Food in the time of Corona: The Rise of the New-Normal Cuisine
Two years ago, a week after I moved to Vienna, I went for my religious weekend market stroll. I stopped, fascinated, to admire the first morels my eyes had ever laid on. As my curious nose approached the mushroom in all its regal beauty, I was stopped by a loud and unintelligible outcry from the stall-keeper. ‘You’re contaminating them!’ is what my then-boyfriend translated from the old man’s strong Viennese slang. Needless to say, I did not have a cold. And this was pre-coronavirus, too.
As I sit on my couch waiting for this pandemic to end, these lingering thoughts seem a thing of an unimaginable past. And since recently our lives have been a pell-mell sprint between disinfectants and banana bread, smelling fresh produce at the market seems somewhat trivial. And yet, will we ever be able to do that again?
How has corona reshaped our relationship with the world of food and drinks? Have our perceptions and behaviours changed? How is the industry coping with the innumerable challenges? And alas, what is this new normal cuisine?
Habemus gluten
In the first weeks of lockdown, life seemed to only involve sobbing on your sofa, craving your grandma’s meatballs and your mum’s sweet embrace, contemplating the thought of opening yet another bottle of wine as you’re waiting for the pasta to boil. Then, apathy turned us into gourmet cooks.
One thing is clear: at home, the new-normal cuisine flourished under the supreme reign of the carbohydrate. The once abundant shelves of flour and yeast were empty for a while. Victory depended on how quickly one managed to bring their sourdough starter to life. The omnipresence of starch also obliterated the once validated keto diet. Instead, yolk porn was replaced by a triumphant parade of section cuts and scoring videos, that lavishly display air bubbles forming in well leavened bread. Every week, those against the tide retaliated with a new way to chemically transform gluten into edible delights — focaccia, pizza, cakes, brioche buns… After all, societies evolved around the prevalence of our daily bread. Is this what a new wave of culinary sophistication looks like?
In a time when fashion revolves around designer face masks and the only travelling one…
