Plague Eating

Thüringer Bratwurst at Wursthall, San Mateo.

If you've been making yourself crazy with fear over your failure to accomplish the impossible—washing every piece of clothing after each wearing, or disinfecting the shopping bag and wiping down the boxes and bottles before you put them in their cupboards, or washing lettuce with soap, or treating the whole house as if it was a restaurant kitchen, I've got some hope to hold out that it doesn't have to be quite as hard as it seems, from the esteemed chef and writer J. Kenji López-Alt, who's been writing recently on Covid hygiene and showed up for a radio interview with Francis Lam this morning of which the text and audio are here: Food in particular is pretty strongly unlikely to be in and of itself a problem.

FL: But, there is a theoretical risk anyway of touching stuff that a sick person might have sneezed on and then getting that into our system. Given that, it does sound like food could be a way of getting infected, right?

JKLA: Well, it is a novel virus like you said. We’re still doing research on it. There’s always a possibility, of course, but what we do know for certain is by far the majority of cases – in fact every case we’ve found so far or every case we’ve tracked so far – none have been linked to food or packaging or any kind of fomite is what it’s called, when it gets on something, gets on a solid object and is transferred to a person that way. All of the spread patterns we’ve seen have been based on aerosolized or droplet forms. Basically, when someone sneezes or coughs or breathes very moist air, viral load can get into that moisture, into the air, and you would breathe it into your respiratory system, into your lungs. That’s the main mechanism of transfer, which is similar to how previous coronaviruses like SARS and MERS were spread as well. Again, with those, neither one of them showed any signs of foodborne transmission.

Of course, that said, there is always new research coming out. The article I wrote, I based it on all of the current research but there’s always new information. I actually have a call scheduled with a virologist this afternoon specifically to talk about this: they’ve discovered that the virus attaches to these receptors called ACE2 receptors, and some of those are located in epithelial cells higher up in the respiratory system. So, now there’s a theory that maybe it could be more likely that it can be transferable by swallowing or something like that. Although, again, I want to reiterate that thus far in all the cases that we’ve tracked – and that is many – none of them have been shown to be linked to food.

This is especially clear from the Singapore experience, where intensive interviews with basically every Covid-19 patient have successfully established where the infection came from in something like 90% of the cases, and they're all from human-human interaction at less than six feet where the infected human sheds virus into droplets in the air and the other one inhales it or touches into eyes or nose or mouth.

If it's experimentally demonstrated that the virus can survive on a tabletop for quite a lot of hours, it's not shown that anyone has ever gotten it into mouth or eyes by resting their hands on the same tabletop, and it has been shown that each time it is transferred from one spot to another—from the box the lettuce is packed in to the person in gloves opening the box to the plastic it's put in in the supermarket to your own sink and however many steps in between, the load diminishes, and becomes less likely to be enough to infect you, and there's no evidence that it ever has, with any of these viruses.

Keep your distance from people! wash your hands! and especially wash your hands before touching your face! Follow the rules we've been given, but give yourself a couple of breaks on the instructions you haven't been given: don't wash off the arm of the couch before you rest your own arm on it, and don't endure a sleepless night because you haven't washed the pillow, and so on, and above all don't regard food as an enemy. Be careful with it, but food is your friend.

And don't stress yourself

because stress and lack of sleep are things that concretely compromise your immune system. The more stressed out you are the more likely you are to get sick, not necessarily from coronavirus, but sick from anything. You want to try to relax right now. Get good sleep. Make sure you’re in a good state of mind or as good a state of mind as can be. It’s important for everyone.

There's tons more great advice in the interview, including something I discovered last night, when an outdoor display of bundles of forsythia branches in blossom pulled me into a Korean-owned deli of a kind I've been avoiding for weeks in favor of the supermarket, which I'm now pretty afraid of—too crowded with really stupid people. The deli was at least ten times safer, with limited customers, hand spritzer at the cash register, and tons of paper towels for sale, which was what I really needed, because the hoarders don't go there.

I was also reminded of one other thing by López-Alt, whose own restaurant, Wursthall in San Mateo, California, reduced like others to takeout-only during the emergency, is working out ways of getting meals to first responders and the like and to food-insecure people as well, and thus keep some of his employees employed. Of all these people who work but not "from home", at serious risk to their own safety, and who deserve that gratitude from those of us who can afford to stay home and make money, the nurses and doctors and EMS drivers, the cops and firefighters, give a big thought to the workers who grow the food and who bring it where we are and keep the scary markets open, but especially those whose own livelihood is so seriously threatened, the workers in restaurants, many of which won't survive this period.