About two weeks ago, I found packets of yeast for sale at a corner market, displayed on a shelf like it was no big deal, like yeast hadn’t become a precious commodity during the coronavirus pandemic as supermarket shelves emptied and Americans took up bread-baking like a national pastime.
I don’t even bake bread. But my neighbor Aggie Zelazco does, and I knew she had been looking for yeast for weeks. I grabbed a few packets.
Half an hour later, standing six feet from her door, I gushed from behind my mask as she clutched the little yellow packets, turning them over in her hands. “I can’t believe you found it,” she said. I’d never been so excited about a $1.69 gift.
I’ve known Ms. Zelazko for seven years. Our sons play together, and we share tips about parenting, yard work and home repairs. And because she has metastatic breast cancer, I’ve been picking up food for her whenever I go shopping, taking her handwritten lists with me to the markets. Until March, when stay-at-home orders were enacted, I had no idea she baked, or that she liked cinnamon rolls, or whipped salted butter.
But the pandemic has deeply affected how Americans shop, eat and stock our pantries. In turn, we’ve caught glimpses of the private lives of our friends and neighbors. In the early days of the pandemic, while Americans scrambled for the most basic items, like flour and toilet paper, people had little choice but to ask one another to help fill in the gaps in their shopping lists. If you were lucky enough to score an Instacart time slot, you texted your best friend to find out if she still needed garlic or sugar. If you braved an hourlong line at ShopRite, you picked up an extra package of chicken for your neighbor.
Now, even as the grocery store shelves begin to resemble normal again, the dynamics still linger, and our shopping habits are still altered. Some food and household items remain in short supply (good luck finding bread flour), many stores still have lines, and for people like Ms. Zelazko who are immunocompromised, shopping is still off-limits.
“There still is sharing of those special items. For example flour — I bake bread every week and I’ve borrowed flour from several different friends and lent it to other friends,” said Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” whose June essay in the New York Review of Books laid out how the pandemic exposed dysfunction in the American food supply chain. “There has been that kind of communication, which I imagine was going on in the Soviet bloc quite a bit once upon a time when there was no certainty that you could find the item that you needed, and the sense of really scoring when you found something.”
Americans are still wary of shopping. Roughly a third of respondents to a survey conducted in mid-May by Acosta, a sales and marketing agency, reported that they were concerned about food shortages, were stocking up when they did shop to limit trips to the store, and were cooking more at home. C.S.A. memberships are up as people look for alternatives for getting fruits, vegetables, eggs, cheese and meat. And victory gardens are making a comeback, leading to plant swaps among people who may never have gardened before but now have more pepper plants than they have containers to grow them in.
A few weeks after California enacted stay-at-home orders, Ave Lambert, who lives in San Francisco, was in need of a can opener and a bicycle pump, but didn’t want to venture to a store. So, Mx. Lambert, who identifies as nonbinary, set up a private Facebook group, calling it Barter Babes, and invited local friends to join. Members could invite friends, too, but they had to personally know the invitees. The group is local and small, with around 100 members.
“People were looking for yeast and flour, all these things that I had,” said Mx. Lambert, who, at one point traded olive oil for salmon and halibut. Members set up trades at a social distance, leaving packages of goods on one another’s stoops and doorsteps. The swap filled in a gap in food and supplies, but it also gave members an excuse to see each other, even if the visits were fleeting and from a distance. Getting some eggs would give you a reason to text your friend with a picture of the frittata you’d made with them.
By the middle of spring, members were trading young tomato plants, too. Mx. Lambert, 36, who works in food education, hopes that by the time the tomatoes ripen, social distancing rules will be relaxed enough for the group to arrange an in-person meetup to sample the harvest. The little tomato plants are “a promise that I will see you this summer and we will see each other later,” Mx. Lambert said.
Eating is a social activity — who wants to break bread alone? Now, even as the country reopens, sharing a meal remains one of the biggest hurdles, with restaurants considering fixes like plexiglass to separate tables, and experts recommending that guests bring their own food and utensils to dinner parties. No wonder some of us get excited when we find yeast for a friend at the grocery store — if you can’t share the bread, at least you can share the ingredients.
“We’re rediscovering something really important about food which is, it’s a deeply social act,” said the British food writer Bee Wilson, author of “The Way We Eat Now.” “You feel wonderful when you’ve given someone something. It’s so basic and frugal and it’s the opposite of the Uber Eats delivery culture.”
There’s another discovery that happens when a friend hands you her shopping list. You get to peek inside her pantry and see a side of the person that you might not otherwise have known — not just what they buy, but how they shop and what they consider staples.
“It’s sort of like finding out how somebody washes their underwear,” Ms. Wilson said. “It’s peering into somebody’s life in a quite intimate way that we never would have done in the past.”
What we find there just might surprise us.
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