Surviving a Pandemic by Loving Food

Hello!

So, my last post was in January 2020, full of optimism about blogging more about all my cool NYC adventures.

Well. I don’t know about you but the last two years have been a roller coaster. The immediate time after that post was dedicated to finding a job, an apartment, and unpacking all of my crap into that apartment. The last box was taken to the trash room, and I looked out the beautiful bay window of my kitchen and looked at the lovely view of the World Trade Center, and that seems like the last visceral memory I have before I became locked in my beautiful new apartment. Mark and I ended up with COVID literally the week the world shut down, the week of March 16. March 16 was my first day, March 18 was the last day I was in the office for the next three months, and March 20 I woke up with body aches, high fever, and no sense of taste or smell.

The loss of taste and smell was what demoralized me the most – as a foodie, I thought the universe was stripping me of the last thing I was deriving joy out of. I could no longer travel, walk around without a mask, go out to restaurants, or sneeze without fear of getting attacked and now, I couldn’t enjoy food. I cried. I cried because the world was a terrifying place at this time and the one constant in my life I had always taken comfort in wasn’t available to me. I know it sounds like a such a small thing to be taken down by, especially when the last two years have been marked by so much loss, volatility, and uncertainty, but as with everything in my life, I was measuring moments of my life by food and my experiences with food, and to know that COVID was going after that simple, basic joy, just destroyed me.

Now that the world has been easing back into its new normal for the last 10 months or so, it’s easy to look back on that time with a level of objectivity that can only come when you’re on the other side of a traumatic situation. I was destroyed not just by my loss of taste and smell, but by what looked like a loss of humanity and hope that is one of the unique things about humanity. I think we all felt impotent, and powerless against what was happening in the world. We all coped in our own ways; some good, some bad, and some just sheer survival.

Once I recovered from COVID, which took a full month, and it took three weeks for my sense of taste and smell to come back (which at the time, seemed like forever and I was terrified it might not ever come back, since so little was known at the time about the long-term effects of COVID), I turned to food again. We supported the local restaurants by trying takeout from different places, and I had so much time on my hands to cook, that the spring and summer of 2020, I felt like I was running a very exclusive restaurant. I was cooking for me and Mark, and a very small group of people that we were socializing with simply because of proximity. I felt starved of months of entertaining, and when I set my table that first spring day to have our friend Sonali over for dinner, wow. I felt like I was coming out of a long pause; a hibernation of sorts.

So again – food came through for me. It gave me an outlet, it gave me hope, and it allowed me to connect with people again when what we needed most in the world, was human connection. You’ll see this all over my Instagram posts and on this website again and again: Food unites us. It’s a powerful thing, and the biggest reason why me and food are in a lifelong love affair.

How did you get through the pandemic? What gave you comfort and normalcy during such an unpredictable time? I’d love to hear from you.