The Adult in the Room Is You
Self-isolation has made it clear many of us are helpless without service workers and the gig economy
While you’re sheltering in place for the foreseeable future, you may find yourself with hours and hours of indoor time you never had before. With that free time you can turn on Hulu and watch a movie like Pet Sematary, or a TV show like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Or maybe it would interest you to watch Basic Skills Challenge, a series of short videos that bring together a gaggle of home cooks trying out the most basic of home ec skills. “Watch as 50 people try to cut pineapple rings,” the short-form video’s description teases. Tempting!
Basic Skills Challenge videos, filmed between 2018 and early 2020, puts us, the viewers, in the position of imagining (or not) what it would be like to learn or relearn basic cooking skills. In their videos, amateurish home cooks, each surrounded by a dazzling assortment of kitchen tools, attempt to core pineapples, separate eggs, peel carrots, and grate cheese. Surely Epicurious was not accounting for this to be a reality for so many people now stuck in quarantine as coronavirus ravages the country. While many households are still getting by just fine without service economy help they’ve never had to rely on to feed themselves and clean their homes, others are…
