German scientists managed to reconstruct in detail the spread of the first outbreak of coronavirus in the country, induced by a worker from a large company on her return from a professional trip to China. The transmission from patient 4 to 5, which occurred in the company canteen near Munich, is significant. Sitting with their backs to each other, individual 5 asked the salt shaker for number 4, two days before the latter began to develop symptoms. Thus, with this innocent and habitual gesture, the contagion occurred. The lesson is obvious: sharing items on the table is prohibited. Unmasked the transmitting potential of a humble salt shaker, there are no doubts about the dangers of food. In this case, sharing is no longer living, but rather the opposite. Are we facing the death of snacking?
It is not easy to remove from memory one of the great pleasures of normality. That table surrounded by camaraderie, with heavy traffic in the center. Some bulls circulate and squid continue as an advance party for other productions, perhaps more elaborate. Some toast is improvised (contact!) …
“What we will do is adapt to the use of new techniques rather than adapt to dispense with pecking”
The Community and the City Council of Madrid have spread the Guide to good handling and processing practices for the catering sector . The document quarantines the widespread custom of pecking. To the measures that we can recite as a run (frequent hand washing, maintenance of the physical distance of two meters, use of a mask, cleaning and disinfection of the elements of greatest risk, etc.), the prescription of “avoid rations for share”. “We choose not to offer rations to share, but tapas or individual dishes,” he says.
Like many of the regulations on the road to the new normal, this measure has contradictions, as noted by the owner of a cafeteria, located in phase 1, much of whose income comes from rations. “If, for example, I serve four members of the same family, it does not seem logical that they cannot eat from the same plate when at home they are going to, even if they take a plate prepared here,” he reasons. In his opinion, the measure will hardly affect the kitchen but will increase the complications of the service: “It is not the same to have four individual tapas as a portion.”
Anthropologist Francesc Xavier Medina, director of Unesco’s Chair in Food and Human Development, is optimistic about the future of the now stigmatized pecking. “Things will change less than we think,” he predicts. “In the early days there will be more restrictions and they will not serve common dishes. It will be difficult for people, because we are used to it; in addition, all tapas are used to being dishes to be shared ”, he argues, and he envisions ingenious solutions to safeguard tradition:“ Ways can be found to be able to share with a certain security, with rations subdivided into containers or by means of safer instruments to to be able to take the food ”.
“What we will do in the first instance is adapt to the use of new technologies rather than adapt to dispense with shared food,” according to Medina. In his opinion, this will not be one of the permanent losses that the coronavirus: “Everything will go back to the same level it was before.”
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