Are Millennials Really Too Lazy For Cereal, Whole-Bean Coffee, Cooking In General?

A recent New York Times story about the waning popularity of breakfast cereal made note of this staggering statistic: "Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it."

That's right — rinsing a single bowl in the morning is too much to ask of today's fleet-footed young people.

This got the Washington Post's Wonkblog thinking about other food trends that seem to underscore the increasing laziness of American society. Like coffee, for instance: Beyond the rise of disposable single-serve coffee pods, there's the matter of ground coffee, which continues to outsell whole-bean coffee by a wide margin that keeps widening every year.

Delivery, too, has increased in popularity. And, naturally, millennials order in at an even greater frequency (20 percent of all meals) than the rest of the U.S. population (15 percent).

Americans aren't doing as much cooking these days, according to the article: "Less than 60 percent of suppers served at home were actually cooked at home last year. Only 30 years ago, the percentage was closer to 75 percent."

Is it all really just laziness? Or are modern Americans simply too busy and stressed out to take advantage of historic conveniences like coffee grinders, dish soap and heat?

WaPo suggests that there's a generational shift afoot — and places the blame squarely on today's parents, some of whom have unburdened their children of the lessons of household chores, making the mere thought of doing anything by hand as young adults seem downright absurd.

But maybe this also speaks to the overall improvement in quality of all these things: Delivery is easier than ever with online ordering and even ordering by text message, ground coffee now comes in a million varieties, and who wants soggy breakfast cereal when you can grab a hot and increasingly delectable breakfast sandwich en route to your daily activities?