It is Monday lunchtime in a London branch of Waitrose, and as the rain pelts down on the flat roof, people duck through the door and past the flower display in search of a meal deal. While they’re at it, they might grab a protein bar and a tub of mango chunks in case they get hungry later. And a pack of cubed butternut squash and a piri-piri half-chicken to throw in the air fryer this evening. Maybe one of those two-minute rice pouches too.
Four dripping Uber Eats and Deliveroo drivers in motorbike helmets stand around. Staff thrust paper bags into their arms filled with a week’s worth of food, which they will race through the traffic to deliver to the work-from-home crowd who ordered groceries on their phones between meetings.
At first glance it is a familiar, fairly innocuous scene. It also tells you something about our relationship with eating in 2025. When it comes to feeding ourselves, it seems that ease is the thing we have come to rate above all else.
A British supermarket is a confusing place in 2025. There are mixed messages woven through these aisles – ingredients that speak to this being a nation that is now interested in food, likes to cook and has far-reaching tastes, but will also happily buy a bag of soggy, flavourless cauliflower rice because it purports to be both dramatically low in carbs and on your plate in less than three minutes.
Look at the fruit and veg aisle, with its recognisable produce piled up. Next to the brown onions and leafy cauliflowers are glistening plastic packets of slightly more expensive, more “uniform” fruit and veg, already stripped of unsightly roots and greenery, sometimes already chopped or shredded.
There is also a heavily marketed section for ready meals. Not your common-or-garden ready meals – those cottage pies for one and pasta bakes – this new breed don’t consider themselves ready meals at all; they have been rebranded as “parmigiano and truffle make-your-kitchen-into-a-restaurant” ready meals, with a side of rosemary triple-cooked (quadruple-cooked, presumably, once you’ve baked them at home) chips and a dinky tiramisu for afters.
If you don’t want to cook, ideally don’t even want to touch your food, but still want it to feel homemade, the shelves are filled with shortcuts and hands-free solutions for you.
There are jars of sauce (both of the Loyd Grossman variety and the newer “organic”, “whole ingredient”, “so-good-it’s-practically-homemade” variety). Next to the bags of rice, there are 39 varieties of pre-cooked rice, costing between 75p and £2 for a 250g bag, depending on whether it has been flavoured with something like mango or coconut. There are all manner of marinated proteins, and chickens that someone has already sprinkled salt on for you. You don’t even have to touch the bird – you can just cook it in the bag.
Sainsbury’s, it should be said, was ahead of the curve on this. In 2018, it changed to “touch-free” packaging to allow millennials (37 per cent of whom were apparently “scared of handling raw meat”) to slide the chicken from package to pan. “These bags allow people, especially those who are time-poor, to just ‘rip and tip’ the meat straight into the frying pan without touching it,” the supermarket announced at the time.
You will feel the effects of this hands-free approach at the till. Chopped onions are £1.35 for 400g, whereas on the opposite shelf, loose onions cost £1.05 per kilogram. A pre-seasoned bird in a bag is £5.30/kg, a regular chicken £3.98/kg.
And if you want to eat something homemade but bypass some of the cooking bit, you can. Anything you once needed to cook – high, low, complex or commonplace – can now be purchased either partly or entirely ready made. They have boiled the eggs for you, mashed the potatoes, chopped the broccoli into florets, grated the cheese, and done the first 10 hours of cooking on the pork shoulder – you will just need to slide the tray into the oven and finish it off for 20 minutes.
In short, you just need to find the right shortcut.
There is an unavoidable conundrum buried in there, though. Rachel Sugar, writing in The Atlantic about the tyranny of what she called “the dinner treadmill”, said it best: “The thing about dinner is that you have to deal with it every single night.”
It is a treadmill, and it is still cooking if you are using a meal kit or roasting a pepper and a courgette that have been chopped and put in a foil tray for you. Of course, there is nothing new (or, indeed, wrong) about buying pre-prepared food. Marks & Spencer first launched a chicken Kyiv in 1979. Come the Eighties, microwaves were growing in popularity and TV dinners were in full swing. And today, in a world where most of us often lack time and budget, solutions are more vital than ever. But in the midst of it all, you wonder if we haven’t lost some important life skills. Along the way, between the air fryers and the meal kits and the dinner “hacks” we are constantly being sold, have we become a nation that is simultaneously obsessed with food and doesn’t know how to cook it?
If you ask the supermarkets, the shift towards shortcut cooking and the renewed appetite for ready meals is clear. In the past year, Waitrose has seen a 26 per cent increase in sales of its No1 range of ready meals. It has just launched the new Charlie Bigham’s restaurant-quality ready meals (which earned mixed reviews from The Telegraph’s Xanthe Clay). And via its website you can order meal kits by a company called Dishpatch from chefs including Rick Stein and Michel Roux.
Tesco has just launched a collection of “restaurant-quality dishes” (featuring strangely retro items such as pork chops with “charcutière sauce”), based on research which found that “almost 30 per cent of Britons admit to trying to pass off supermarket meals as their own cooking”.
These days, we seemingly can’t get enough of cookbooks, and yet, in an increasingly saturated market, they often struggle to sell. In 2022, Sunday Times research found that while more than 5,000 cookbooks were released in the UK in 2020, only 556 sold more than 100 copies. The books that now get the most buzz tend to be miles from Delia Smith’s fabled Complete Cookery Course, with its brisk, reliable instructions on how to boil an egg.
In September of this year, the publisher of Delicious magazine went into liquidation, while Waitrose Food magazine has undergone a rebranding to reflect “how food culture has changed”, with recipes that are “simpler to follow”. Also in September, David Sillito, a BBC media correspondent, published an analysis of why so-called “stand and stir” TV cooking shows are dying out, reporting that commissions for food programmes across British TV had dropped 44 per cent in a year. The reason? The appetite for food shows is still there, but the people who watch them are surfing YouTube, not turning on BBC Two at 7pm.
Meanwhile, Waitrose’s most recent annual food and drink report heralded “the death of the recipe”, and noted both a rise in “scratch cooking with shortcuts” and “restaurant-quality dining at home”. Ready-made sauces and marinades were popular again, with restaurants from Wagamama to Michelin-starred Gymkhana, and chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi launching ranges of sauces. “Pre-prepared proteins” such as marinated tofu and “easy to cook” joints of meat were proving popular, as were “flavoured butters, premium jarred beans and instant noodles”. Customers want to cook – 55 per cent said they would opt for a home-cooked meal over a takeaway. They just need some of the work to have been done for them.
The question, then, is whether it matters. If the Waitrose report reveals a loss of real cookery skills, or a general nervousness or apathy about the idea of preparing a meal, then perhaps it does. Diana Henry, The Telegraph’s award-winning food writer, fears we have been losing our ability to cook for some time. “I think it’s a bit of a crisis,” she says. “I don’t think we realise what a disaster it is – and increasingly will be – if people don’t cook.
“If you are buying takeaways and ready meals, you are giving your money – and your health – over to other people every single day. Being able to cook is not optional, it’s a life skill. I am really tech-phobic but I can’t choose to avoid computers. Most people learn to swim, drive, cycle and use an iPhone – we also have to be able to cook. Apart from being essential, cooking can bring you huge pleasure too.”
Meal kits might be expensive, but they are a helpful route into home cooking, Henry says. “They can, in a way, teach you how to cook and give you more confidence.” Meanwhile, chefs such as Jamie Oliver have, she adds, done a good job of showing people “that cooking is do-able”.
Henry worries about the impact on younger generations of gadgets such as air fryers that speed up or side-step the cooking process, pointing out that it used to be the oven that was the time-poor cook’s best friend. “Oven cooking is so simple,” she says. “I think if you can learn to cook something like chicken thighs then you can then make an endless number of things. But I worry about whether or not those absolute basics are being understood or taught.”
Writing in the i newspaper in July, in a piece headlined “At 23, I cannot cook a meal – and it’s all because of the air fryer”, one Gen Z journalist put her lack of confidence in the kitchen down to a combination of social media, takeaway apps and gadgets. “In the four years since I’ve lived away from my parents, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve used an oven,” she wrote, sharing that gadgets that chop your onions for you have “de-skilled” her generation.
Good home cooking need not involve huge amounts of expertise, but it does usually involve some work, however minimal. And knowing how to roast a tray of vegetables or slow cook a stew is arguably as useful a “skill” as any.
If you believe the headlines, then younger generations are not cooking at all. “Gen Z are so incapable of cooking they cannot even make an omelette” shouts one from January, above a story based on a survey of Gen Z cooking habits. One participant explained: “I feel like a lot of us just didn’t grow up in kitchens the way older generations did. Plus, with food delivery apps and ready meals I can just stick in the microwave, it’s easier to get by without cooking.”
That’s not to say this generation isn’t interested in food – far from it. Many are learning to cook on social media. Henry notes that her sons and their friends are “avidly teaching themselves to cook by watching YouTube videos – then they actually cook and send me the pictures”.
On TikTok, videos of people explaining how to make “cloud coffee”, pancake cereal and nutritionally boosted lunch bowls are popular. They might teach you how to “fibremaxx” some pasta but not how to season it properly. If image or eccentricity are prized over flavour and usefulness, how many skills are being acquired? “We’ve skipped over the basics and gone from your parents’ kitchen table to complicated TikTok trends, and in between, no one taught me how to sweat an onion,” says Poppy, 25, who admits that when she has guests over: “It doesn’t matter how it tastes, it’s more about how it looks.”
“I’m terrified to go in the kitchen,” she admits. “I’m hosting a dinner party this evening and I don’t know what to make. You feel the pressure, because you want it to be perfect and Instagram worthy. It’s either Insta-perfect or there’s no point. And you know that as soon as everyone arrives they’ll take their phones out and start posting, so there’s a pressure for it to look perfect.”
All of Poppy’s friends cook, but few would stretch themselves. “I’ve never been to a friend’s house for a roast. I made a Christmas lunch once but it was the biggest faff.”
Claire Thomson – a chef and food writer, whose 11 cookbooks cater to parents with limited time but a desire to cook interesting, joyful, nutritious meals – has hope for the younger generation of cooks. “I’m really heartened, because my oldest daughter has just left for university. Grace is 18 and she studied really hard for school, so she didn’t really do an awful lot of cooking at home, and I was wondering if anything had really gone in, but it [has]. It’s osmosis.”
Thomson, who has three daughters and lives in Bristol, worries about the amount of packaged, pre-prepared food available now. “There is a monetary reward if you go and buy a butternut squash, and you peel it and dice it yourself. You ultimately will realise it’s cheaper to buy it like that and you get more bang for your buck.
Have we over-prioritised ease in the kitchen? “Yes,” Thomson says. “We’ve become obsessed with ‘five ingredients’ and ‘under 15 minutes’. Sure, I’m a mum to three kids, sometimes I need to make something in 15 minutes and it needs to be in their mouth and out the door because we’re going to netball. But if all my time and cooking was spent like that, the love [for it] would be zapped.”
There is a time for fast cooking and often “a necessity to make things quickly and cheaply”, she says, adding: “It takes time to make things beautiful. And where something might take time, often it can save you money.”
Perhaps that is the thing the hacks and the shortcuts get in the way of. Cooking from scratch is often cheaper. But at its best, it also has the potential to give you something more than the meal at the end. It can give you something in the process too. Is a lasagne still homemade if the white sauce came from a jar rather than a spoonful of butter, another of flour and half a pint of milk? Yes. Is it still homemade if the component parts came from a meal kit? Also yes. Do we sometimes need dinner to have been entirely pre-prepared? Definitely. But there can be a great bonus to be found in the process. We can get something from the time spent assembling a meal, from the joy of pulling a bubbling dish from the oven 40 minutes later and placing it on the table to be demolished.
Would it be a shame never to make a lasagne from scratch? Maybe. You can make a case for there being more important things in the world, but making something good to eat – even if it’s simply a boiled egg and toast – is one of the more joyful, satisfying ways to pass the time.
Back in Waitrose, while most shoppers move down the aisles at a clip, one man strolls towards the till at a more stately pace, seeming delighted with the purchase he is about to make. He is singing a song to himself about the pack of premium pork sausages he is holding. “Sausages, oh yeah, gonna have sausages.” And on it goes. That’s the point, isn’t it? To enjoy the food we are lucky enough to be able to buy at lunchtime, and take home to cook for our dinner.