Cartoonish bad at cooking is such an infuriating trait for me. Most people seems to just find it comedic, but it's a pet peeve for me.
Real people that are bad at cooking are because they don't have much experience. They don't know how a taste will be affected by how much heat you cook things, or how to do certain steps properly. Stuff that can be fixed with practice and experience.
Anime bad at cooking is just straight up "I wanna strangle you" stupidity. Like, there's no way you're not doing that on purpose. It's not stuff that can be fixed with "practice" until you have bandages in your hand. It's like telling someone instructions to press the red button, and they poke their own eye out. Like come on dude. The problem isn't cooking at that point.
I'm genuinely curious if there really is anyone in real life who falls into this 'cartoonishly bad at cooking' category? Myself haven't encountered any, but what about anyone else here?
Some otherwise completely normal-seeming people are just constitutionally unsuited to process-based workflows and repetitive fine manual tasks, and I have had to take chef's knives away from them while they were like "it only hit my fingernail!"
You're right that it's down to no experience, but let me amend that to "no good/real experience." If you don't know what you're doing and don't approach it with a mind to learn, all the "experience" in the world isn't going to help, because you never once tried to strictly follow a recipe before making substitutions or winging it.
Like, obviously it's exaggerated for comic effect in manga, but the biggest difference is that in manga they take the obviously failed science experiment and plate/serve it. Usually when it goes horribly wrong, it's like, mechanically impossible to continue. And I only know like two people who serve things they don't try... but even those types exist.
And the true horror that manga usually leaves out is someone like me staring up into an inverted saucepan like "Yeah, I don't know how you're even going to clean this. Brakleen? Muffle furnace? Piranha solution?"
They're out there.