By Daisy Zeijlon
The ferocity of COVID-19’s descent on New York City in mid-March last year put an abrupt end to the spontaneity with which I used to approach dinner. I am lucky to live a half block away from a grocery store that’s open 24/7 and in a neighborhood packed with good food: Roman pasta, Israeli salatim, Japanese curry, Indian dosa, and dozens of other dishes and cuisines are all at my doorstep. Running out of eggs or energy to cook was never a problem.
Suddenly, though, a quick dash to the bodega or dinner out at the end of a long day were no longer options. My husband and I went from living mostly outside the home, going to work and school, meeting friends at bars, and seeing movies to using our home as a conference room, recording studio, gym, office, classroom, and bar. Our tiny kitchen became a cafeteria of sorts, churning out 21 meals a week (plus many, many quarantine banana breads).
When New York on PAUSE was announced in late March, we realized we were not heading back to an office, a classroom, or a restaurant anytime soon. So, we started recording what we planned to cook and eat for dinner each night of the week. The impetus for this practice was threefold: firstly, and most practically, grocery shopping was frightening. In those early days, with such minimal knowledge about how the disease was spreading, we went to the store just once per week and had to plan that trip meticulously. Secondly, I was irked by a sense that we were living through a historical moment. I wanted to document it in some way and being a food studies student, this felt like an interesting way to do that. Finally, in hindsight I think these plans ended up structuring our time at a point where we desperately needed a routine. Doing everything inside our apartment was disorienting at best and miserable at worst—do pajamas count as pantsuits? What time is lunch? Will we ever see our families again?
So, last fall I turned these scrupulous meal plans into a project for Food and the Arts: Food Communication During Times of Crisis, a class taught by Professor Amy Bentley. I opted for a timeline, hoping to conflate the public narrative about COVID-19 in NYC with my private food experience. In essence, I set out to explore the intersections between a COVID-ridden world and my own home kitchen.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the impact of the pandemic on our cooking and eating habits has been profound. The week of March 21st (the first we planned) revealed that we were panic buying the same groceries as almost every other American household. On the menu were fried rice, pasta, black been enchiladas, and various homemade breads. Sales of yeast, beans, pasta, and bread soared in that same week—yeast sales were up 648% and dried beans, 377%. We ate no fresh fish until the week of June 8, when NYC entered Phase 1 of reopening and we felt comfortable going to the store more than once per week. Takeout didn’t appear in our plans until May 29, a few days after the CDC announced that surfaces were not the primary way COVID-19 spreads. Prior to that finding, we were quite uneasy about ordering out, but since then, we’ve eaten takeout at least once a week.
The biggest pattern I found, though, was a direct correlation between COVID-19’s severity and the complexity of our meals. The higher the positivity rate, the more elaborate our meals became. On April 12, NYC reached the highest daily rate of new deaths, and on April 15, the highest daily rate of positive cases that we had seen at that point (obviously, these numbers rose significantly later in the year). A mask mandate was issued, New York on PAUSE was extended, and around the corner from our apartment morgue trucks started lining up at The Brooklyn Hospital Center. In turn, our dinners that week were involved and indulgent: ice cream sundaes, homemade queso and tater tots, braised short ribs, cheesy bakes, and burgers. Dinner was in every way an escape.
Conversely, our meal plans got a lot less complicated when NYC hit its lowest daily rate of positive cases in August. We opted for staples like kale Caesar salad, tacos, and soba—generally, we started putting less effort into meal prep. As we were able to see our friends again (outside, masked, and distanced) and return to a few “normal” activities, we relied less on elaborate cooking projects.
As rates rose again towards the end of last year, complexity and comfort were starting to creep back into our roster in the form of split pea soup (made from dried peas), kedgeree, and celery leek stuffing. We even made the bread for the stuffing—an unintentional nod to those first days of March when every meal we made included a homemade dough. More poignantly, though, I think the dish was a commemoration of a holiday season that looked so very different this year. In the absence of families gathered around overflowing tables, we settled for stuffing as a way to reach for the flavors and feelings this city has lost.
Daisy Zeijlon is a communications consultant and food studies student based in Brooklyn, New York.
What’s For Dinner is a digital project that investigates the impact of COVID-19 on feeding work in New York City.
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