Wow, fatigue aside, I could not disagree more. https://gen.medium.com/cooking-was-my-jam-but-quarantine-is-ruining-my-favorite-hobby-8391f8430345

If anything I feel a certain amount of shame over the number of trips I made to the grocery store(s) and the amount of produce that rotted in my fridge in the Before Times.

I do feel the fatigue of being forced to cook every day, though that’s easing up as I get used to planning and improvising, but in every other way it feels like the most useful and joyful work I’m doing right now.

Cooking as joyful necessity, improvising, stretching, eating up the scraps, links my work to generations of women before me who had to do the same and pushes me away from the most egregious late capitalism version of food culture.

What’s more, I feel this spirit in the kitchens of some of my favorite restaurants who have gone right on cooking and become grocery suppliers to boot.

I’m not trying to be all Pollyanna about this, and I don’t want to fetishize scarcity, but the overwhelming middle and upper class plenty of non-Covid times was propped up by low wages and labor deliberately made invisible.

Now I am forced to think about who has touched the food I eat all the time. I feel extreme gratitude that I live in a place where so many small farmers and ranchers pushed back against agribusiness.

That knowledge and gratitude inform the way I treat my ingredients and how I consume them in ways I don’t want to lose.