How is Safe Take Out Ordering during These Days?

How is Safe Take Out Ordering during These Times? Restaurants have been closed to walk-ins and reservations for a long time now. Many places have started opening up again for takeout, pickup, or delivery, which to lots of us is a godsend.

How is Safe Take Out Ordering during These Days?

Cooking for yourself is great, but it can become tedious when you have to do so a night in and night out. Sometimes we want a treat; sometimes, we want someone else to do all the leg work for us. Sometimes we just need a takeout. But is it safe? Unfortunately, there is a good chance; it’s not. And here’s why

Corona and the food business:

Corona spreads quickly and devastatingly through a community. The more people come in contact, the closer we are together, and the more likely we are to catch and spread Corona.

Now, the problem with a restaurant is you are cramming lots of people into a small area. Most restaurants fit as many people as legally possible because that is the most efficient business model for them.

How is Safe Take Out Ordering during These Days?

Restaurants typically operate within very tight margins. If a restaurant opens at half capacity, to accommodate social distancing, they are probably losing money. No, they are perhaps hemorrhaging money.

So they have to close, better to let the business go stagnant than run it into the ground.

When rules changed to allow businesses, especially food service ones, to reopen this interestingly worked out quite well for a lot of places, they don’t need their wait staff, barmen/women, and busboys. Half of the staff can be replaced, with only essential kitchen staff remaining.

Costs are suddenly down, and they can go back into the business. Awesome. But is it? For those of us who have worked in a professional kitchen and understand how they deal with sickness and injury, the problems were immediately glaring. If you haven’t worked in a kitchen, this next section is especially important to you.

How is Safe Take Out Ordering during These Days?

How does the food business deal with illness?

Horrendously. It couldn’t be worse, quite honestly. I’ve worked in numerous kitchens, at the very highest level, and they are equally as bad as your neighborhood bistro when it comes to illness in the workplace.

This might come as a shock to you as there are plenty of laws in place about coming in to work sick. Don’t do it. That’s the rule. The owner knows it; the head chef knows it; everyone knows it.

But no one cares. They are calling in sick as a chef is a good way to get fired. Being sick is a weakness; it shows a lack of reliability. If you can stand, you can cook if you can cook you can clean, and if you can do both of those things well then why the hell are you not coming in to work?

That rhetoric has been drilled into every chef who’s ever worked in a kitchen. Because coming in regardless of how you feel is not only expected but do or die regarding your employment, people come into work sick all the time.

How is Safe Take Out Ordering during These Days? – Order takeout or delivery

Sure, they wash their hands, they cover their mouth when they cough, and they follow good food safety practices. But they’re still sick. And they’re still handling your food. Illness rips through a kitchen like a wildfire, because everyone comes in before they’re better. Chances are those illnesses that will spread to customers.

This is a sad reality for most restaurants. Most. Not all. There are good ones, but they are few and far between. This is not a new risk to you; let’s make that clear. This is the risk that you’ve had to deal with every time you’ve gone to a restaurant in the past.

The difference is, that there wasn’t an epidemic going on before. The difference, therefore, is that before, if you got sick, there wasn’t a high chance of you accidentally killing a family member bypassing the virus.

Is it Safe to Order Takeout? How is Safe Take Out Ordering during These Days?

Would I say maybe? The risks do not outweigh the rewards, far from it honestly. If someone in the kitchen has Corona, chances are they all do. It doesn’t always present symptoms so the whole staff could be infected with no idea.

They pass it on to the delivery driver; they pass it on to you, you pass it on to a family member, and so on. The chain is endless. That’s why social distancing works. That’s why, despite how much more effort it requires, you are far better off cooking for yourself.

Getting takeout is a risk that you have to face. Personally, that’s not a risk I would be willing to take. But then again, I don’t mind cooking. I certainly prefer peeling the potatoes myself over dying. But that choice is up to you.

Read more about Staying in Shape During COVID 19 How to Keep Healthy

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