Post-pandemic, what becomes of food culture throughout America?
Travel centered around eating may become a thing of the past — at least for a while. A mid-September road trip provides an eerie glimpse of the future.
My husband Thierry and I are just back from a 6-day road trip to Colorado — our first getaway during pandemic. It was wonderful to be away — from the unrelenting and oppressive Dallas heat, from a world’s worth of worries, from our claustrophobic routine. Mountains and streams and fresh air and lots of hiking were fabulously restorative.
And so, in a way, was experiencing a new kind of travel — one in which it doesn’t matter so much what we’re going to eat, so long as there’s something to eat. The treatment of food and dining as cultural, gastronomic and experiential Xanadu fades into the past, and we’re left with this: What will sustain us? How will we get it? Where will we eat it?
During the 6-night trip, we picnicked a lot — in a desolate city park in Walsenburg, Colorado; on a wild hillside trail above the splendid, lush Arkansas River in Buena Vista where we stayed four nights; at a picnic table with a Sahara-like view at Great Sand Dunes National Park. Our picnics weren’t fancy: hummus and tabbouleh and pita. Or ham and cheese and a smear of good butter on sturdy whole grain bread. We ate takeout on our knees in the car; one time we ate while actually driving, a first. We cooked in our airbnb — not the long, leisurely dinners I’d imagined, but very simple plates, as the groceries we found in town were basic. A plain omelette and arugula salad. A lamb chop and arugula salad. Good local ale. And we ate a few restaurant meals, outside, on patios.
But these meals were not what the trip was about. It was about being in nature, in the incredible Rocky Mountains. About walking along the river, babbling and rushing and crystal-clear. And hiking high-altitude Alpine trails through pine forests blanketed here and there with late-summer snow. It was about navigating the perilous Independence Pass over the Sawatch Range toward Aspen, and at the top following a path to behold the highest point of the Continental Divide, 12,095 feet. All of that was absolutely spectacular.
On the way, on the road, across the Texas panhandle, through the upper-right-hand-corner of New Mexico and into the mountains of Southern Colorado, we drove through towns whose Main Streets offered block after block of storybook 19th-century western facades. Fading stenciled signs on the brick sides of buildings advertised milliners or plumbing fixtures or the Palace Hotel.
Missing were the people. And commerce. And with those, food culture. Storefronts boarded up, cafes closed, diners shuttered, we hardly saw a soul. Every place felt post-apocalyptic, a string of Covid-era ghost towns. Could this have all happened in just six months? The depth of devastation was stunning.
It was a strange conundrum. Freed from the tyranny of what-to-eat-on-vacation, we were able to really be in a place, and let the place drive our decisions.
In a magnificent natural setting, that’s a great thing: You don’t skip an interesting hike or nature drive in order to have lunch.
But when food culture disappears, a town or region loses an important part of its identity.
What will happen when this all shakes out? Will that mountain village Italian spot that folded during Covid be replaced? If so, with what? What forms of food culture will feel essential to reestablish? Is there still a need for an Italian spot just there? Or for any kind of restaurant just there? And what if we’re headed into a terrible recession with very few people able to afford a restaurant meal or artisan bread — or travel? Is it possible that restaurants will go the way of cobblers and bakeries and butcher shops?
How will these small towns regenerate? How will culture be expressed in the future? Will the Lao chef-owner in Amarillo or the Lebanese mom-and-pop in Cleveland be able to afford to re-open? What will American culture feel like as we figure out what food culture should look like and feel like and taste like?
No one knows the answers to any of those questions. In the meantime, people need escape, and the American spirit tells us to take off. In the parking lot of Great Sand Dunes National Park we saw license plates from Alabama, Mississippi, Connecticut, New Jersey. Perhaps it’s a time to see America, and feel America — to see each other, and talk to each other. And try to remember who we were before we became Foodie Nation.
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