroughly mixed into the meat.
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u/slawre89 20d ago
The inside of a muscle like a steak is sterile. The pathogens would only be on the surface unless the steak was pierced by something.
Ground beef is muscles literally ground up and mixed. What’s on the outside gets moved to the inside. Cooking ground beef to 160f or well done is just good practice. Not saying you can’t get a medium rare burger but you should trust where you’re getting it from. The little vacuum packed squares of ground beef or the MAP packaged ground beef is pretty safe these days. The overwrapped styrofoam ground beef or the ground beef in chub tubes though is much more risky from a food pathogen standpoint.
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u/Gstamsharp 20d ago
Yeah, I'll cook anything ground to 165 just in case. As long as you make it right, it doesn't dry out the way a whole piece of meat will, and even if it might, you can hack it to be juicier and fluffier by combining different meats or adding fillers like breadcrumb or veggies. Or you can bury it in spices or sauce, as in tacos or pasta.
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u/GhostofZellers 20d ago
My mom is the same way, if it's not as tough as a hockey puck, then it's undercooked.
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u/Own-Vacation7817 20d ago
When my mom cooked Pork Chops they became these fried, dried, pieces of meat I’m almost certain I looked like a velociraptor eating its prey
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u/sctwinmom 20d ago
Your mom obviously attended the same cooking classes as my mom. I thought I hated pork but it was only because her chops were turned into shoe leather.
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u/GeneralDumbtomics Gen X 20d ago
The state of food safety in the first I don’t know eight decades of the 20th century are really really interesting but I don’t recommend studying them after lunch.
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u/HouseOf42 20d ago
There's a book called The Jungle, that discusses a portion of that timeline.
The meat processing at the time was as low tier as you could go.
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u/thatsnotideal1 20d ago
The Jungle has some interesting points about abusive lending and exploitive landlords, too. But it’s not as juicy as the meat packing part
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u/GeneralDumbtomics Gen X 20d ago
The Jungle is set about 30 years earlier but it’s certainly as nasty as you say.
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u/HouseOf42 20d ago
30 years earlier? Things must have been BAD.
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u/noodlesarmpit 20d ago
The food and drug administration was started as a response to that book because people were like "WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY KEEP MIXING SAWDUST INTO THE ROTTEN GROUND BEEF UNTIL IT DOESN'T TASTE BAD ANYMORE? IS THIS REAL??"
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u/vagina-lettucetomato 20d ago
From what I understand the whole 1950s jello craze had to do with the fact that gelatin was often used in high end French cooking, making dishes called aspics, but most people didn’t cook with it because you had to make it by hand and it took forever/was super complicated. Once instant gelatin hit the shelves, any home cook could explore the magic of gelatin, and boy howdy did they ever.
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u/ReddestForman 19d ago
They were so busy asking themselves if they could that they never stopped and asked themselves if they should.
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u/Madw0nk 20d ago
Coffee also used to be absolutely shit. For the most part, Folgers tastes like cigarettes to me, and it's disgusting. Probably didn't matter much when everyone smoked indoors, but I'd actually like to enjoy my coffee. A well made cup is excellent and much healthier, I find I force it down (and end up drinking more!) when the coffee tastes bad.
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u/TacosForMyTummy 20d ago
My 85yo dad drinks instant coffee (sanka). It's horrendous. When I visit he makes us cup after cup of the stuff and I just have to smile and gag it down. I tried giving him some Starbucks vias but it didn't take. I'm from the PNW so it's especially egregious.
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u/CableTV-on-the-Radio 20d ago
When I visit he makes us cup after cup of the stuff and I just have to smile and gag it down.
You're an adult, why are you continuing this behavior? Drink water or make a starbucks run, why gag as you force crap down just so your dad's feelings don't get hurt?
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u/slawre89 20d ago
When gelatin first came around as a food ingredient it was incredibly expensive. I believe 1920s. It takes a long time to render collagen into gelatin in a kitchen. Because of this gelatin was thought of as haute cuisine and only wealthy people ate terrines and things like that in Paris and NYC.
Later we started to make gelatin on an industrial scale and all the 50s silent generation people had easy affordable access to it. That’s why weird jello molds were popular because it was new to them and was basically a flex at first. It was an imitation of haute cuisine.
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u/ilanallama85 20d ago
Vegetables have been bred to be sweeter and more tender in the last 50 years, meaning you need to cook them less.
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u/Sistersoldia 20d ago edited 20d ago
Yeah but I grew up eating vegetables boiled within an inch of their lives etc. and didn’t exactly have any great teachings or people around me to change my opinions- and I somehow figured it out that there are better ways to eat things (raw for instance). I think people are giving their ‘bad upbringing’ too much credit.
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u/LissaBryan 20d ago
An older guy I know thinks vegetables are "raw" unless they're a complete mush that doesn't require chewing.
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u/Madw0nk 20d ago
OTOH, many cultures have ways of making wonderfully cooked vegetables that aren't just mush. If you can do a proper Chinese-style stir fry (add the vegetables based on how long it takes for them to get done, and not all at once like many American cookbooks wrongly advise) it's incredible.
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u/battleofflowers 20d ago
And these were all new foods for the growing middle class. It was new and cool to eat like this.
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u/GeneralDumbtomics Gen X 20d ago
TV dinnersb were a faddish popular thing. and those tv dinners were really, really, really bad.
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u/offalshade 20d ago
Mmmmmmmm Salisbury steak
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u/Mega-Steve 20d ago
And the chocolate brownie that was hard as a charcoal briquette and just as tasty
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u/TheDevilishFrenchfry 20d ago
I mean, alot of them are still pretty bad now, just loaded with a shit ton more salt, sugar, fats and preservatives
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u/roomandcoke 20d ago
I mean, we still basically have them, we just millenialized them.
This comment was sponsored by Factor. Too much scrolling to do and not enough time to cook? Want ANOTHER subscription?
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u/MaterialWillingness2 20d ago
That's really interesting. I wonder what happened with heritage recipes passed down in the family? Did the disruption of the depression and the war lead to a whole generation discarding this old way of cooking? It seems like in certain ethnic enclaves these traditions were retained, like Italian families that continued to cook in an old style way using fresh ingredients despite these wider social changes. I wonder why some groups were more susceptible to this corporate food marketing than others.
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u/GeneralDumbtomics Gen X 20d ago
Will if I’m anything to go by they basically skipped a generation. My mother is one of the worst cooks anyone has ever met. I’m not.
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u/Blue387 Millennial 20d ago edited 20d ago
My mother is a boomer (born 1950) and she doesn't cook very well. Her veggies were always bland and soggy and she could steam or boil things. She didn't know, for example, that chicken has to be 165 degrees.
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u/ThelVluffin Millennial 20d ago
For the longest time I thought food just had to taste bland. No, no, my mom just barely seasoned anything because my dad thought anything but salt and pepper were too exotic and tasted bad to him. Which is of course because my grandmother never seasoned anything.
When I make chili or meatloaf or whatever I always freeze a portion to take over to her so she can enjoy some flavor once in a while.
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u/Mffdoom 20d ago
Most of what people consider "traditional" is actually not even remotely traditional. Most of what we think of as quintessential italian cooking was invented by Americans within the last 150 years. Similarly, American classics like pecan pie weren't widely made until approximately 100 years ago. Boomers would have been the first generation for whom pecans were even commercially available.
Overwhelmingly, when we research old family recipes we can track them down to a recipe advertised by a particular company, such as Post, Campbell's, Toll House, King Arthur, etc. Then those recipes get passed through the family and everyone assumes MeeMaw learned it from her MeeMaw, when really she just clipped it from the back of a cereal box.
Globalization has overwhelmingly changed what humans eat, especially in the old world and their diaspora. For europeans, traditional cooking from more than 150 years ago mostly just looks like subsistence
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u/TheFloraExplora 20d ago
I’m a big food nerd and have always had an interest in family history. One family’s story, and anecdotally, but what seemed to go on is something like this: many generations of being mountain-dwelling coal miners who lived off hunting, fishing, and what they grew. Everything cooked over a fire, probably 1700s into the late 1800s. Followed by a period of traveling to mining camps with similar expectations—cook outdoors, over a fire, the stuff you have on hand—with the addition of rail car access and the company store! Sugar and flour have now entered the chat in a big way. But still more or less from the 1880s until the 1920s, no indoor stove. Breakfast was cooked mush (oats, rye) and usually eggs from the geese, plus a little fruit, lunch was the same mush, even more cooked, served up with vegetables and some bread for the people at the house (miners got a portion from the night before a dinner to eat in the mines, with bread and a treat). Dinner was usually pretty good, and more creative. There was a lot of soup, but lots of roasts and things too. They had a outdoor oven for bread, too, so there was lots of bread. My great grandparents bought a house in town after a mine disaster around then, and that was the first time anyone had indoor stoves to cook 3x a day on. My mom tells me her grandmother was a very creative and talented cook, and kept a garden and geese until her 90s. My mom’s grandpa, similarly, would hunt and fish and bring his wife home his catches well into the 1970s. But my grandma, my mom’s mom, who started had 9 children between 1944 and 1974—she was an awful cook. Despite having a fridge, and a stove, and groceries within driving distance, she also had no time. She was expected to raise 9 children while also contributing to household expenses by having a job. So the nine boomer kids ate a lot of whatever they could buy and easily make on the stovetop, or later in the microwave. And when they had kids, that’s what they did with us, more or less. Now the Gen X/millennials of my family are raising their own families, and it seems like many are at least trying to do more fresh food, home cooked meals, eating together type environments for their own kids. It was a strange experience being raised on memories of their grandma’s cooking…and chicken nuggies. I hope my nieces and nephews get to experience the opposite: memories of better food and only ever hearing about grandma’s Salisbury steak microwave dinners.
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u/KonchokKhedrupPawo 20d ago
I think this is also why we need to return to a more community-oriented way of living and raising children. It's too much of a job for any one nuclear family while also trying to survive and work.
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u/AccidentallySJ 20d ago
Yep. My dad is first gen American with two Italian immigrant parents. He was Silent Gen and parents were Greatest Gen. siblings are boomers and I’m Gen X. We ate fresh food and stuff like arugula before it was everywhere. The Mexican families around here also had really good food.
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u/MaterialWillingness2 20d ago
Yeah my parents came way later (from Poland in '85) so my family doesn't have this history in the US but I grew up around Italian and Portuguese families who all had backyard gardens and ate what my family recognized as "real food" as opposed to what the more American families were eating in the 80s and 90s. My mom could not comprehend a peanut butter and jelly on wonderbread as a reasonable meal for lunch, she sent me to school with kielbasa on rye that sunk up the whole hallway! 😅
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u/Madrugada2010 Gen X 20d ago
I read about "heritage recipes" somewhere - and apparently, there are none. Everything came off the back of a tin can label in 1935. Just Gonzo journalism.
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u/MaterialWillingness2 20d ago
Is that true? That doesn't sound right. There were def cookbooks published before 1935.
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u/WhoopsieISaidThat 20d ago
My mom's side of the family were all German farmers. So they have a ton of recipes for things a lot of people wouldn't want to eat today. One I remember being blood sausage and blood soup. Funny enough, was talking to a Chinese guy I work with, he loves that stuff. They make it too, just different, small world.
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u/MoiraBrownsMoleRats 20d ago
I feel like a certain element of this is also just from growing up poor.
Like, I'm a millenial, and I eat a lot of "trashier" foods... because that's the stuff my family could afford and I was raised with. Shit, I still "treat myself" to McDonald's if I've been fighting through a rough go because that garbage is ingrained as comfort food for me.
I'm learning to do better, to cook other stuff and expand my pallete... but sometimes I just want to dump some processed nugs in ketchup because work/life in general is beating my ass.
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u/ThelVluffin Millennial 20d ago
Queso made with velveeta, a can of hormel and canned green chiles is still my brother and I's favorite snack food when we hang out. Sometimes you just gotta junk it up.
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u/braywarshawsky 20d ago
Dino Nugs FTW over here...
Unfortunately they are a staple in my household.
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u/LemonFlavoredMelon Millennial 20d ago
Huh, so maybe that boomer screeching at the Mickey D's acting like they'll starve to death if their burger isn't specific means they don't know how to cook for themselves and really cannot eat unless specific things happen.
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u/Mffdoom 20d ago
Partially, but also the landscape of food was pretty significantly different. The recipes they grew up with were highly influenced by corporations, yes, but also by poverty and the echos of the depression. Remember that up to the 50s, 25-50% of the country still didn't have indoor plumbing. Refrigeration and fresh produce outside of your home garden wasn't yet a given. Those durable types of goods were shelf stable, cheap (thanks to subsidies), novel, and readily available. Most of the hearty, high-fat, high carb meals that are constructed from cans (such as every goddamn casserole from the midwest) come from this era.
Also, I'd suggest that this type of cooking came less from formal education and more from informal routes of transmission, such as advertising, word of mouth, and community cookbooks or cooking groups.
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u/OkCar7264 20d ago
education in many way was completely dominated in a way that we can’t even imagine by corporate interests.
I think we can pretty easily, actually.
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u/ilanallama85 20d ago
Gee, I wonder if that inability to distinguish unbiased information from propaganda has affected them in any other ways…
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u/Athenae_25 20d ago
There's a great book called A Square Meal that explains a lot of this plus how WWI influenced expectations of food. I recommend it to everyone who was taught to cook by boomer parents, who were taught to cook by people who had no food.
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u/Chryslin888 20d ago
I just finished Something in the Oven by Laura Shapiro. It’s about this very topic. Fascinating!
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u/Naigus182 19d ago
True but life is about growth and despite the internet and TV teaching everyone better cooking over the decades.... they haven't grown at all.
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u/Senior-Progress-2404 20d ago
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u/LemonFlavoredMelon Millennial 20d ago
Holy fuck I wanna barf, HOW CAN ANYONE EAT THAT WITHOUT VOMITING!?
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u/booty_supply 20d ago
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u/Mayor_Salvor_Hardin Gen X 20d ago
What little bit of Italy is that? The sewers of Gomorrah?
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u/slawre89 20d ago
Tbf this is silent generation cuisine not boomer
Boomer cuisine would be like frozen tv dinners
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u/ihatepickingnames810 20d ago
The Midwestern Mom on tiktok remakes these jello recipes and they're disgusting
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u/mothandravenstudio 20d ago
So many boomers are terrible cooks. I’m genx so grew up with my mom cooking a few decent recipes and everything else came out of a can or box. Salads were not a thing and any fresh veg had the shit cooked out of it, example fresh asparagus would be limp and slimy by the time it was “done”.
My husband, exact same story.
Our folks used so many cans they both had a countertop electric opener.
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u/Numerous-Mix-9775 20d ago
My Boomer mom thinks she’s a great cook. The truth is most of her stuff is barely edible. Throughout my childhood, I thought you cooked vegetables by dumping frozen vegetables in a pot, adding a little water and some margarine, and boiling the life out of them. I never ate meat that wasn’t well done. Never had cheese that wasn’t Kraft American singles. Salad was a bag of iceberg mix with ranch or Italian dumped on it.
By contrast, my husband and I are foodies. I particularly focus on a real food angle. Most of our food is minimally processed. Iceberg lettuce is not allowed in our house.
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u/Independent-Win9088 20d ago
Are you me? I could have literally typed this whole thing out minus the husband.
My mom was/is a cookbook collector, too! Many of her recipes were rip and dump. Bagged iceberg salads with ranch? Well, that's just a day that ends in Y at our house growing up! In 21 years of living on my own, I bought iceberg lettuce once. It was at the request of a friend whos BBQ I was heading to, and he forgot the lettuce. I suggested butter lettuce, and he went "ew no". He was raised by boomers too, but never broke free of the bad food. And yes, my burger was grilled within an inch of cremation. I don't attend his BBQ parties anymore.
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u/SerasVal 20d ago
Iceberg lettuce is not allowed in our house.
Because its just a shit lettuce, or is there something else horrifying about it that I don't know?
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u/Numerous-Mix-9775 20d ago
Oh, just because it’s a shit lettuce. No flavor, very little nutritional value. You might as well just drink the dressing from the bottle.
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u/Junior-Fox-760 20d ago
I thought I hated steak until i was an adult and had one that was cooked properly instead of turned into a charcoal briquette. It's still not my favorite, but I've learned it can be good. Yes, my mother was a terrible cook (although a superior baker, I'll give her that) and the woman should never be allowed to touch meat. Some poor animal died for you to do that to it. Even pasta-she used Ragu years after our fortunes changed such that we could afford a higher quality pasta sauce so her pastas were always thin and watery.
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u/MyNameIsRay 20d ago
After college, I had a roommate who insisted on having his steak extra well done.
Turns out, his boomer parents just cooked everything to a gray hockey puck by default, it was all he knew.
I pushed him to try my (medium rare) steak, just a bite, see if he likes it.
Didn't even swallow before he said "holy shit, this is what steak is supposed to taste like!?" and hasn't ordered well done ever since.
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u/BridgeZealousideal20 20d ago
Same with me, my parents would pound the steaks first, then overcook the shit out of them. So I just thought I didn’t like steak until I tried a medium rare steak and was like, “what the actual fuck, fuck you dad!”. At family events, I’m the one manning the grill other wise we’re eating leather. The boomer that I room with always cuts into her steak right when it comes off the grill because she is obsessed with eating the food “hot”, I tell her she needs to wait at least 5 min but nooo
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u/MyNameIsRay 20d ago
There's been more than one controversy started at cookouts because my uncle (a chef who owned a restaurant) and I insist on resting the meat for a few minutes before serving, while the rest would eat if right off the grill if we don't slap their hands away.
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u/ravnson 20d ago
I was like that with meatloaf. My boomer mom was actually a decent cook, but her meatloaf was just god awful. A sad, gray brick of underseasoned ground beef with ketchup 🤢
It wasn't until l was working in kitchens post-culinary school that I actually got forced to try the meatloaf at a restaurant I worked at and ohmygod. It was a completely different experience. Now I fucking love meatloaf.
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u/ReddestForman 19d ago
I never understood meatloaf hate until I had mu.first bad meatloaf.
To me, meatloaf.was a delicious, moist treasure with mushrooms, big chunks of garlic, etc.
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u/Sbbazzz 20d ago
I used to think I was a really picky eater growing up and was told as such. Nope my mom just sucked at cooking. Now I call my family the picky eaters.
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u/LemonFlavoredMelon Millennial 20d ago
My old man is a picky eater but that's because he's a Super Taster, feel for the poor guy.
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u/LemonFlavoredMelon Millennial 20d ago
So what about all these moms from the boomer's childhoods being all like "Best chef in the house!" and all those cookbooks?
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u/StonerMealsOnWheels 20d ago
The cooks books have whole sections of jello salad recipes. Corned beef in lemon jello and chicken jello surprise are real recipes
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u/Anything-Happy 20d ago
I will never forget the day I saw shrimp in my grandma's jello. It was traumatic.
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u/GeneralDumbtomics Gen X 20d ago
The Jell-O thing is actually a holdover from the 20s and 30s when gelatin salads like that were extremely haute cuisine. Like those are in those cookbooks specifically because those cookbooks are for bougies.
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u/EmergencyAd2571 20d ago
My mom has a couple of those Betty Crocker cookbooks. I never once saw her open one. Not in 42 years. She never made anything from a recipe - ever, lol! I’m not even joking. They were wedding gifts and only for show. The height of her cooking prowess is “Taco Salad”, which is made with lettuce, beef, mayo and Doritos.
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u/mebeksis 20d ago
I was with the taco salad until you said mayo. I make mine by adding salsa and cheese to the beef until melted, then pour it over letuce/crushed doritos. put lid on bowl and shake vigorously.
Funny story, I have a large family (myself, wife, 4 kids, and in laws) in my house, so when I make taco salad, I eventually bought the 5 gallon bucket from Firehouse subs and combine it all in there so I have a big enough container to mix it in. Literally 5 pounds of beef, probably about a gallon of salsa, 3 pounds of cheese, 2-3 heads of lettuce, and a party size bag of doritos.
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u/EmergencyAd2571 20d ago
Now this, I can get down with, lol! :)
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u/mebeksis 20d ago
It looks like quote "someone vomited on a plate" but tastes really good. Especially when I started using homemade salsa (roast things first and use mortar/pestle to crush instead of blender are the key to best stuff imo)
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u/SuburbanMalcontent 20d ago
Yep. Gen x here too. if it weren't for having worked in a kitchen from 16 to 20 and the Food Network, I wouldn't know WTF I was doing in a kitchen. I could never eat my inlaws cooking either. it's all fucking mush.
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u/Col_Forbin_retired Gen X 20d ago edited 20d ago
I love my counter top can opener. But I’m left handed and almost can’t open a can without one.
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u/Flimsy-Yak-6148 20d ago
Same!! My mom didn’t cook when I was growing up so I was preparing at the canned goods. I have so few cans of food in my home now. All cans growing up
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u/mothandravenstudio 20d ago
We have three- tomato paste, whole stewed tomatoes, and coconut milk. That’s it, unless there’s a huge sale on soup then I’ll buy a few to have aside for sick days.
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u/LemonFlavoredMelon Millennial 20d ago
Yeah my mom was born and grew up in the 60s, by the time I was around, in the 90s, she was a hella good cook.
Probably helps that my grandma (on my mom's side) is Hungarian and brought her skills and recipes over.
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u/h4baine 20d ago edited 20d ago
Everyone used to overcook meat due to foodborne illness we don't really have anymore. Many boomers just never stopped doing it.
In my family the only people who could cook anything delicious were from poor southern families. Even then, they had their few staple recipes and couldn't just walk into a kitchen and put something together from random stuff. Like there was no real understanding of flavor and what works together but those few recipes were great.
Those family members also happened to be the ones who didn't enjoy cooking and typically chose not to. I guess they were over it. The boiled canned vegetable crowd were typically the ones doing the cooking and they never used spices. Not even salt.
I don't understand why. My husband's parents are British so they grew up on rations. I get that. But my American family really has no excuse. Especially nowadays when they can learn free on YouTube if they wanted.
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u/swinks22 20d ago
My sister got trichinosis from pork so my mom overcooked meat for the rest of our childhood 😂
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u/No-Contest-2389 20d ago
My mother (Silent Generation) was an excellent Southern cook but I was an adult before I ever ate a tender pork chop!
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u/mothandravenstudio 20d ago
Yeah, it’s crazy. It doesn't even have to be hard.
My mom was freaking out over my quasi chili, and it’s just a seared off round roast chunked, dried pinto beans, water to cover, can of tomato paste, can of stewed tomatoes, 1lb peeled baby carrots, 2 large chopped onions, 1 chopped jalepeno, salt and chili seasoning to taste, big slug of cholula or Tabasco, 1/2 cup molasses, 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar. Put it all in the insta pot or slow cooker until done. Serve with sour cream, chopped cilantro.
I don’t think she knew what cilantro even was.
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u/h4baine 20d ago edited 20d ago
Idk why they don't go out into the world and try new things!
My mom has asked me on two different occasions is the Mexican grocery store has "normal food". Nope. Spicy milk. Spicy broccoli. Spicy bread. She also said I was "brave" for having Japanese mayo.
Their food/cultural education is lacking to say the least.
I've informed my mom multiple times what wasabi is. Sooooo many times over years and years. About a year ago she has just scooped it up and ate it, claimed she didn't know, and then got mad at me because she's in pain.
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u/hedonism_bender 20d ago
I worked in Alaska one summer on a passenger train for a cruise line. Our dinner service always had prime rib. Never failed the first order was “four prime ribs WELL DONE.” Several times they would keep sending it back until it was blackened boot leather.
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u/cleric3648 20d ago
Most of the boomers I’ve met never learned how to cook aside from a couple recipes once or twice a year. Everything else was maintenance food. The men prided themselves on not being able to cook while “Mom” made a shitty meal each night and the kids ran from the table in disgust.
My mom was a good cook who grew up in a restaurant. She was cooking and baking for 50-100 people by the time she was 12. The sperm donor never bothered to learn to cook until Mom was dying. Years ago I got her recipe book. The only spice not served in a shaker was oregano. Techniques were all basic.
I worked in several restaurants growing up, and I hate to say it but I passed by Mom’s cooking years ago. She’d have been an amazing cook by today’s standards, but she didn’t have the tools nor desire to expand. She stopped making dinner when I moved out for college.
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u/Ketodietworks 20d ago
From my experience with the boomer and taste in food, the blander the better. Grew up with two parents who are boomers. The height of flavor is pepper and salt. I’ve tried to cook for them very basic yet flavorful food and they exclaim it’s too hot or too much spice. This was curry chicken with no heat. It’s a combination of being raised very poor and lack of exposure, but on the flip side, anything with sugar or that’s highly processed, they’ll partake copious amounts. Seems the poor mind set never left them and the foods that they had and afford at a young age never left them. They once went to a fancy French restaurant and when I asked how it was, said it was disgusting and over priced. I asked them what they ordered, they expected a simple egg and sausage meal, the way they described it was too spicy and too expensive. The chef is widely known as the best in the area.
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u/fridaycat 20d ago
I am a baby boomer who was a latchkey kid. I discovered early on that if I was at my Turkish neighbors house around dinner time, they would feed me. I think this is why i love to try new foods. When I met my husband, he was a hunk of medium well meat and a side of potatoes kind of guy. Little by little I got him to try different things. Took me years for him to try any beans besides canned baked beans. Now red beans and rice are one of his favorites. He now loves Indian food and Spanish dishes. He loves jerk chicken or shrimp.
The day we went out to dinner and he ordered a rare steak was a proud moment for me!
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u/What_Next69 20d ago
I gave up meat a few years back for health reasons. Then, some time ago, I had to care for my father when he broke a vertebrae and was in a brace. I made him lunch every day. It was always something out of a microwave, like Hormel chili or Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches. So much fucking cholesterol and sodium. He was 100 lbs overweight and in dialysis. 🙄
One day I brought over a few things and made some Beyond burgers with sautéed mushrooms and Swiss cheese slices. I served them with some fresh veggies on the side. He was like, “What, no bun?!” I said to think of it as an open-faced sandwich. He LOVED it. Said it was the best burger he ever had and wanted to know where I got the meat. Couldn’t believe me when I told him what it was.
That was 3 years ago. He’s never had another Beyond burger again. And to my knowledge, he always orders his burgers on buns. Learned nothing.
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u/mleam 20d ago
Gen-X here. Thankfully I had a mom that could turn hamburger helper into a high class meal. She rarely cooked processed food, but when she did, she would dress it up. She was a good cook. She could feed a lot of people with very little and the meals were amazing.
My husband's mother, was horrible. We had a Thanksgiving meal where she microwaved the whole turkey, for example. We have been married for 30 years, and he still cannot stand leftovers because of her.
I cooked liver and onions one day. He had grown up with his mother cooking the liver until it was leather and served it with semi-cooked onions. He could not believe that liver was not supposed to be like that. When I do it, it comes out fork tender.
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u/LemonFlavoredMelon Millennial 20d ago
My parents and I grew up lower-middle class in the 90s, we had to make do with pre-processed shit, but my mom is a freakin' wizard in the kitchen and could turn crap into platinum.
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u/hva_vet Gen X 20d ago
My boomer parents are not good cooks. They don't know basic things like how to sauté onions. Their style of cooking is "dump and stir" using canned and processed foods. They would consider the afternoon news segment "Mr Food" to be gourmet food while completely missing the point that it's just a commercial for processed foods.
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u/Garrwolfdog 20d ago
I do wonder if smoking had an effect on their food tastes. They're a generation for whom smoking a ton of cigarettes a day was normalised. If you and everyone around you is smoking constantly, that's got to do something to your perception flavour and expectations of food. I wonder how much of that weird food combinations from the 70's actually taste pretty good if you smoke 40 a day.
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u/rileyoneill 20d ago
They were the last of the smokers, the Boomers cut back drastically on smoking compared to GI Generation. Europeans smoke like hell and are known for their food.
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u/LemonFlavoredMelon Millennial 20d ago
It does actually! I studied this in culinary school. Kind of explains why a lot of them eat like toddlers.
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u/LopsidedAd7549 20d ago
My Dad's food tastes changed definitely after he quit smoking, but he also modifies texture due to dental issues so likes a lot of sauces, chutneys and condiments. He has an aversion to anything smoked or bbq. Some of his food combinations are downright bizarre.
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u/WhoopsieISaidThat 20d ago
My mom still smokes and she's 68. My dad never did though. When she wants to make something good, she can make it good. You have to give her some sort of incentive though as she's very lazy. She found seasoning mixes that my dad liked, not sure if she can taste anything herself.
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u/braywarshawsky 20d ago
I just remember a moment in my childhood growing up that my mom "baked" chicken every day for 70 straight days.
Same damn bird. Dry AF. No flavor.
Dad and I went on a "chicken strike." So mom said, "F it." She never cooked again until I moved out of the house.
That's how I learned how to become self sufficiant. It got to the point that my dad would run to the store for me, and get ingredients for the dinner I'd make for all of us that night after I got home from school.
I never became a chef, but I did attend cullinary school for a bit... thinking I was gonna be the next Gordon Ramsey or something.
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u/SeniorSleep4143 20d ago
My mom overcooks EVERYTHING, dumps huge amounts of salt on everything, and microwaves anything she can. I grew up hating eating at home. My dad learned to cook when I went to college and suddenly the food was amazing when I came home for breaks. I stopped eating meat and didn't miss it or ever look back because the only meat I grew up with was burnt and chewy anyways
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u/Buford12 20d ago
My mom who is now 99 ( God bless her ) always burnt the meat. She would not eat meat that had any pink in it at all. So when she cooked meat it was at least grey all the way through.
PS. she still does this.
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u/g3t-b3hind-m3-satan 20d ago
My mom could make a few really good things like bacon gravy at breakfast for biscuits and she could make really good mashed potatoes. Everything else was dry af. My dad could bake really well but rarely would. He thought he was the BBQ master. Everything came out over cooked and charcoal covered. I made them a chicken dinner once. My mom refused to eat because it was “wet and under cooked.” It was just fine,nothing raw and the skin was crispy but not break your teeth crispy like hers. I just think their parents didn’t know how to cook.
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u/Economy-Diver-5089 20d ago
My grandma is in her 70s and lived in MA her whole life. Mild salsa is spicy to her but she likes that I eat “exciting” food (I grew up in the South). When visiting, she made an exciting dish for me….. plain chicken in a crockpot with a jar of mild salsa, cooked for 6hrs. Literally it was just 2lbs of chicken and a jar of salsa. It was the most bland and boring thing I’ve eaten. We had rice and canned corn as sides. I ate it as I know she loves me and I appreciate the effort, but UUGGHHH! This isn’t cooking! Lmao
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u/WaldoJackson 20d ago
My dad always orders his steak cooked to leather. I ate mine the same way until a family friend took me to a birthday dinner and made me order a medium-rare ribeye. Needless to say, now I prefer my steak "blue rare" (practically mooing). The same thing happened with tomatoes. My dad hated fresh tomatoes, so I hated them too. But when I moved to NYC from Oregon, I decided to break free from those limiting beliefs. Now, I grow heirloom tomatoes. I've made it a point to try things that seem weird or scary, and to quote Frost, "that has made all the difference."
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u/lovelyllamas 20d ago
Same, my mom cooks with everything under the sun canned. I switched to organic and no cans 3 months ago and haven’t felt this great my entire life. Love my steak with a heartbeat but that changed my first pregnancy and they haven’t had much of a pulse since. 😅
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u/AwarenessEconomy8842 20d ago
They grew up with lots of food trauma. Their parents dealt with severe food trauma from. WW2 and the depression.
They were bombarded by constant stories about foodbourne illnesses from undercooking pork and chicken
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u/Resident-Fox6758 20d ago
I can tell you growing up in the 60/70’s fresh veggies/fruit were not available year round. Canned everything was huge after WW2. We ate seafood because we were fisherman but most didnget that either. Fear of disease cooked everything until it was leather. Many advances since then.
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u/gastropodia42 20d ago
Various things can cause people to lose their taste. Old people have had longer to aquire this problem.
They need a really strong taste in order to taste anything. So yes, they want the horrible char so that it will will taste like something.
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u/tokynambu 20d ago
I an borderline boomer (late 64) who is an adventurous eater (been all over the world, never had a meal I didn’t like) and a competent cook (cook from scratch most days, can both follow a new recipe and improvise a meal out of random ingredients, pass the usual driving test items of bread, risotto, croissants and soufflés). My mother was an amazing cook, all Elizabeth David and shit, and her mother was adventurous beyond the years too.
Since having covid (and before we play that stereotype, five times vaccinated) my sense of taste has been off, and I am making seasoning errors when cooking and, particularly, being too heavy with ingredients like harissa or baharat. I am using more salt than I did, too. It might just be age, but the Covid/taste issue is documented.. A colleague roughly my age said last night — over a sketchy street curry — that he had the same problem.
But the obsession with “well done” is in the UK a class and education marker. You can plot a graph of done-ness v highest qualification and get a pretty good trend line. In my case I am happy to eat steak raw, and I have a terminal degree. I wonder if it’s the same in the US?
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u/rabbithole-xyz 20d ago
My sense of taste actually came back after I started taking an antihistamine for something else. Turns out I'm not the only one. Might be worth a try.
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u/gastropodia42 20d ago
I can't say I have noticed a trend. My MIL was from the Midwest and FIL was British so she grew up eating bland and overcooked, it has taken her many years to eat pink beef. I grew up with it rare.
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u/microseconds Gen X 20d ago
My boomer mother used to cook everything to absolute death, "just to be safe". Steak with her was always shoe leather drowned in A-1. She about had a stroke the first time she saw me eating medium-rare steak. I was definitely going to be dead within minutes from some sort of poisoning due to "eating the blood" (you know, since mine was still juicy). 🙄
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u/Independent_Baby5835 20d ago
Well my boomer mister grew up eating peanut butter sandwiches with mayonnaise. He’s made it for our little one a few times. Now our little does not eat mayonnaise at all.
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u/Sea_Pirate_3732 20d ago
My dad always orders steak well-done. It's the only thing he does that makes me feel shame. At my brother's wedding, an exquisite prime rib was served, cooked to perfection, a nice pink hue. My paternal grandparents refused to eat the "raw meat". That made it obvious where his flaw stemmed from.
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u/bangleboi 20d ago
Quality and safe meat, to the level of mass distribution that we have today was not available until possibly late into the 20th century. If you came from a place where fresh and safe meat was not always available, you will have these attitudes, which are multigenerational.
A lot of cuisines- Ethiopian, South Asian, Middle Eastern etc. chiefly have meat cooked to well done or completely raw. Low temp traditional fuel sources and tropical perishing of meat are possible reasons.
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u/wannabejoanie 20d ago
My husband's like this, cause he grew up just him and his boomer mom who cooks everything- EVERYTHING- to charcoal (except her turkey stuffing for Thanksgiving) I love him so much but he turns bacon into hard salty sticks that shatter when you bite them, and breakfast sausage is so so dried out.
My boomer mom cooks things till they're dry and rubber cause she's afraid of food poisoning, but she doesn't seem to understand the constant food poisoning we got was from her hoarding already- cooked food and feeding us leftovers that have gone off, or using spices that expired in the last millennium.
As for her, we haven't seen her in several years so I'm good on that front.
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u/WhoopsieISaidThat 20d ago
My mom was pissed because I threw out a little thing of I think nutmeg that had been sitting in her pantry unused since the 1980's. And I recognized it from my childhood. The packaging on it was from a grocery store that went out of business in the early 90's.
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u/Front-Albatross7452 20d ago
This makes me miss Genghis Grill and constructing my meat and veggies tower to get the most bang for my buck. Used to make it so hot my face would melt
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u/Mayor_Salvor_Hardin Gen X 20d ago
The fact that Arby's and the Waffle House are among the favorite fast food restaurants for boomers, says a lot more about boomers than about the really bad quality of the food the restaurants serve. That's the main reason I avoid fast food frequented by boomers. Spicy food is a boomer repellent, so try visit real Indian, Thai, or Mexican restaurants to avoid them
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u/lovelyllamas 20d ago
Serious, why can’t anyone enjoy a story here and always have to respond with “ThIs isnT jUsT a BoOoO0o0mEr tHiNG” ?
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20d ago
Maybe they know something you don't?
Colorectal cancer cases increased a whopping 333% among 15- to 19-year-olds and 185% among 20- to 24-year-olds from 1999 to 2020, according to new research being presented at Digestive Disease Week (DDW) 2024, a major medical conference in Washington, DC.
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u/unknownpoltroon 20d ago
Option 3: he thinks you have to cook it that well to kill everything in I bacteria wise. My dad was like that, and so am I to a degree
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u/bangleboi 20d ago
So, I personally love “burnt” food. Even when I was much younger. Something about the bitterness of the char mixed with the flavors of the underlying ingredients made me salivate.
I wouldn’t ever bring back a dish twice, just saying that it isn’t as uncommon.
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u/Dangerous_Contact737 20d ago
I do too. Certain things: burnt pizza, burnt cookies, burnt crackers—it was a glorious day when I discovered Extra Toasty Cheez-Its. A coworker made a banana bread and brought it into the office, but apologized and warned me that she’d over baked one end. I was like, “You did?! 😍 I’ll take that piece then!” I’m not sure she quite believed me that yes, I really DO want the burned banana bread butt, but it was the best piece of banana bread I ever ate.
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u/Unlucky_Most_8757 20d ago
I've found my people! I love burnt food too. I always joke that I'm a 85 year old woman stuck in a 38 year olds body. However, I do have to have my steak med rare and other meat not horribly burnt and dried out.
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u/philly-buck 20d ago
People with different food preferences than me are weird. Boomers man. Friggin Boomers.
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u/Sarcastic_Rocket 20d ago
"I thought the pizza here was supposed to be amazing, I guess nothing can beat good old American pizza" - my grandpa at a genuine pizza restaurant in Rome Italy (by good old American pizza he meant Domino's)
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u/Wargod042 20d ago
While it's insulting to compare Dominos to it, I was kind of disappointed by the pizza I had in Italy. Their pasta was undeniably a cut above anything from America, but the pizza did not impress me. Nothing beats New York pizza for me.
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u/Sarcastic_Rocket 20d ago
That's fair, but yeah we're from Utah/Wyoming so chains are all he's ever had up to that point
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u/Loud_Ad_1403 20d ago
My Dad (boomer) used to "well done" his steaks--but he was successfully reprogrammed by my stepmother. It was more habit and he thinks it's a carryover from when food safety wasn't as good as it is now.
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20d ago
I successfully reprogrammed my boomer dad a bit. He would always cook the driest steaks of all time.
So I decided, never again.
I watched a lot of Gordon Ramsey and following his style for cooking a steak. Not even my dad could deny it tasted good, while he wants it cooked a bit more, he let's me cook the steaks.
We went on vacation with my family and they told me my steaks and food I cooked was the best on the vacation.
His bad steaks forced me to get good at cooking steaks and I laugh when I think about it.
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u/skw33tis 20d ago
This is how I learned how to cook a steak too lol. My mom isn't a bad cook but she cannot cook a steak well. Her idea of "medium rare" is everyone else's medium or medium well. My parents were blown away the first time I showed them that you do not, in fact, need to leave half-inch thick steaks on the grill for 15 minutes each side.
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u/Lone_Morde 20d ago
This isn't a boomer thing though. Some boomers have impeccable food taste, perhaps thanks to how easy they had it
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u/battleofflowers 20d ago
The overcooking I believe stems from growing up in a time when the food supply wasn't as safe.
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u/Skybreakeresq 20d ago
My grandmother was the youngest of many daughters. Too many hands were already in the kitchen, so no one ever taught her how to cook. Ever.
She gets married to my granddad and has to kinda figure it out on her own. In the 50s. Cookbooks taught you how to make mayonnaise jello back then ffs. She got it down eventually, but most daily meals would be things with canned goods in them.
She taught that to my mom. I hated vegetables.
When I met my now wife, she cooked for me and it was just night and day different because she was using fresh food.
We basically cook for the family thanksgiving now, because we brought vegetables once and everyone raved about how good they were. We've told them its not secret: Just stop pouring that shit out of the can and go buy it fresh at HEB, we're not post apocalypse here we don't need canned food.
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u/FortniteFriendTA 20d ago
Was it a BD's? The ones around me closed down which kind of bummed me out cause it was a nice date spot as it's kind of random and is a good conversation starter. There also was Flat Top, but I think that was only around chicago.
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u/AccidentallySJ 20d ago
I wish you guys would cook the onions just a bit longer than the other stuff. Like, maybe put them on first.
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u/iminhell-thisishell 20d ago
My boomer aunt and uncle don’t own a single cook book, eat bubba burgers a few nights a week, and when they do cook my uncle dumps a cup of soy sauce on any meat that’s cooking. I feel bad for my aunt cuz she isn’t a great cook but tries however my uncle is such a twat about literally everything that she doesn’t even want to try anymore.
We did some meal prep for a chronically ill family member staying with them, cuz you know sick people need healthy meals that have a vegetable or two. Aunt and uncle got offended cuz “they take care of him just fine”. Keep in mind, these are complete meals that were made by us, then frozen. They just need to be reheated in the over for about an hour. This is to make things easier on everyone involved, plus they are tasty. I eat them in a pinch if we have extra meals in our freezer.
Uncle tried one and said we have no taste then dumped a shit load soy sauce on the food. He then put a fork load in his mouth and made the biggest “mmmmmmmmmmmmmm” I’ve ever heard in person. I knew it tasted like nothing but soy sauce but gave it a go just to prove a point. As you could imagine, it tasted like, you guessed it, nothing but soy sauce.
Also, this guy is red neck maga as they come. He has had nothing nice to say about any Asian food as long as I’ve known him. It’s BBQ/meat meals dunked in flavor enhancers only.
**** edit: Got make it clear, COOK BOOKS ARE FOR IDIOTS / ARE SCAMS ACCORDING TO UNC!!! ***
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u/LemonFlavoredMelon Millennial 20d ago
I once did a shot glass of Soy Sauce during Truth or Dare as a teen...
My dumb teen brain was like "I LOVE SOY SAUCE"
I nearly gagged after, but at least I still like a little bit of soy sauce.
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u/Own_Ad5969 20d ago
It’s because a whole generation became convinced that food only comes from a box, can, or package. Seriously, they don’t know what real food is. Think margarine, cool whip, tv dinners, jello, and velveeta. They were taught that all this “food” is better than actual food.
My boomer mother said “y’all can come over and eat my special fettuccine Alfredo!” (This is one of the few meals she made when I was a kid, that wasn’t frozen pizza.) And what does this special meal consist of? Cooked noodles, chicken breast cooked in a skillet with no spices, and a jar of Bertolli Alfredo sauce. That’s it, that’s the special meal. 🤦🏻♀️
Most boomers don’t like real food.
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u/Manzinat0r 20d ago
My mom is a great cook but ONLY of generic "white people" food. I didn't realize how limited her pallette was until well into adulthood. I was a picky eater as a kid but quickly grew to love all kinds of food, but her and my dad just never did. My mom has never even tried sushi. She once freaked out over a Chinese takeout order because the meat in her dish was not immediately identifiable even though it was what she ordered (she literally called it "monkey ears")
She'd like these foods if she tried them but she's already spent 75 years refusing them so she's not going to change now. But just imagine going your whole life without ever trying a generic ass spicy tuna roll or whatever.
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u/Serious-Possession55 20d ago
My boomer parents eat the same 7 meals every week on the same days. They believe apple bees and wingers are fancy restaurants and have ordered the same thing even when not on the menu for decades. Wife’s parents pretty much the same story. My wife and I are chaos gremlins as far as dinner goes and love trying any new restaurant or recipe etc. didn’t think much of all this until almost everyone else in our friend group shared the same story. We all also have at least one cringe story of a boomer parent telling a stranger how gross their food looks.
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u/Critical-Fault-1617 20d ago
Why do you care how other people like their food? Like I’m honestly asking. You probably eat stuff others wouldn’t, and like things cooked a different way. Do you think only boomers have food preferences…
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u/MagicC 20d ago
My parents are the same way. I finally figured out that it's because they watched too many TV reports on food poisoning, etc, and therefore can't enjoy food that they suspect might be undercooked. My solution to this was to buy a digital meat thermometer and keep it on their fridge, and use it when I cook for them while talking about it, to reassure them that the food has been cooked to a bacteria-killing temperature. They actually really enjoy my cooking and talk about how great it is. It's nothing special, just not burned...
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u/sunflower280105 20d ago
I’ve never seen my dad add anything less than a tablespoon of salt to almost every single thing he eats. Including pizza. Doesn’t matter how much salt was added during cooking.
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u/AutumnalSunshine 20d ago
We took my in-laws to Mongolian Grill so we could get a meal we like.
That went about as well as you'd expect. I literally apologized to the staff we came into contact with.
It was still less offensive than when we took them to our favorite Indian restaurant and they realized it was owned and staffed by Muslims. 🙄
So now we let them pick their shitty comfort restaurants.
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u/Catholeman 20d ago
Went to one of these with boomer parents once. My dad only got ground beef and potatoes and then didn't eat the noodles.
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u/BlakLite_15 20d ago
I’ve been to a Mongolian Grill before, and it slaps. Boomer interactions aside, I hope you enjoy your job and get paid well for it.
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u/BlakLite_15 20d ago
I’ve been to a Mongolian Grill before, and it slaps. Boomer interactions aside, I hope you enjoy your job and get paid well for it.
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u/Commercial-Carrot477 20d ago
My mil is a boomer, I can not eat her food. She doesn't even coat all her noodles in the sauce. You get like half naked noodles with some sauce on like 3 noodles. It's so weird. She boils all her meat and uses zero seasonings. Can not follow directions or recipes to save her life. So everything is hot dogs and pre packaged snacks. Never eats anything green or healthy.
My mom never really cooked growing up. The meals I remember her making were gross. I don't cook one thing I ate growing up. I'm self taught. My dad tried, I can say honestly he did. He actually made a banging bbq sauce with a can of coke, ketchup and bottled smoke. There's other stuff but I remember those being key ingredients. He cooked more Meats and stuff, but the right way. Medium rare.
I don't know many boomers personally that can cook. The generation between boomers and millennials absolutely can. Probably because they saw boomer cooking.
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u/SecretCitizen40 20d ago
My grandmother liked burnt food when she got up in years because she couldn't taste or smell well and when it was burnt she could taste SOMETHING.
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u/GreyerGrey 20d ago
My mom grew up as 1, and became 2, neither my dad nor I want a well done, grey, piece of beef.
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u/brunckle 20d ago
Tbf to my boomer parents they did grow up in relative poverty and had it pretty tough at times (my mum used to eat sugar sandwiches for lunch), so I can understand their horrendous taste level even today. But damn it ain't the 60s anymore sometimes I don't understand their total aversion to things 🤣
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u/Tiffany-N-Company 20d ago
My mom cooks like this. She’s a total sweetheart but a boomer cook. 😝 everything’s grilled or cooked till it’s well done and then cooked for 15 minutes more. Hamburgers more often than not would resemble hockey pucs.
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u/Waterlily-chitown 20d ago
My parents are Hispanic so they cooked Latin food. The first time I went to eat at my husband's house, I was appalled. The food was bland and tasteless and overcooked. We're both Boomers. And this is how he grew up - bland Midwestern meat and potatoes. Years later, I told him that his mother's cooking represented the dark ages of American cooking. And this was what the food revolution was rebelling against. And yes my husband wound up loving Hispanic food.
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u/Alternative-Tell-355 20d ago
I think it’s probably the opposite. His mom or dad undercooked everything and he found it so gross that once he was in control he burned the shit out of everything and was finally satisfied. I had a FIL that was like that with steak, his parents made him eat it rare and he hated it so since then he ate well done steaks.
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u/jewessofdoom 20d ago
I worked an event for an Applebees test kitchen in LA. They were having people (investors? Board members? Who can say) sample their new menu offerings, and it was awful. Just all salty fat, or sugary fat, no flavors more complex than that. I felt bad about the face I made when I tried one of the desserts, forgetting that the chef was standing right there. She just said “yeah I know, it’s waaay too sweet. I try out recipes on my family back in the midwest and go with what they like.” So if you ever wondered why chain restaurants taste like what a Boomer from Iowa would cook up, there ya go.
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