How Gordon Ramsay’s ‘MasterChef’ Is Playing a Culinary Game Between Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z in Season 14

After fourteen seasons, Gordon Ramsay’s Fox cooking competition “MasterChef” has found a way to reinvent itself once again: pitting one generation against another in a battle that will prove whether baby boomers, Gen X, Millennials, or Gen Z can dominate the cuisine.

Premiering Wednesday at 8 p.m., “MasterChef” Season 14 will begin with auditions for eligible millennials (a group typically comprised of those born between 1980 and 1994), followed by episodes dedicated to narrowing down the competition to baby boomers (1946 to 1964), Generation X (1965 to 1979) and Generation Z (1995 to 2009).

For each round, judges Ramsay, Aarón Sánchez, and Joe Bastianich will be joined by a guest judge who is a culinary expert brought in this season to assess their generation: Priya Krishna for millennials, Lidia Bastianich for baby boomers, Nick DiGiovanni for Gen Z, and Christina Ha for Gen X.

And for each generation, these guest judges know what the gap will be when these home cooks compete for the title of MasterChef champion and the $250,000 prize.

First up, the best group: millennials.

“I think it’s the psychology of the fact that we grew up with articles like, ‘Millennials are ruining X,’” New York Times food journalist and cookbook author Krishna told Variety. “We’re the generation that ruined everything: We ruined the grain bowl, we ruined the salad, we ruined the avocado toast, allegedly. Those are all the things that we get blamed for, and that’s the psychological part that makes it difficult. I’m actually surprised that—without giving anything away—some of the ingredients that I find very ‘millennial,’ I haven’t tasted many dishes with them. So it seems like millennials are trying to challenge stereotypes.”

Then there’s the issue of what’s okay and what’s not okay with baby boomers.

“With baby boomers, it’s about tradition,” says Italian-American chef and longtime public television cooking host Bastianich. “The tradition of techniques: How to braise something, how to roast something, how to make mashed potatoes, all that stuff. And I think that’s the advantage.” I think millennials are not so much focused on gaining their own platform, but on the future of these new chefs, what they’re doing and all that. So maybe focus on tradition, rather than just creativity. How much do they hold on to tradition and how much do they move forward and catch up with other chefs?”

Representing Gen X, aka the “latchkey kid” group, is Ha, the winner of “MasterChef” Season 3 in 2012, who says that particular nickname actually refers to a cooking skill that comes with her age.

“I think Gen X is really good at being independent,” Ha says. “We had to learn how to survive on our own from a young age, so the cooking skills are already there. But we grew up a little later, and some of the advantages that the younger generation has is access to things like YouTube, TikTok, where they can learn everything about cooking online. Just type in a search and then learn how to make something. So their wealth of information and knowledge is much broader. I think Generation X is a little bit smaller, but we can still search online and learn about things. That’s the strength of Gen X: being able to learn online but also doing a lot and experiencing a lot in the kitchen with your own hands.”

Generation Z guest judge DiGiovanni, who has amassed more than 30 million followers to his cooking channels on social media platforms including YouTube and TikTok, was not interviewed, so viewers will have to wait to find out his generation’s strengths and weaknesses when the auditions take place in the coming weeks.