Though I doubt I know any, it’s not too difficult to imagine people like this. Every once in a while, a askreddit thread comes up along the lines of “people who know the ultrawealthy, what’s the most out-of-touch thing you’ve seen” and there’s always stories about super rich college roommates from overseas doing things like throwing away clothes instead of doing laundry or not knowing how to use an electric kettle. They had servants back home to do all that and there’s probably some Americans like that, too.
Sort of related: After someone I know lost his father, he had to show his mother how to pump gas. She’d been driving for decades but the father had always taken care of it. Of course, there are areas where the station personnel are required to operate the pumps but not there.
I think we have some single occupancy residences left here in Chicago but they’re critically endangered and their disappearance is often listed as a reason for a lot of homelessness. A lot of them served meals in the morning and evening.
My brother in law, as a young adult, seldom if ever cooked. We visited him once…the refrigerator held a few sticks of celery and a jar of peanut butter. He was a busy guy and usually ate out or picked something up (NYC so that was pretty easy).
He’s now a lot older, but he still does little if any cooking.
Regarding the original question—“is it odd”— here’s how I generally think about that kind of thing. I live in a city of about 30,000 people. Can I imagine just one adult in my city never using an oven, stove, or microwave? Sure, not too hard…
Well, my city has about one ten-thousandth of the US population. So I have no trouble imagining that 10,000 adults in the country for this description. Odd? Probably. Unheard of? Not really!
1930s is definitely more recent than the era I was thinking of (though I’m not the poster you are replying to). More like London at least up until the 1850s it was a thing. Not sure how widespread, but definitely a thing. Here is a book summary that mentions it.
Going back much further, it’s my understanding the majority of homes in Pompeii had no cooking facilities, though I suppose if they used open fires outside, we’d know less?
There’s a mention of a variation of this practice in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Kitchens available to the poor on Sundays and religious reformers trying to outlaw the practice, Sunday being the Lord’s Day and all.
There are plenty of countries where you don’t have to be super rich to live live-in help. A lot of guys growing up there don’t cook at all.
My father was a type that rarely cooked. I never saw him cook once in his life, but he had lived by himself for a while, so he did know how to cook. It was just a woman’s job.
My sister could cook very simple meals when she was eight or nine. Instant potatoes, canned vegetables, and cheese sort of thing. My father would have her do it when my mother would be gone.
I know a guy who won’t eat anything unless it’s white or brown. He has been known to spit food out because he “doesn’t like to chew that much” when he eats something. Most of us have no idea how he’s still alive. Other than his weird eating habits, tho, he’s a good guy and co-worker.
It seems strange to me now. It wouldn’t have seemed strange to me when I was 23 or so, and up till that point, because I also didn’t use that stuff. I never cooked. I lived on granola, wheatberries, yogurt, candy bars, hot dogs from 7-Eleven, and the hors d’oeuvres that singles bars used to put out every night. There were a log of singles bars where I lived in those times.
I had a friend in my old town whose mother died suddenly, and her father was incredibly helpless because he did not know how to do laundry, heat a can of soup on the stove, pay bills, make a sandwich, etc. She did point out that if anyone would hear this and think that her father was a bad man, they’d be very mistaken - that in fact, he was a kind, hard-working man who was a good father and treated her mother very well, but he had never HAD to do any of those things.
To my knowledge, both my grandfathers who were born in the early 1900’s never cooked anything in their life and since both my grandmother’s passed away before them, they never leaved alone either (their children took them in). My Dad could barely fry an egg, my Mom (later me) did all the cooking in the house. He told me he used cook simple things before he was married, which was just a few years after his release from the Army.
That was just way it was back then for most of the families I new growing up the 60’s and 70’s. Only one parent worked and the other stayed home. If more money was needed, the working parent (usually the Dad) would get a second job.
Edit: As I posted in another thread, at least in my circle, it was normal for parent’s to beat the c**p out of their kids, so normal doesn’t always mean good or right!
The range in my apartment looks as clean as it was at the time the range was installed 8 years ago. I live in the same apartment complex as my mother and I usually eat dinner with her in her apartment. (She’s disabled and could only make the stairs up to my apartment with extreme difficulty. I’m disabled myself for that matter.) However, I’m usually the one who actually cooks dinner because it’s just easier for her because of her disabilty so I know how to use an oven.
When I’m eating lunch or dinner by myself in my own apartment it’s usually something that doesn’t require cooking or something that I make in microwave. I eat a lot of canned pasta and soup and that just has to be heated up in the microwave.
I definitely find odd that someone would have absolutely never used a stove or microwave. The microwave one stands out the most as being odd. Even the people I know who are the most averse to cooking use a microwave to heat leftovers or prepackaged meals(i.e. tv dinners/hot pockets type food).
It’s not that we love the microwave. It’s that for a person who doesn’t know how to cook, pushing a few buttons in accordance with the directions on a package is the very simplest and cheapest way to feed oneself. In the context of the OP, it’s kinda stunning that they can’t at least do that much.
I mean, what if he got the flu? Would he have to drag himself out to a restaurant or starve? But then, I suppose Mommy would come out and take care of him. Shame on her.
I’ll say this though, I wish food was that unimportant to me. It must be nice to see eating as just something you do if you happen to go out. I would be ravenous!
Nope. Mine broke fifteen years ago and I never replaced it. I cook almost all of my own meals, too. I make small batches of proteins and grains and mix with dressing and chopped kale. I make smoothies in the ninja. Baked potatoes come out beautifully in the air fryer or instant pot. I make a lot of sheet pan dinners. I cook a LOT and don’t miss the microwave at all. The stove heats things very quickly and without the texture that microwaved food often gets.
I use the microwaves at work to reheat the food I bring from home, but I don’t miss having one at home at all.
I don’t have a dishwasher, either. That, I do miss.
My ex’s sister who I talked about above, once made a seven layer which was open Mexican bean dip which was basically open a can of this, open a can of that, cut a few veggies (which she actually was pretty good at, though super slow), mash an avocado. She she said it was the first thing she ever ‘cooked’ (she was in her late 20’s at the time) I couldn’t help but burst out laughing!
Oh, completely unrelated to the OP, but she couldn’t make Jello because stirring it made her dizzy!
I knew a guy who was nearly as bad, the last I had talked to him he hadn’t cooked anything in 7 years, but was a microwaver earlier.
For starters he was completely anosmic, and I think may have barely had a sense of taste at all either. He just has no interest in any food over another one except cost and ease.
When I first knew him in college he ate cereal or baloney sandwiches nearly every meal occasionally going to the dorm cafeteria for something hot at dinner.
When he got out he got in a routine every single day of he is at home; cereal breakfast, baloney sandwich lunch, microwave pizza dinner. But about 7 years ago he moved into a basement that didn’t have a microwave, and he just started cereal for dinner too. Those where the two options he negotiated to when his mom demanded he eat when he was 4, and he never saw a reason to change. I always figured the only reason he doesn’t have scurvy or pellagra or something is that his job requires meeting clients who came into town, so he goes to a restaurant three times a week or so and tries to look normal with a standard meal.
Interesting. The building I toured was built around 1850, and the apartments definitely had kitchens. And they were tenements. But this was New York, so it might have been different. Both families that lived in the restored apartments were immigrants, the first Jewish the second Italian.
If we had this thread a few months ago I could have asked the guide.
I think it is quite abnormal for any human being who has access to such appliances, but for some reason it appears to be common for people from Madrid (specially but not limited to male ones); I’ve personally met quite a few examples and also other people from the same town who, while themselves capable of cooking, saw nothing strange in being in-capable.
This is viewed by people from the northern half of Spain as proof that people from Madrid are some sort of aliens.
