Young People Aren’t “Canceling Cooking.” They’re Getting Priced Out of the Kitchen.

A notification popped up on her phone: “Young People Are Now Trending Toward ‘Canceling Cooking.’”

The headline was short: two verbs pressed together, trending and canceling. It read like a person standing at the kitchen door, raising a hand to switch off a light. The motion clean. The reason sufficient. Keep going and the picture completes itself: someone is working out, dieting, training for lean muscle, compressing three meals into two cups of coffee and a salad. Someone looks healthy and self-directed. The headline has already done the reader’s fantasizing.

Click into the description and there is one sentence: vegetables and meat have gotten too expensive, so she stopped cooking.

Yesterday’s dishes were still soaking in the kitchen sink. The dish soap bottle was upside down, only a finger’s width left at the bottom. Xiao Zhou got off work and entered the supermarket. The air curtain rolled up and cold air hit her face. She pushed a shopping cart; its wheel pulled left and scraped the shelf every couple of steps. The price tag on the baby bok choy had changed: 6.98 yuan a jin. Pork tenderloin was 29.8. Chicken breast was 12.9. She stood in front of the cold case, tapped two numbers into her phone calculator, then deleted them. A stock clerk carried over a box of cabbage and tore open the tape. “Cabbage is on special today,” he said. “Two ninety-eight.”

She took one head and put it in the cart. At the meat case, she picked up a package of chicken breast, turned it over to check the date, and put it back. Her phone buzzed: the landlord reminding her about utilities. She put the chicken back in the cold case and took two packs of tofu. The case’s light was bright white, and a layer of mist clung to the tofu boxes. She wiped it with a finger; the water slid down the plastic.

On the way home, a delivery rider ran past her, his box bearing a sticker: “3 off 25.” She opened the delivery app. A chicken salad was still in her cart: 22.8, delivery fee 3, packaging fee 1. She deleted the salad and exited the app. At home she opened the fridge: half a cabbage, two eggs, a bag of dried noodles. A few dried grains of rice were stuck in the rice cooker’s inner pot. She took a photo of the fridge and sent it to her roommate: “This week’s menu: cabbage, tofu, noodles.” Her roommate replied with one word: “Trendy.”

Xiao Zhou laughed once and put the phone face down on the table.

The next day, she saw the same notification in a group chat. In the headline, the word “trend” was bright, and “cancel” was light. Price did not appear. Income did not appear. Rent did not appear. Working hours did not appear. In the headline, the subject is young people, the predicate is “trending,” and the object is “canceling.” The weight of the whole sentence falls on what young people are actively doing. At a glance, the reader sees a subject with choices: he is in the trend, he is on the cutting edge, he is deciding his own life.

The subject in the description gets off work too late. Vegetables are too expensive. Meat is too expensive. The time cost and ingredient cost of cooking rise together. He shuts down the kitchen and turns “what to eat” from a nutrition question into an arithmetic problem. The headline writes this as a “trend,” which means it first takes away the choice, then takes away the accurate words for describing the choice. A person is already worrying about vegetable prices, and the media still wants to tell him: you are not poor, you are trendy.

The word “cancel” carries its own sense of agency. Cancel the gym, cancel travel, cancel cooking. It all sounds like a person standing before life and elegantly pressing pause. In reality, “canceling cooking” is often not canceling one item but shrinking a whole way of living: less meat, more carbohydrates; fewer fresh dishes, more meals cobbled together; three meals compressed into two; “what to eat” turned from a question of taste into a question of price. Strictly speaking, not cooking does not equal not eating. More people are cooking less, lowering the quality of ingredients, reducing the number of meals, filling up on cheap calories. If it really comes to eating less or not eating, the accurate terms are food insecurity and food poverty. Fitness dieting has room for choice, medical supervision, a way out. Not having money for groceries does not. The former is “I choose not to eat.” The latter is “I cannot afford to choose.”

To write the latter as the former is a double dispossession: first the choice is taken away, then the accurate naming of the choice.

The grammar of media headlines is convenient. “Young people are trending toward canceling cooking.” Price is swallowed by the headline. Vegetable prices, income, rent, working hours, community canteens, school meals, and food banks do not make it into the sentence. What the reader sees is a weightless subject: he is choosing, he is in the trend, he is on the cutting edge. The subject in reality may simply be: he gets off work too late, vegetables are too expensive, meat is too expensive, cooking is not worth it, and in the end he shuts the kitchen. A downgrade under the squeeze of living costs is translated into consumerist language.

Consumerism excels at translating “having no choice” into “I want.” Saving money is called minimalism. Deprivation is called self-discipline. Making do is called relaxation. Being unable to afford food is called intermittent fasting. The prettier the translation, the more invisible the structural problem.

Hunger past and present forms a continuum, but the mechanisms cannot be equated. The Ding-Wu Famine and the Irish Famine were institutional disasters compounded by climate, colonialism, markets, and failed relief. The shrinking of daily life under modern food price rises is more often relative poverty, distribution, and inadequate social protection. The degrees differ, and so do the mechanisms. Once scarcity is aestheticized, suffering is seen as personal style. Once deprivation is packaged as self-discipline, structural problems retreat back onto the individual. “Trend” is originally a temporal word: this is trendy this year, that next year. If a “trend” runs from the Paleolithic to the present, crosses history, crosses species, and can be found in every biome, then it is not a trend. It is scarcity. Scarcity recurs, but what recurs is not cultural taste. It is unequal distribution, inadequate protection, and price shocks. Haitian mud cakes and emergency foods in extreme poverty are scars of poverty. Using them as a mirror can expose the absurdity of “trend” discourse. Treating them as a cultural spectacle consumes suffering one more time.

The useful questions are about price, income, working hours, and public support. Why does the rise in vegetable and meat prices make cooking an uneconomical thing to do? When income expectations shrink, why are fresh ingredients the first thing cut? Why do long working hours leave people no time to cook? Why do community canteens, school meals, food banks, price interventions, and social protection not appear in the headline? Why are individual money-saving tactics internalized as the identity label “I am modern”?

Individuals can make choices: buy a little less, compare prices more, learn a few cheap dishes, look for community group buying. These are coping tactics. They do not explain the structure. To write coping as a trend is to make the individual take the blame for structure.

At ten at night, the supermarket cold case was still lit. A stock clerk held a stack of yellow discount stickers, walked to the tofu case, and stuck “second item half price” onto a tofu box. Xiao Zhou took two packs and put them in her cart. In her phone notes, the line “cancel cooking” had been written. She deleted it and changed it to: “Buy half a cabbage, two packs of tofu, a bag of dried noodles.” At home she turned on the stove. The water boiled. The noodles went into the pot. Steam fogged the window. She did not post it on Moments. Outside, a delivery rider ran past, and the corner of the “3 off 25” sticker on his box lifted in the wind.