Come and Dine - 29 October 2020 - Plague Journal Day 231

Micah 6:8
Luke 11:37-44
Yes, your life matters.

We all are still sheltering in place, but I'm here to keep you sane and entertained.
One could hardly ask for much more than that, now could one?

Restaurants are in trouble these days. (So are any businesses or venues based on the arts. I'll address them in an upcoming post.)
Perhaps you've heard of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants. These are a couple (related) ways restaurants are trying to address the current situation, where guests dining together in the same room seems less and less desirable to the guests, and less and less allowed by the various States and localities. Chains that you know have taken part in ghost kitchens where their food can be prepared for a delivery-only model. There's no dining room, no front of house staff, only a kitchen and delivery folks. Many of these are even owned by the delivery companies who lease kitchen space to the restaurants.
In a similar vein, virtual restaurants are brands with no physical locations - sort of pop-up delivery-only restaurants. A lot of these are chicken wing brands for reasons apparently known to many, but which I find totally inscrutable.
At any rate, this inverse quarantine is busily killing off many of the ways that a lot of people have made their livings for decades, while adding to the (still often unprofitable) bottom lines of the delivery companies - and to the bottom line of the bills for the meals they deliver.
One has to wonder how far this can go before enough of us will be unwilling to pay the price for delivery that this shake-up will have to be shaken up again into some other form of new normal. If the prices of gasoline, natural gas, and electricity move up significantly, there's no way this model can be sustained. We might all have to cook for ourselves and eat at home!

Of course we still can come together for a true meal, breaking bread with one another, perhaps as in this song.

Keep Calm and Stay Away.
I'll be back tomorrow.
The mental health issues related to our lockdown and the pandemic are especially hard for people with depression. NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, has a 24 hour helpline: 800-950-6264.