WHAT THE PANDEMIC HAS DONE TO HOW WE EAT

The coronavirus pandemic has upended daily life as we know it. It has changed how we work, how we learn, how we socialize. And it has changed how we eat.

Increasingly, the pandemic has driven a wedge between us and our food. We’re now more likely to be ordering at home, on a screen, from a third-party marketplace—quite possibly from a restaurant that’s not a restaurant at all. 

That order is sometimes traveling miles to get to us and arriving in a box or a bag, often left at our doorsteps without a trace of the person who brought it there, not to mention the person who prepared it.

Often, the food in the bag has been something indulgent and comforting. It’s likely something that travels well, or that has been deconstructed to travel better, in an effort to approximate, as closely as possible, the dine-in experience.

The process has become integral to restaurants’ survival during a public health crisis that has devastated the industry. But with the prospect of this kind of transaction becoming the new normal, it bears asking what it’s doing to our experience of food.

“It’s a totally different business model,” said Erick Williams, owner and executive chef of Virtue Restaurant & Bar in Chicago. “Many chefs that are cooking in the circuits that I align myself with are very focused on things that we would all understand as buzzwords right away: sustainability, commitment to the land, technique, process and, last but not least, the aesthetics of the dish.

“We recognized that the 12- or 24-course menu is not staged to be put in a box.”

Virtue, a Southern American fine-dining restaurant, had intentionally avoided delivery for that reason, but added it during the pandemic as a means of survival. 

“We didn’t have to alter the food a ton,” he said of his menu, which features Southern staples like gumbo and catfish. Instead, Virtue focused on finding the right packaging for each dish—weighing plastic vs. biodegradable boxes, moisture retention and steam.