Five Cooking Trends Among Millennial Parents

By Avani Mudbidri

Millennial parents are better informed than ever before. They also have to prepare meals keeping in mind the numerous fads espoused by influencers, celebrities and fitness gurus. So how do millennial parents keep their children’s appetites satiated? Here are some key trends.

Millennial parents are comfortable with technology

Millennials were the first to adopt new technologies, so it’s no surprise that as parents, they are able to use newest technologies to cook nutritious meals. An upper-middle-class millennial parent living in urban India knows how to use search engines to find recipes for a chicken preparation or pastries. They also understand that excess carbohydrates aren’t good for the body. For this reason, a millennial parent is likely to use search engines to find the most nutritious chicken recipe. Often, this recipe demands simply boiling chicken rather dedicating hours to make chicken curry.

Millennial parents understands benefits of vegetable protein

Vegetarianism was born in India and its benefits are widely recognised by the rest of the world. Not a week goes by before a celebrity and teen idol proclaims they’ve become a vegetarian. In India, it’s unsurprising to discover a family in which parents eat meat while the children are staunch vegetarians. The popularity of vegetarianism is leading many parents to learn about the most nutritious food that doesn’t contain meat.

A millennial parent is likely to search online for vegetables and pulses that contain protein. Such parents discover rice contains high-quality protein and so does spinach. Both these foods are more likely to be cooked in urban millennial homes.

Organic foods are a blessing

Genetically engineered foods entered many people lives without any warning. It’s understood by millennials that genetically engineered foods while having an appealing appearance, aren’t nutritious and often don’t taste good either. Often millennial parents use grocery delivery apps to order food that may be pricier than sold nearby but which nonetheless their children demand.

Quirky is in, traditional is hackneyed

Millennials enjoy a culture that is more varied than that of any generation before them. They’ve evolved beyond aspiring to become doctors and engineers and want to do jobs that don’t exist today. This individualism extends to their tastes in desserts as well. If a patisserie wants to attract millennial parents it must create desserts that not only taste delicious and offbeat but incorporate them into them themes millennials like. This means parents who want to buy their children a memorable birthday cake don’t visit the local bakery, but begin their search online. Many millennial parents of teenagers have downloaded apps of patisseries that bake quirky foods that revolve around an attractive theme.

Millennial parents order in

The popularity of food delivery apps clearly signals people love to order in as much as or more than eating out. Why go to a restaurant and wait half an hour to order food when you can spend quality time with family and friends and have food delivered to your doorstep? The millennial generation wants everything NOW. This means they want slow cooked food delivered in the time it takes to serve fast food. Parents are happy to order in.

Millennials are extremely attuned to ideas from across the globe. This means they are exposed to culinary trends that originated halfway across the world and have to become familiar with technology to help meet their children’s fancy for different varieties of food. Most urban Indian parents are doing remarkably well in this sphere.

(The writer is Pastry Chef, Academy of Pastry Arts.)

Source: The Indian Express