Covid-19 Could Change What We Eat and Do for Fun
If today’s crisis is really like the Great Depression, will we go back to making casseroles?
Economical cooking.
Photographer: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThe latest unemployment figures — worse than expected, again — suggest that the economy remains in the woods. Recovery depends on bringing the new coronavirus under control, yet each day brings record numbers of new cases. Little wonder people are making anxious analogies to the Great Depression.
If these comparisons have merit, we may be in for some lasting changes. It’s conventional wisdom that the Great Depression created a generation of penny-pinchers, but it wrought more subtle transformations as well — in the way people cooked and in how they spent their leisure time. The evidence from the 1930s suggests that life hacks made during hard times have a funny way of outliving the crises that beget them. Something similar may be underway today.