Cooking for comfort in a crisis time
Abhijit Banerjee, co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Nobel Laureate in economics, writes about cooking and food in times of crises as he reflects back on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in his monthly column, 'Tasting economics,' for The Times of India.
The first known case of Covid-19 is from December 2019, which means it was circulating in Wuhan that November. Four years ago.
I first noticed that the pandemic was getting to me when Cheyenne, who lived with our family through the pandemic, caught me washing just-delivered carrots and turnips with Lysol, which is a powerful and poisonous disinfectant. It probably wasn’t entirely a coincidence that President Trump had recently proposed injecting Lysol (or something similar) into Covid-19 patients, to the horror of the medical community and the amusement of our whole family. But there I was…