Salt Fat Acid Defeat: The restaurant before and after Covid
<i>Restaurants have been brought to their knees at precisely the moment when the nourishment of the country is most in peril: since the start of the pandemic the number of Americans facing food insecurity has climbed from thirty-seven million to fifty-four million.</i><p>A reminder that one of the reasons we don&#x27;t have a lot of outright starvation in the US is because we have so many businesses that serve food -- restaurants, grocery stores, etc. We never think of businesses as being in the business of &quot;solving world hunger.&quot; We think non-profit organizations do that for poor starving nations or something, but historically Persia, India and Greece all revered the honey bee as a mental model for <i>doing business</i> -- as opposed to, say, going a-viking and simply stealing everything you could from neighboring nations -- a cornerstone of creating civilization and fostering peace and prosperity.<p><i>In the decade before Covid hit, the net number of new restaurants and bars in New York alone increased by more than 7,000, to 23,650, twice the rate at which businesses citywide expanded.</i><p>I wonder if that is related to the demographic trend of people marrying later (if at all), having kids later (if at all) and having fewer of them and other demographic trends that together add up to a great many more households with just one to three people.<p>A lot of current American culture and expectations and ideas about how things supposedly are supposed to work are rooted in post World War II culture that caused the Baby Boom. &quot;The Boys&quot; came home and they encouraged women to quit jobs to give them up for the men and there was money in the bank and military benefits and a vast latent demand for housing and the means to finally meet it, which gave birth to the modern American suburb and widespread prosperity of a sort the world has never seen before.<p>This means a lot of our cultural ideas are rooted in a stay-at-home mom doing the cooking and cleaning. There is a lot of stuff that implicitly assumes this model and fails to work when this is not our reality and the truth is this is not our reality for most Americans today.<p>For people already scoffing at the idea of wanting a servant to serve you your meal, this is a standard expectation in American culture, we just usually call her &quot;mom&quot; and gloss over the fact that she is a de facto servant.<p>One of my many neglected project ideas is to somehow write about how to keep yourself adequately fed under challenging conditions and one of the things that drives that interest is the frequency with which I see complaints online that people are either going broke and getting fat ordering takeout or going broke and getting fat eating microwave meals or similar. Cooking for just one person takes almost as much time and effort as cooking for a whole family and doesn&#x27;t come with built-in conversation, so eating alone doesn&#x27;t simultaneously help everyone in the family bond emotionally, keep up with family news, etc. At best it just keeps you fed and that&#x27;s it.<p>There are benefits to having one person do the cooking, like it means they can get good at it while other people put time and effort into other things. It provides efficiency of time use at the societal level to have some people cook and some people not bother to learn.<p>I think we need to do more takeout and we need to revive a practice that was alive and well when I was child but seems to have died out: The walk-up window for takeout. Now we have drive-throughs and no walk-up windows and this de facto assumes everyone has a car and it penalizes people who don&#x27;t. (No, they often will not serve a pedestrian at a drive-through.)<p>For the pandemic, I really like Little Caesar&#x27;s Pizza Portal and I don&#x27;t see why we can&#x27;t do something similar for more eateries. You order online, get a code, walk in and punch in the code, get your food and leave.<p>One of the hidden benefits is that one person can pay with their debit card and another can pick up because you don&#x27;t sign for it. At most places, if you order online, you need to be prepared to sign the receipt which is a problem if one person is paying and another is picking up.<p>I also would love to see an updated version of the &quot;food court&quot; -- an outdoor socially distanced seating area that serves multiple local eateries with walk-up windows and&#x2F;or food &quot;portals.&quot; Being waited on by waitstaff is of relatively little interest to me personally, but being able to get food conveniently without having to cook it or do the cleanup is quite valuable to me and was when I was homeless.