A higher proportion of American men - 43 percent - are cooking these days than at any point in the past 30 years.
Meanwhile, they're spending more time than ever before - 49 minutes a day - doing so. Those are up from 38 percent and 40 minutes two decades ago.
By contrast, 70 percent of women cook these days, a bump from the 67 percent that cooked two decades ago but a definite decline from the 88 percent of women who cooked 40 years ago. And they're spending 71 minutes a day cooking, also a small increase from 20 years ago but less than the 101 minutes they spent 40 years ago.
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This data comes from a 2013 study by researchers at the University of North Carolina who used the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey.
What's driving the trends? The higher level of cooking overall among men and women may be driven by an era of stagnant wages that makes cooking at home the more affordable option, as well as the fact that broad Internet access and the popularity of social media make it more fun and easier to do than perhaps ever before.
While women are cooking at about the same rates they have been for several decades, it's the surge in men's cooking at home that may be most noticeable.
Companies that make money off food are weighing how to take advantage of the trend, deciding whether to treat cooking as a distinctly masculine activity or to show foodie-ism as a gender-neutral hobby.
Those that invoke a manly-man approach to cooking sometimes hawk bacon, burgers and brews, or else emphasize a testosterone-drizzled palate that helps craft a chiseled bod. Kevin Curry, founder of the blog Fit Men Cook, said men in the kitchen are following what men had been doing since the beginning of humanity: hunting and providing food for themselves and their families.
“It's a masculine quality to want to physically put food on the table and make it taste good,” Curry said.
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The success of Curry's blog alone suggests just how big the male cooking market is. Founded on Tumblr in 2012, it's now a profitable website with a Facebook following of a quarter-million users.
“The first thing we do as men is make everything a competition,” Curry said. “When we get a new car, we'll say to our friends, 'Hey man, look at the rims on this.' Same with food, we'll post on Facebook like, 'Look what I just made, this is bad y'all, I can't believe it.' It creates this competitive culture, and as men, we gravitate towards that.”
The most pervasive trend is reality competition cooking shows, which have taken the Food Network by storm. The number of food competition shows on the Food Network increased from two in 2005 to 16 in 2014, according to Quartz .
These shows try to demonstrate that cooking is “not for sissies,” said Daphne Kasriel Alexander, a consumer trends consultant at Euromonitor International. That can help explain the popularity of expletive-spewing male chefs like Gordon Ramsay, whose abrasive personality alone has become a meme.
“That's an example of brands responding to this interest,” Alexander said.
The Washington Post