The Pandemic and Food, Part Two.

(Note, I actually thought I'd published this already. . . the Coronavirus is leading to a backlog of posts).

Until just the other day, I was apparently really naive about the degree to which Americans eat in restaurants.

Fourteen year old waitress, 1917. Nobody in my family has ever worked this occupation, and I was really clueless on the extent to which people dine out.

I probably shouldn't have been, as I'm well aware that lots of people eat out every day at noon, or a lot of days anyhow, and that a lot of people start the day with breakfasts from a fast food joint.

But I was.

That's likely because I never start the day at a fast food joint and never have.  I don't know if I've ever had an Egg McMuffin and frankly the thought of starting off at McDonalds doesn't appeal to me at all.  If I haven't eaten at home for breakfast, I just don't eat.

And I almost never eat lunch at a restaurant either.  I have, of course, but it's almost always in some sort of context, such as meeting a friend or as part of a work meeting, or something like that.  And for that matter, we don't eat out all that much for dinner either, although we do eat out a lot more than my parents did.

And at that, I'm often amazed by the amount of food people eat outside of dinner, the American main meal  I'll skip breakfast and lunch fairly routinely and not miss them, which means by extension I don't really eat much at those meals.  But I'll find that even people who bring in meals for lunch often eat really big lunches, often as much as I eat for dinner.  I couldn't do that.

All of which has lead me to being ignorant as to people's actual practices, even though they are there right out in the open for me to have observed.  Indeed, my father always ate lunch downtown during the work week, which was, in his case, always a bowl of soup at restaurant that he and his friends ate at every day.

I definitely differ there.  I hate soup.

Anyhow, waking up on this, it's now evident to me that a lot of people grab something from a fast food joint for breakfast, something else downtown at noon, and eat out at night a lot.  Some people eat out three for dinner, in one fashion or another, three or more times per week, which is just stunning to me.

The net result of this has been strain on the food supply system and is contributing to the odd sense of there being a shortage on the production end when in fact the shortages are in the dual distribution system.

This ought to give us some pause, and part of that may be the extent to which we've really suspended cooking at home for eating out in a major way.

Now, I don't want to suggest anything that leads to a crisis for working people, and people who work in restaurants, restaurants of all types, are certainly working people.  Indeed, right now, servers in restaurants are in a real state of crisis.

But relying on eating out to the extent that we do is not good.  It contributes to an unhealthy diet, no matter what we may think about what we're ordering, and it dissociates ourselves with our food.  No natural diet of any type is severed at the 50% rate through restaurants.

With all of this being the case, I wonder to what extent people will now reassess this part of their daily lives. As things open back up will people who have learned how to cook keep on doing it, or will they immediately given it up for something served through a drive up window on the way to work.

Beyond that, this really raises what we've called here the Distributist Lament from time to time.  We have a system that's obviously better served through the local, but in the name of efficiency and a false economy, we've defeated it.

There was a time when restaurants bought their food, often daily, from local grocers.  Now they don't do it at all.  The extent to which they don't do it never occured to me until now.

Indeed, the only real familiarity that I have with restaurant supply chains, other than a brief stint at Burger King, a job I truly hated, comes from the National  Guard and Army. The service bought its food locally when serving through GI kitchens, so I just assumed that restaurants did as well.  I don't know why I assumed that, but I did. I know why the service did, it wanted locals to know the economic benefits of a military establishment in their municipalities.

And that benefit would exist elsewhere, if that's how this was generally done and there was a single, not a double, food distribution system.

Something to consider.

And we'll have more to ponder on this topic as well.

Related Threads

The Pandemic And The Table, Part 1.