A few days ago, my boss sent a Slack message to the Food team. Another editor at the paper, she said, has an interesting idea: Should Food do something on if shared plates dining is being affected by the [corona]virus?
The reason I bring it up, the editor explained, is I got this invite to a communal dinner event that is silverware optional. Seems like a bad idea.
Cue some heated all-channel chiming in. (I was thinking about that too when I went to a buffet this weekend, like is that sketch now??) (Im the germaphobe of the group. Havent eaten at a buffet in years and never will again. Bring my own hand wipes everywhere I go.) (My dad was a doctor and wouldnt even let us eat leftover M&Ms from his poker game because his friends put their dirty hands on them.) (Team lunch to sizzler.)
I, being cranky and old, tried to throw water/gasoline on the fire by ranting about Americans and their dont-double-dip-in-the-salsa hand-sanitizer ways of eating and proposing, facetiously, Lets ask for forks and knives at the Ethiopian restaurants!!
Which is how we arrive here: What exactly should we think when it comes to questions of eating and the novel coronavirus panic and pandemic?
The problem: Most food writers are neither public health officials nor experts in any myriad forms of expertise than can be credibly leaned on to answer such a question.
After threatening to lick the armrests on my upcoming flight to Los Angeles (which I had to, spoiler alert, cancel because of a temporary ban on nonessential business travel by my employer), I did what any American does when they want more information on a subject: I turned to cable news.
Specifically, the coronavirus episode on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Well come back to what I learned from Mr. Oliver in a minute.
Coronavirus is not spread by food or water; its spread by coughing, sneezing and unwashed hands.
(Hollie Fernando / Getty Images)
I think, first, its worth my saying that I came to this topic with the belief informed by almost every public notice Ive seen from the CDC and others that there is little beyond the reasonable, everyday things we do during flu season to keep ourselves from getting sick.
Wash your hands. Stay home if youre sick. If youre immunocompromised, you already take extra steps to take care of yourself and should continue to do so.
Some estimates say that 70% of the American populace will catch the novel coronavirus and, for most, it will be like having a bad cold not even a bad flu.
But still! Were hoarding water! Were hoarding oat milk! Chinatowns are empty! What should we do?
So I asked some experts.
First up: Marion Nestle, whom you could describe as the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, or, if youre me, say shes the 800-pound-gorilla of what she says goes and is generally grounded in heavy-duty academic truth when it comes to most issues of food policy and politics. Either way.
So I put the questions above to her and she said:
Silverware optional? These better be people you are happy to share germs with. Coronavirus, horrible as it is, doesnt change dinner table courtesy and safety. Wash your hands before eating, use clean silverware, dont eat off of common serving pieces or use your silverware to take food from common bowls or plates, and keep your hands out of food that other people might be eating. At an Ethiopian restaurant, use the injera to take food. Coronavirus is not spread by food or water; its spread by coughing, sneezing and unwashed hands. Share food? Of course but sensibly.
Doesnt that make so much sense? Be clean and considerate and respectful of the people around you! It is less fun than kneecapping somebody who is about to buy all of the packages of instant ramen you want to stockpile, but it is actually what we know works.
Does this mean eating out is 100% safe? No! I hate to break it to you this late in life, but nothing is!
I turned to my colleague Emily Baumgaertner, who reported on the Ebola and Yellow Fever outbreaks in Africa from Africa and has a masters in public health from George Washington University. She summed up the situation as such:
Youve donned a completely unnecessary mask, commuted across town to the restaurant, and, safely inside, scrubbed your hands for two Happy-Birthday [songs] in the restroom. Thats great. But virologists have figured out that viruses found [in] respiratory droplets can survive on inanimate surfaces for hours. Theyre on business cards, elevator buttons, door handles and, yes, tables.
Completely unnecessary masks.
(Jean-Philippe Tournut / Getty Images)
Dont get me wrong: Im happy for you someone didnt sneeze directly into your mouth or even into your plate of food. But if someone sneezed onto the table that youre now touching with your uber-sterile hand, and you unknowingly reach up and touch your face, youre out of luck. So please: go. Enjoy meals with your friends. But consider wiping down surfaces often, at least until the COVID-19 spread subsides.
I believe that restaurants, for themselves, not for us, keep as clean as possible as often as possible, but truth is truth, and thats Emilys take on the specific risks.
I texted with Arielle Johnson about the issues at play too. You may know her from such L.A. Times Food stories as How to eat a tree or as one of one of Glamours Women of the Year, but Ill offer you how she described herself in our texts: I am not an expert, I am just a food chemist who reads enough to be a dilettante.
And after running through the should-I-still-eat-around-other-humans non-conundrum (she had a similar take to Nestles), we segued to chatting about the reported supermarket hysteria going on.
Some people are stockpiling months of food and, like, friend, if society has broken down so much that there is no food for a month, we have much bigger problems than making our personal stash last. Humans are social animals. Theyre not supposed to be doing the food-getting by themselves, ever.
Johnson invoking our togetherness brought up two other coronavirus-adjacent topics: The general insecurity of minimum wage and other food service workers in the current American capitalist paradigm and the particular restaurants that people are avoiding.
The first is a broad and deep topic. My colleague Julia Wick, writer of the Essential California Newsletter, summed up the situation well in messages we traded:
We live in a deeply broken country where many hourly service workers lack the economic power to just take the day off, and we have no federally mandated paid sick time ... and even if we did, job repercussions could still be an issue for a lot of people. Jaya Saxena wrote more on the topic over at Eater.
Heres the thing: Food service workers, regardless if they work at the cheap buffet or the fancy restaurant, dont want to get sick either. If you cant trust that theyre doing their best to keep themselves and, by extension, you safe, then your problems are deeper-seated than a Food section can help you with.
But those problems might brush up against John Olivers first rule for not getting novel coronavirus: Dont be racist.
As he put it, Thats just good advice for now and for later.
So dont avoid Chinatowns. Dont avoid the turo turos that Garrett Snyder wrote up for this section, or the SGV restaurants that our critics have recently spotlighted. Dont think that the color of the skin of the people in a restaurant has a thing to do with whether its where youre going to catch coronavirus. It doesnt.
But but but I hear the hamster wheels in some of your brains spinning what if the people at the restaurant are from Wuhan? Doesnt that make a steakhouse [or substitute any restaurant you assume has no Wuhanese employees] safer than a Chinese restaurant [again, acknowledging that over a billion people live in China and most of them have probably never been to Wuhan]?
Though I am tempted to roll up my (print) newspaper and batter you about the ears like a 1950s dad in a suburban sitcom, I instead hit up Baumgaertner again.
We went back and forth and discussed how maybe very maybe right after news of novel coronavirus broke, if you knew that an employee of a restaurant had been in Wuhan within the previous 14 days and had been within 6 feet of an infected person, maybe the risk at that restaurant was higher. (Of course it is Hogwarts-level fantasy to think you could know that much about every member of a restaurants staff.)
But, she conceded, Now that were seeing signs of community spread, it REALLY makes no difference whether you go to a Chinese restaurant or a steakhouse.
So do what your mom probably told you to do years ago: Wash your hands, dont cough in the food, and be reasonable in your response dont expend energy on things you cant control.
Also, please spin the Lazy Susan over my way so I can get some of those noodles.
The rest is here:
Eating in the time of coronavirus - Los Angeles Times
