COVID19

The Day – People are losing their taste and smell to COVID-19. Now there’s a cookbook to help.

Mitchell R. Lajoie 3 weeks ago

On a Sunday afternoon last March, Gillian Dixon was cooking roast beef for lunch, which would normally fill her home in the United Kingdom with a distinct savory scent.

That day, though, something was amiss: “I suddenly thought, ‘I can’t smell the beef,'” Dixon, 53, recalled.

Her concern mounted when she took a bite of the roast and couldn’t taste it.

Back then, Dixon was unaware that she was experiencing a symptom of COVID-19, and that she would become a COVID “long-hauler,” with her sense of taste and smell disappearing for nearly a full year because of the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Ryan Riley is a British chef who has spent the past several months concocting an array of science-based recipes to help people like Dixon enjoy food even though their sense of smell and taste is compromised.

He co-wrote the cookbook “Taste & Flavour,” which has recipes that

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Kenya’s COVID-19 lockdown is forcing people to make difficult food and household energy decisions

Mitchell R. Lajoie 3 weeks ago
lockdown
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was estimated that 85% of people living in Nairobi’s informal settlements were food insecure. This means they could not afford to pay for sufficient quantities of food. Food insecurity was mainly caused by poverty due to high rates of unemployment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made matters worse for the over two million people living in the city’s informal settlements—about 56% of the capital’s population. Because families are not growing their own food in such urban areas, paid work is crucial to ensuring they purchase enough to eat. Unfortunately, over a million Kenyans lost their jobs and livelihoods under measures imposed by the government to curb the spread of the corona virus. These measures include lockdowns, curfews, business closures and travel restrictions.

At the end of 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, we surveyed approximately 200 families living in Mukuru, one

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Over sourdough? Here are five cooking projects to take on during year two of COVID-19

Mitchell R. Lajoie 2 months ago

If you’ve spent the majority of your time at home over the past year, it’s likely you’ve started a coronavirus project. What’s even more likely is that your project is making sourdough bread. The pandemic’s lockdown spurred a 2020 baking craze, which in turn led to flour and yeast shortages, and the resulting media attention brought on even more excited bakers. Home bakers turned sourdough tutorials into their side hustles, and celebrities also got in on the baking craze. On FoodPrint — a website focused on the entire food system — our primer on making the fermented dough and ways to use the discarded portions quickly became one of our top viewed posts after we published it last year.

Which is all to say, sourdough is kind of old news. Unfortunately, COVID-19 isn’t. Despite the rise in vaccination and decreased infections, experts suggest limiting activities outside of home to

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Elijah Milligan: Today’s Obstacles For Black Chefs, From COVID-19 To Soul Food

Mitchell R. Lajoie 3 months ago

Elijah Milligan is all about baby steps. After more than 15 years in the restaurant business, the chef is happy to note that the changes he’s been fighting for are finally taking hold across the industry. Much of that is due to what he calls his “baby,” Cooking for the Culture, a culinary network devoted to connecting and helping Black chefs all around the country. The project has made headlines through a series of pop-up dinners helmed by minority cooks — but the effort goes much deeper than that. In this Voices in Food story, the professional chef tells Anna Rahmanan about the struggles he’s had to overcome, how COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have positively affected the gastronomy world and what dining will likely look like in the near future.

On being one of the few Black chefs on the scene

I’ve been a chef now

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