I Don’t Want to Forget What COVID Taught Me
Many people don’t want to acknowledge the pandemic’s five-year anniversary. But there are lessons — both in and out of the kitchen — we would do well to remember.
Five years ago this month, things began to come apart. Slowly at first, then all at once. Panic. Shutdown. Shelter in place orders. Schools shuttered. So many workplaces went fully remote.
There is, it seems, a great reluctance to mark this COVID anniversary. So many editors have told me they’re done with COVID stories; people just don’t want to read them. They conjure so much darkness that many of us don’t want to think about or relive: the horror of watching the death toll rise, the fallout from so much political failure to properly plan and protect, the many societal fissures that were made painfully plain.
Many would prefer to forget. But there’s so much we would do well to remember. The groundswell of mutual aid. The coming together in righteous protest. The skills we developed and the muscles we flexed, during those long, fraught months. The ways of being and doing that we relied on to make it through.
I turned to food for solace and sustenance during that precarious time. I’m hardly alone in that regard. People who’d never kneaded bread dough before started baking sourdough, and those without a green thumb grew scallions in windowsill shot glasses. Samin Nosrat marshalled thousands to make the Big Lasagna.
I did none of those things, but I did cook. Constantly. Most of what I prepared was stripped-down and simple; when shutdown began, my twins were three years old, whiny and constantly underfoot. I remember the last big grocery shop before shutdown officially began, filling my cart with sacks of beans and rice, and tins of sardines and tuna; boxes of pasta and canned tomatoes for sauce, heads of cabbage, and lots of carrots and onions, the kind of sturdy, long-lasting ingredients that people the world over rely on to feed themselves through lean, sere times.
At home, to anchor my days, I scrambled dozens of eggs. Sauced pound upon pound of apples. I used nettles from our backyard — an annual marker of the return of spring, which, despite the strangeness, arrived as it always does — to make huge pots of soup. During several chilly April evenings, we made an adventure of cooking hot dogs on sticks over the fire pit in the backyard, then let the kids go wild with s’mores.
With so much more time at home, I doubled the size of my vegetable garden that spring (Remember the record-breaking sales of seeds, compost, trowels and hoes?). Wanting to be of use, I planted extra to help meet our small city’s huge demand for emergency hunger relief. It served as a tangible reminder of how food connects all of us, even when we can’t be together.
I’ll forever recall the meal I made after finally getting vaccinated in April of 2021. I invited another mother, with whom I’d fed and cared for the three children we have between us, through the deep winter that spanned from 2020 into 2021. Our kids’ preschool had closed again due to a spike in cases. We were desperate for company and support, and convened outdoors almost every day, through a long, bitter cold snap and feet of snow.
The day before I was to host my friend and her son, I went to the butcher across town. I walked into the shop, unmasked, for the first time in many months, and ordered not one chicken, but two. I wanted to mark the occasion with a feast. I salted the birds well, then slid them into a hot oven, each upon a bed of sweet potatoes and parsnips, with a scattering of green garlic.
My friend arrived with a bottle of prosecco in one hand and a small bouquet of flowers from her yard in the other. She and her son were the first people who’d crossed the threshold of our house in over a year.
She and I were tipsy by the time the chickens finished cooking, almost drunk by the time they’d rested and were ready to carve. When I pulled them from the oven, my friend gasped a little at the quantity of food. But I was pleased: I’d made a celebratory show. And, there would be plenty left over to pack up for my friend to take. To send a parent home with food, already cooked and halfway to another finished meal or two, was the kind of exchange we trucked in. The sort of workaday, knowing generosity that, over those winter months, had brought both of us so much comfort and relief.
The kids shoveled a few bites of food in their mouths, then took off, too excited to sit still. But my friend and I lingered at the table. It was so good to have the house ringing with different voices. To see the table scattered with plates and forks, surrounded by proof that that long year of isolation had finally come to an end.
As Rebecca Solnit wrote in A Paradise Built in Hell, “We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical, and psychological” to it. “In the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems,” she says, “we are free to live and act another way.”
The food I cooked during that time wasn’t complex or glamorous. But planning and preparing it gave structure to the days, and helped me keep my feet planted firmly on the ground, especially when fear and fatigue set in. All that chopping, stirring, sautéing and then serving, eating, and washing up became a thousand tiny bridges, getting us from one moment to the next.
Move on, we must. Move on, we have. But we forget at our peril. Not what we lost, but what we learned. Now, five years later, with so much worry and fear in the air, again, so much falling apart, we’ve got to remember. Remember how we made it through the thick of things, in order to believe that we can, again.
Feeding ourselves and one another isn’t all we need to, but it is essential. It is a place to start.
