Turns out letting "efficient" monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea. --- “If you pull out one little thing in that specialized, centralized, consolidated chain, then everything crashes,” said Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociology professor at University of Missouri. “Now we have an animal welfare catastrophe, an environmental catastrophe, a farmer catastrophe, and a worker catastrophe altogether, and we can trace a lot of this back to the pursuit of efficiency.”

But in a world where everyone’s struggling through the quicksand of reality, Fieri is a king among slugs. During the height of #MeToo, he escaped unscathed. There are remarkably few stories about him being a dick in public; in fact, the majority of public opinion is just that he’s the nicest guy. And now, the latest news coming in piping hot from Flavortown, just like one of his recipes, such as I’ve Got the Need, the Need for Fried Cheese! (Jesus Christ, buddy, I’m trying to help you here), is that Fieri is doing a lot more for out-of-work restaurant employees than most people. Since the coronavirus outbreak, he’s raised more than $20 million for a relief fund for restaurant workers. You know who didn’t do that?? Any of your extremely chill, fashionable faves, probably wearing $350 chunky mustard mules, including every single one of the people on Instagram currently trying to convince me to make bread.

Sometimes, you’re haunted by your own stories. I wrote “So Much Cooking” in 2015: in it, a food blogger describes cooking in quarantine during a pandemic, feeding an ever-increasing number of children she’s sheltering at her house with an ever-decreasing supply of food. […] Researching the story in 2015 was when I first encountered the phrase “social distancing.” Obviously, you’d close the schools, and public gathering spaces like movie theaters; you’d have everyone telecommute who possibly could. How would you get food? Would grocery delivery services be instantly overloaded? Would restaurants continue to serve take-out? What are the ethics of ordering delivery if you’re just outsourcing your own risk to someone more financially desperate? […] I’ve been struggling to end this essay—I think because we’re still in the midst of the crisis. But I think part of what appeals to people about the story is that it ends with the crisis unresolved. There’s hope; the protagonist absolutely believes that she’ll see her household through to the other side; but it’s not over, any more than it’s over for us.

When our best impulses seem at odds with necessity. --- Thursday is shaping up to be a decent night. A bit slow, but decent numbers considering WHO has officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. My sous chef informs me that El Gaucho Steakhouse downtown has closed and laid everyone off. This strikes me as a wildly premature move, although given that they’re so dependent on tourists and client lunches, they wouldn’t have much business now anyhow. Nostrana, my restaurant, is in Southeast Portland, a world away from downtown. Our people are locals, families, regulars.

This really made me feel better about eating food, ordering takeout, and grocery shopping. Questions about COVID-19 and food safety, answered.

To fight the pandemic, restaurants are shuttering across America with no aid in sight. What will happen to the rest of us? --- The boldest action on the parts of government includes eviction bans and more funding for paid sick leave and relaxed liquor regulations. What do these regulations offer an undocumented dishwasher who just got laid off, beyond the hope that his landlord might not demand four months’ back rent in due time? What do they offer business owners trying to keep their employees employed, beyond hope for a fraction of the revenue needed to pay for rent, supplies, and staff? Restaurants are suffering from this pandemic because they’re the center of communal life in America, but the awful cascade of consequences lays bare how broken American life has become. American restaurant culture is a glorious public-works project, like a train station or a bridge, built during more prosperous times; its rusting supports and cracked concrete would have been tough but possible to fix oh, any time, for decades. But no one did. And now, the earthquake has come. Without major and unprecedented government intervention and responsible community support, independent food culture could go the way of the neighborhood pharmacy and department store in the wake of this pandemic. In high-rent neighborhoods in American cities, the transition is already underway, with high-rent blight stuffing neighborhoods with chains, fancy and otherwise. And as restaurants go, so will independent stores of all kinds, whether it’s repair shops or clothing stores or bookstores like the one I worked in, which are now struggling to survive and temporarily laying off staff. Any retail that’s not a grocery store is in serious danger. In the aftermath of the Great Shuttering, without help, the only operators with capital to reopen will be the same massive corporations whose irresponsible treatment of their workers is threatening to worsen the outbreak.