Did we miss eating food outside?

It’s almost been a year now since the Covid situation emerged and caused us to feel like we were experiencing temporal anomaly like those that we encounter in fantasy films. Our mornings weren’t the same, be it having to miss breakfast and rush to the office and choose up your favourite smoothie or coffee on the road, or order yourself an enormous ice cream tub and give yourself the famous “Flix and Chill” caption to your snap and Instagram stories.

Our eating out culture and socialising all happened to go on a standstill, and it was a relatively tough time for those who lived away from home and could not travel back as the lockdown was pretty much unannounced in the larger sense. To trace back to the past, the culture of eating out in restaurants was not a very common thing, and it is quite westernised there had to be some festival or occasions for people to go outside and dine. This was because of the economic status of the people, and also it had to do with health and hygiene. Globalisation has made all that go away and we come across people who survive eating outside and ordering in from fast-food joints and other places for their meals and prefer to not cook at all.

Image 1: Tacos at their best!

In the 21st Century, with the evolvement of technology making it smoother for people, food ordering apps have gained the limelight, and they have become direct competitors to homemakers. Our palettes have adapted to food outside that we don’t prefer eating the same dish at home. Now, this sounds quite condescending especially, considering how we’ve been a country that rarely went outside to eat and considered it unhealthy. The apps like Swiggy, Zomato, Dunzo, Freshmenu and Uber eats our choices have multiplied especially our tastebuds too, and this culture of ordering food, on normal days has made most of us addictive and we figure this out only during the Pandemic where we couldn’t eat the food that was made at home and as soon as the lockdown was lifted it was reported that Swiggy and Zomatos app crashed because of the Traffic and the orders were booming like a night sky filled with rockets on Diwali.

Eating Outside, started becoming a memory for most of us and we had favourite restaurants that we ordered our favourite food from and had our first dates in and other memorable events must have taken place in these setups and it was a bummer to most of us we couldn’t visit these places.

As we reminisce about the good old days where we ordered pizza before a game night and went to that party at this lavish restaurant we always wanted it makes us think through this whole situation of the pandemic and notice how easy of a job was it to order and have your heart racing when the delivery guy rings your doorbell and the moment you hear it and walk toward the door and open the door and look at him for making your life easier and thank him by also tipping him and come sit down on your couch and relish into that doughnut with a huge bite and feel you are at the top of the world.

Image 2: A Plate to relish on even during bad times.