Yesterday I ate a four-week-old roast dinner for lunch.
By which, I mean the smell from the staff microwave was so strong, you could chew it.
As I type, the scent of 7000 toasted sandwiches is permeating my clothes and it is only a matter of time before two litres of accumulated cheese grease ignites and forces a full building evacuation.
Why are my colleagues so filthy?
One person leaves a fork in the sink and this acts as a signal to everybody who follows. Lemmings at the sink of life.
“They don’t like doing dishes,” explained a Millennial deskmate. She was referring to Gen Z, the demographic born roughly between 1997 and 2012, who would rather eat lunch at a screen than a cafe.
Multiple surveys indicate many of this cohort have not learned to cook. Further evidence suggests they lack the skills to recognise plates, bowls or the stupidity of many so-called kitchen hacks.
Have you ever clicked on a video of a 22-year-old woman making chicken schnitzel at her home “schnitty station”?
Please stop worrying you have destroyed the world for future generations. Anybody who spreads a sheet of tinfoil on a flat bench and covers it with three piles of ingredients including a raw egg that they intend to whisk directly onto that foil is probably not going to make it to 30 anyway.
Wikipedia tells me today’s youth are, generally, better “behaved and less hedonistic” than previous generations.
To wit: People used to spend their 20s drinking to excess and sleeping with questionable Contiki tour guides in random European countries. Today’s hellcat risk taker simply refuses to properly rinse their protein shake container.
If you have been wondering why your open-plan office increasingly smells like a fart, it’s because said youth are obsessed with protein. Recently, for example, they invented eggs.
You’re probably familiar with the concept of a curated wine flight. The youthful cosmopolite doesn’t drink but they will invite you over for a selection of halved, hard-boiled eggs, covered in a variety of toppings. They will describe this as an “egg flight” and you should fight the urge to laugh so hard that you fall face forward into their deconstructed butter centrepiece.
(On weekdays, the modern sophisticate just beats three eggs in a cup and helps themselves to your flaky sea salt before cooking on “high” for between one and two minutes. The office will reek, but not for much longer, because creatine is the new protein and the best natural source of creatine is raw meat. This won’t be a problem until somebody leaves a sirloin on their desk over the Christmas break).
Science reassures me that, as I age, my sense of smell will diminish.
Generally, I’m not looking forward to the gradual deterioration of my body but I just saw someone in the communal kitchen emptying a tin of tuna into a bag of frozen broccoli and no amount of science can explain this.
On the internet, I watch a Gen Zer make a dessert. They hollow out a croissant and stuff it with a mini Magnum ice cream and I think it’s probably not the worst thing in the world to eat.
On the internet, I watch a Gen Zer make a salad. They open a bag of bright orange, artificially flavoured, extruded corn snacks, add a squirt of lemon juice, a dollop of sour cream, hot sauce and chopped cucumber. They eat it directly from the bag and I consider calling the police.
Every generation despairs of the ones that follow but I’ve never ordered milk foam separately from my coffee so I can film the “construction” of my latte or spent four days arranging cubes of watermelon and feta in a checkerboard pattern and declaring it “chic”.
The youth want my sympathy – the world has never been harder-scarier-darker – but they are also chopping raw fruit, mixing it with coconut water and calling it “nature’s cereal”.
“Fruit salad,” confirmed my Millennial guidewoman. “Wait until they learn it comes in a can.”
Kim Knight is a senior journalist on the New Zealand Herald’s lifestyle desk. She is old enough to remember cheese and pineapple hedgehogs.