Gen Z's culinary escapades are a symptom of societal decay
Young people's appetite for turning food into artifice apparently knows no bounds.
It hasn’t been easy for Gen Z, what with coming of age as they did in a time of economic, social, and political crisis. They entered adulthood during a pandemic, when they were told to stay home and prioritize safety (not just for themselves but for others, too). Forget about going out, seeing friends, or getting a job.
But now we’ve moved past the COVID emergency, and Gen Z’s denizens are emerging into the world as consumers with seemingly unending disposable income (how?) and an insatiable appetite for food as a spectacle.
For this generation, raised on TikTok, food is not about flavor or texture or taking delight in the very thing that gives us sustenance. Rather, it’s a status symbol used to project pseudo-sophistication and a meticulously crafted image that elicits envy and admiration from a social media following.
Another hollow pursuit in a fleeting, artificial age.
Surveys have shown that young people today dedicate roughly 40% of their monthly spending to food. Luckily for marketers, Gen Z seems to have a penchant for the luxury end of the scale.
In December 2023, the Daily Mail reported that Gen Z is fueling a surge in caviar sales:
Sales of sturgeon roe are up 74 per cent since 2020 globally, according to 360 Research, with British teenagers and those in their early twenties driving the trend.
When fashion brand Gucci opened a pop-up restaurant in Seoul, South Korea, serving dishes that cost $90 to $125, reservations sold out four minutes after the restaurant opened.
A generation more hungry for social validation than nourishment is choosing to spend $22 for sturgeon spread on a bagel, $45 for a cocktail, and $25 for a smoothie from a Los Angeles health food store with a cult following.
Beneath the veneer of luxury lies a troubling truth — Gen Z has a warped sense of reality and a shocking amount of financial irresponsibility. At a time of extreme economic uncertainty and mounting debt, their decision to spend extravagantly on food items shows just how oblivious they are to what’s at stake and the long-term consequences of their actions. Worse, the price of their ignorance could prove catastrophic to us all in the long run.
Consider, for example, the environmental toll of sourcing and extracting wild-harvested sea moss from the Caribbean islands to produce a bottle of blue goop that “tastes like dirty sink water” (see video above). Yet, Gen Z is blissfully blind to the ecological consequences of their actions, even though this is the very generation that claims to suffer from climate anxiety and will glue themselves to the road or throw soup at a work of art in the name of Mother Earth.
Similarly, the very same people who croak about diversity and inclusion are indulging in an extravagant lifestyle that only few can afford, further widening the gap between the privileged and the marginalized all for the sake of likes and clicks. As they feast on gold leaf smoothies and artisanal tuna sandwiches, they reinforce the very societal divides they otherwise decry.
Enigmatically, Gen Z has also embraced the low brow when it comes to eating. Last year, an odd hashtag — #girldinner — started trending on TikTok. The phenomenon involved young women sharing pictures of sad, meagre meals made up fruit, salami, cheese and crackers, or potato chips.
As The New York Times wrote in July 2023:
Girl dinner is “both chaotic and filling,” as one TikTok commenter put it, requiring none of the forethought, cooking or plating demanded by an actual meal. As another commenter observed: It’s “no preparation just vibes.”
‘Girl dinner’ fetishizes and normalizes a way of eating that is neither healthy nor socially appealing. The trend apparently originates from the TikTok account of Olivia Maher, who broadcast a meal consisting of bread, cheese, pickles, and grapes and joked that it was like what a medieval peasant might eat.
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At the other end of the spectrum from sparse ‘girl dinners’ is ‘mukbang’ — a trend in which people make a living by serving up videos of themselves eating vast amounts of food. It is truly grotesque, but top mukbang creators report making up to $1 million a year in advertising and sponsorships, to say nothing of the insane numbers of followers who tune in for… the spectacle? The schadenfreude?
It’s easy to dump on Gen Z and their vapid ways. Past generations have had their culinary high-priests and priestesses. And yes, the homemaker’s obsession with aspic was an odd anomaly in post-WW2 Western food. Still, fetishizing food was usually linked to a personality, and that personality would typically have a mission — Anthony Bourdain toured the world eating and drinking to forge a new type of culinary journalism; Gordon Ramsay’s foul mouth and ridiculous tantrums gave us a behind-the-scenes look at high-pressure fine dining; Julia Child was on a mission to raise the bar when it came to American cuisine.
This current generation’s fascination with excess, indulgence, and the continued abstraction of food is worthy of examination because it not only smacks of hypocrisy and superficiality, but it appears to be laden with contempt for the small pleasures in life — growing, cooking, and eating food made with love in the company of loved ones.
With enough public attention, this youth perversion could serve as a cautionary tale, with hope for a lost generation to begin to value substance over style and recapture what is truly meaningful before it’s too late. We hold out some hope thanks to kids like Maxim Smith over at The Great Man Podcast working, as it were, for his supper. But that flame dims ever more with the stories that cross our desk daily. It’s a ‘vibe’ we’re all going to have to get used to.
I will call it a mixed bag. There is the clout chasing with instagram and such. We have always had conspicuous consumption. The lens of social media only gives it more impetus. There is also a resurgence of people actually cooking and preparing their own food. Some for growing you own food as well.
We had a couple generations of people who grew up on fast food, ramen, and cheap pizza that had no idea of how to feed themselves. During the height of the pandemic when there were shortages and empty store shelves, I just laughed to myself. The only things that were in short supply were the stuff that people who don't know how to cook reach for. For those of us who cook from scratch, there was plenty. The only shortage that affected me was a temporary shortage of yeast when people went on a bread baking spree.
I am confident saying that there are a lot more people that are getting into making their own food trying to get by while making their student loan payments working at low pay jobs that their worthless choice of degrees got them than there are following the stupid trends of "social media influencers."
My adopted grand daughters are Gen Z as well as many of the young people I know in our community. These young GenZ are industrious, learning to contribute to the community rather than use it for their own benefit. Instant-media displays the corruption of the Gen Z culture, this is unfortunate. Monetizing intensifies self-focus; but distortions in thinking are not unusual in the natural man - who are not, on their own, capable of escaping the limits of self. Though disheartening to see, it is clear the collapse of life in GenZ captures those who are driven by fettishes and therefore imprisoned by their ‘self-want-glut’ identity.
The collapse of life is not new. What could be new to ‘the dead in a self-focused attitude’ is a Hope that is outside of self.