Covid and food

     When my family was staying in for the National quarantine, our relationship with food got kind of weird as a whole. I remember it was hard to find what we normally keep in the house because people were stock piling everything like it was an apocalypse. One of the main things that was hard for us to find was chicken which we ate a lot. We ended up eating more beef and pork for a while for our dinners. We tried to make things that would last a while because we knew it would be better for us to have leftovers than to have to struggle to find more items more frequently at the grocery store. My family didn’t find it necessary to buy out the grocery store as many others did because we figured the government would have warned us if we weren’t going to be able to even go to grocery stores. There was a lot of confusion, but we didn’t let it make us go crazy. 

I remember being scared to do take out orders, but my family didn’t have the same anxiety about it that I did. We ended up doing takeout at least twice a week because our governor encouraged us to try and keep up the local businesses and restaurants. When we did order take out we made sure we re-plated and reheated our food before eating it. Now, we know more about how the virus spreads and we don’t do this anymore, but during the time it made me appreciated my food more because it did take longer to prepare. I also personally took the time to try and eat healthier because I had more time on my hands to prepare healthy meals and snacks. My family bought lots of fresh fruits and vegetables when they were available and I made them the main parts in my meals. Being in the house almost 24/7 did make me want to snack a lot though, and that was something that my whole family dealt with. When you see food you want to eat it.  I would say during the lockdown my choices in food became better and as a whole my family was introduced to more of a variety of foods and meals because we couldn’t buy the same things we normally did, so in general I would say we actually had a healthier diet. Now, I know that can’t be the case for some because as things ran out and prices went up, people with a lower income probably had a harder time finding things they could afford. I remember there were sources through public schools that my family tried to help out with that provided food for kids who were own free and reduced lunch plans. I also saw many resources advertised on television with numbers you could call and websites to visit to get help if you were in a food crisis during the lockdown. Overall, it didn’t matter what socio-economic status you had, everything was flipped upside down.