Everything on High
- Sasha DuBose
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
“You’re not one of them young hoes who cook everything on high,” my mom tells me while preparing the stuffing for Christmas dinner.
“I know,” I respond, talking through a mouth full of stuffing. “You raised me better.”
My mom and I have different approaches to cooking and eating. She’ll take an apple out of the fridge and eat it raw while I mull over which apple would be the best for a spontaneous apple compote. However, I am regularly reminded by our shared presence in the kitchen that we do share some foundational theories on the rituals of cooking – including the fact that a good meal takes time.
The internet loves to dissect young women and the way we eat. “Young hoes cook everything on high,” has consumed my thoughts since reading the original tweet. It transported me back to the “Food and Gender” weeks of my undergraduate days, where I’d diligently read article after article about domesticity, womanhood, and silent labor.
This tweet, and the collective response to it reveal a lot about how Gen Z women are positioning themselves in relation to labor and time. The conversation that “young hoes cook everything on high” seemingly starts is really picking up where girl dinner left off. Girl dinner, I break down in conversation with my food studies bestie, Zoya Rehman, is Gen Z’s response to the invisible domestic labor of our foremothers.
The perfectly packed lunches of our primary school pasts. Or how our favorite snacks “magically” appear in the pantry. Invisible labor consists of actions that make us feel seen, in fact, they are the seamless threads binding the fabric of domestic bliss that often go ignored.
The advent of short-form content has provided Gen Z with an opportunity to articulate with brevity their sociopolitical dissatisfaction with traditional American values. As I mindlessly scroll down my TikTok for you page, I’ll see a handful of young women defending their high heat cooking choices. The comment section is filled with quips like “Alfredo be done in 4 minutes,” “& no i’m not waiting till the oven finish preheating,” and my personal favorite — “cuz I got shit to do meemaw.”
Like girl dinner, young women choosing to cook all of their meals on high heat, is a response to gendered expectations about food and labor. Not only do both speak to just how draining domestic labor can be, they also highlight how closely late-stage capitalism and misogyny commingle. Even if we did have the time to make a 20-minute alfredo after an eight hour shift at work, the pressures that come with performing gendered labor make cutting that time in half not only effective, but enticing.
As I was researching Young Hoes discourse, I wondered — do the girls know the magic that can happen in a preheated oven or pan? The joy of an evenly cooked, slow scramble on an even slower morning? The cinematic experience of watching onions transform from pearly white to deep brown? Whipping up an edible alfredo sauce in 10 minutes does take culinary knowledge and skill, even though I’d prefer to take my time heating my butter, cream, and cheese until smooth.
It’s important to recognize how glaringly misogynist “young hoes cook on high is,” despite the responses from women eliciting a chuckle or two. Young Hoes’ counterpart, Girl Dinner was created by a woman, and Young Hoes, was coined by a man. This is why Girl Dinner, from the initial introduction of the concept to the responses from women, had a liberatory quality to it before the trend dissolved into subliminal eating disorder content. At its best, every zhuzhed up snack plate was a playful middle finger to misogyny. “I’m going to indulge and not spend hours in the kitchen doing it,” was the prevailing message from many girl dinner enthusiasts of summer 2023.
It’s 2025 now. You can’t be on the internet without facing the rampant rise of American conservatism upon every scroll, every meme, and every perfectly loopable clip. I have no idea what @Bean_____1’s political ideology is, nor do I care to do a deep dive. However, I do care that this user is a man, choosing to call out young women by calling us “young hoes,” and our rather calculated choice to cook most of our meals on high heat.
An adult Lunchable or meal cooked on high heat is better than no meal at all when you are a modern working woman with bills to pay. When the labor of young women is constantly devalued, what is the difference between a meal cooked in 10 minutes versus a meal in one hour? I promise you that most men would not be able to tell the difference.
My own mother has lamented to me about this sentiment, how no matter how long the meal took to prep, cook, or bake, the response from my brothers is all the same. A polite, yet loving “Thanks for the food, Mom” then swiftly returning to their boy caves. I never truly understood what my mom meant by this until now.
As someone who cooks for children on the regular, I’ve been in high pressure moments that call for high heat. My labor is not silent nor invisible, but the prayers I say to my induction burner, turned up to the max, five minutes before class ends are. I’ll tell my students, “claw and saw, low and slow,” just so I can cook Brussel sprouts and squash for them at the highest heat possible – all while maintaining a smile and a safe classroom.
While we’re eating away at meals cooked on high, both capitalism and misogyny fervently eat away at our time. I now cook for a living, which means that cooking and capitalism are intertwined outside of my social media reposts. My students will get farm fresh cooking lessons and snack bags counted out just for them, while I’ll go to the deli for the third day in a row for a sandwich. I’m sure many women of all generations can relate to this sentiment, providing something of higher quality to others and scrounging up whatever you can for yourself. It’s what capitalism and misogyny require of women.
Young women choosing to cook on high is another middle finger to misogyny and gendered labor division, but I would be doing a disservice to you all by ending my analysis there. “Young hoes cooking everything on high” reveals the societal pressure cooker we are all in. It’s a response to domestic, and often gendered, labor in the face of both productivity and instant gratification culture. But where does the performance of productivity end, and the lack of culinary knowhow begin?
Do young hoes cook on high to save time, or save themselves from the basics of recipe construction? Is culinary knowledge slipping through the firm grip that capitalism and patriarchy have on us all?
Everyone is trying to cook on high, yet no one is trying to cook for real. Gourmet Magazine gorgeously echoes my concerns in their manifesto, “Who’s Afraid of a Little Cooking.” There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to cook all of the time, but something special is lost when every recipe is either “fetishizing difficulty” or part of “the endless parade of 3-Ingredient This, [or] 10-Minute That.”
I’m sure your 10 minute alfredo recipe from a 90 second TikTok video is fine, but does everything have to be optimized? A well-written and researched recipe cannot be boiled down to three steps and one pan on high heat. A phenomenal recipe, and the writing and visuals that accompany it, should be informative yet deeply moving. This experience gets scorched by the heat of a pan too hot.
I’ll leave you in my kitchen. You may even find me cooking a meal or two on high. But mostly, you’ll find me babysitting the back left burner that I religiously set on medium-low for my scrambled eggs. Sure, I could’ve been eating by now. Are a few minutes saved worth leaving so much to be desired? Are a few minutes worth sacrificing my sensual scramble?
I too wish that I could end this essay with a one liner just as profound as “young hoes cook everything on high.” The conversations I’ve had with my friends about my analysis — from former classmates to fellow queer chefs, is showing me my words are just the beginning of a longer discussion about the intersections between cooking, labor, time, and knowledge.
Hungry for More? (citations, links, etc.)
I found this Cosmopolitan article while putting the finishing touches on my essay. Despite my analysis differing from Annabel’s, she makes a very important point by connecting “young hoes cook on high” to its predecessor, “All females born after 1993 can’t cook…all they know is McDonalds, eat hot chip, be bisexual and lie.” Here is a line I cut from my own essay:
Why did this sentence end up on the chopping block, you might ask. Eat hot chip and lie is the grandfather tweet to almost every take about feminism, labor, and the evolution of domesticity in the face of modernity. This tweet is also the root of every stray caught by bisexuals in the 2010s. It's an analysis that deserves a work of its own, served hot on a platter to you, dearest reader.
I’ve been a big fan of Chef Courtnee since starting Snack with Sash almost five years ago. Her TikTok is a key example of how essential cooking knowledge has been lost over time. High heat has a role in cooking, which Courtnee explains. However, for proper flavor development, the whole meal cannot be cooked on high. Young hoes be damned.
I linked above, but there is nothing like a shameless self plug. As many of you know, I have an extensive audio storytelling portfolio, and this story I recorded in 2023 was one of my favorites. If you missed the Girl Dinner hype, give this a listen. Shout out to my food studies bestie from across the world, Zoya, for allowing me to record our musings about Girl Dinner. Now, almost three years later, I am happy to say that our conversations continue to shape my critical lens on food, feminism, and labor.
I had to drop at least one academic article. This review gives a comprehensive introduction to gendered household labor from an academic lens, and breaks down how studies over the past decade captured data on men and women’s contribution to domestic labor. The review breaks down key factors like the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, race, and marital status.
I really enjoyed this take. It combines the efficiency that young hoes crave, while also instilling some cooking fundamentals and cultural know-how. There are kitchen shortcuts you CAN take while maximizing flavor, and not losing touch with your culture. If this motivated anyone to get in the kitchen proper instead of cooking a meal on high, that’s a win.
excellent!!