Four out of ten Millennials can’t be bothered to eat cold cereal. Too much work (wait for it). My kids eat cold cereal. Tons of it. We go through so much milk we should have our own cow. Cows? Cows might be too much work. But washing a bowl and spoon?
The dream of all these (cereal) companies is to capture the all-powerful and elusive millennial eater, who just isn’t all that into cereal for breakfast. It’s just too much work, for one thing. Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.
So…?
…is the Food Network doomed? (Stick with me, I manage to fit volcanic eruptions, ceramic collectibles, treadmills, and Persian rugs into this rant.)
The average meal on the average Food Network program comes with a lot more collateral damage than preparing a bowl of cereal. We’re talking dinners that increasing number of Millennial Americans wont cook. Dishes, pans, pots, appliances. Is anyone at the Food Network thinking about the long-term consequences of that?
Tomorrow on the New! Food Network, “What parts of the Digiorno frozen pizza box can’t be recycled!”
By the way, if you have never purchased the Digiorno ‘Pepperoni’ pizza the topping-name on the box while not meant in the singular tense, comes close. You will need to add additional pepperoni (which someone will need the forethought to have purchased) to make it “look like delivery,” or even like a pepperoni pizza, as opposed to a pizza with a side of pepperoni.
Whether you opt to add toppings or not you’ll have answered the marketers coyly cued challenge: Delivery vs. Digiorno. If the take-out place only gave you 11 slices of pepperoni on your 12-inch pizza you’d be taking it out on the delivery driver. Or is that too much work.
Where was I?
Comedian Richard Jeni did a bit (before he died) where he made fun of cooking shows part of which included this. “Today we’ll be making an incredibly complex dish, with ingredients you don’t have, using cookware you can’t afford, in a kitchen larger than your whole f-ing apartment.”
The world has actually downsized (except where it has it up-sized) since that joke. Home and Garden has a program focused on tiny houses (with tinier kitchens). Perhaps Food Network could consider a show called Tiny Kitchens. I see a lot of cross-over episode potential in that. Two element hot plate, 6 cubic foot fridge, two feet of counter space, all accessible from almost every corner of your home but with barely enough room to balance the frozen pizza while you add more pepperoni to it. Crap there’s no oven in this outhouse.
No, you couldn’t fit the cast of ‘The Kitchen’ in the home, let alone in the kitchen in the home, but if living in a tree house without a tree is your dream come true, just don’t ask me to pay for it.
Smaller home, less work?
In the “to Millennials cold cereal is too much work” world will cooking shows be nothing more than entertaining historical reenactments, creatively edited to provide some appearance of conflict and resolution? Food Network/History Channel anyone?
What if the Food Network brought the studio experience “home,” not to a Tiny Home, but most any other home, because the best part of a Food Network show to those Millennials has to be that “the talent” isn’t cleaning up after the incredibly complex meal made with ingredients you can’t find. Someone else does that. Probably not a millennial but somebody.
You don’t have to be a millennial to love that. The entire restaurant industry counts on this for its livelihood. You don’t shop, you don’t cook, you don’t clean. You eat, you tweet, you go. It’s a Millennial’s bumper sticker. (I want a nickel for every one you sell.) If clean up really is the big issue (bowl and spoon-too much!), send a Food Network crew out to film meal make-overs and leave a few of them behind to clean up. And while you are at it leave some of that name brand cookware behind.
Don’t worry, no one else is ever going to use the cookware. Too much work.
In the millennial kitchen of the future cookware equals artifacts. Historical art. You hang it near the shiny appliances so you can admire the way the light reflects across the aircraft carrier-sized granite-topped island (bigger than a tiny home) while you wait for the exhilarated feeling that comes when the microwave beeps; heralding the completion of some prepackaged fare whose cleanup challenges are reduced to whether that silver thing you microwaved the finger food on goes in with the cardboard or in with the regular trash.
Too much work.
Food Network could make a killing charging even more for their already-overpriced cookware because now it is sculpture. It’s the same scheme by which sweater-dryer makers can charge a fortune by labeling those as “exercise equipment.” Sure, you convinced yourself that you bought it to cover the Hot Pocket filling-stain on the corner of the Ushak Oriental rug grand-pappy brought back with him after the Big War, but it also doubles as a great place to drape delicates instead of risking their constitution on tumble-dry.
Just keep telling yourself it is worth every monthly payment and wear your increasingly ill-fitting sweaters with pride when you invite your millennial friends over for take-out. You can all admire the cookware arrangements while you talk about Vines and YouTubers and whether anyone would use the sweater-dryer as a treadmill if you placed it where the kitchen table should go.
Sadly, the pot rack as great sculpture idea is short-lived unless you wash them, which might imply using them, which is too much work. Time and particulates will gradually transform them into something you are more likely to find in a tomb. Dust covered and cobwebby, like plastic flowers, or those f-ing Village Collectibles on the side-board that look more like the town of Capas in the Philippines after Mount Pinatubo erupted than the quaint little ceramic berg your cousin was so giddy about when she gave them to you.
Hmm.
You know, this started out as a throw-away post with a pull quote and a link. Now I’m making obscure references to volcanic eruptions in east Asia. Weird how that happens. Maybe I need to go in to the kitchen and complain about all the unwashed spoons and bowls. I did tell you my kids eat a lot of cereal, right?
