Sometimes I wonder what the pandemic would’ve been like without food delivery and then I wake up sweating like an anti-vaxxer forced to look at data.
Personally, I don’t consider covid in any way traumatic or life changing. I haven’t been sick and I haven’t lost anyone dear to me. Well actually, my dad and I kind of stopped talking because he’s convinced I’m filled to the brim with nanobots courtesy of Pfizer, but other than that I surfed the many pandemic waves unscathed and mostly even unbothered.
A lot of that is because of Takeaway.com, Uber Eats, Deliveroo and the people they exploit to treat my incessant hunger and laziness.
People always give credit to nurses, doctors and more nurses, but to me delivery drivers are the unsung heroes of the pandemic. Without them, I would have had to do so many dishes.
Like, really a lot of dishes.
And thanks to delivery drivers I didn’t have to. Well done!
That’s not to say delivery people don’t annoy me any less than regular people do. Our relationship is not one based on equality and I always take on the role of Karen.
One of my pet peeves is food getting cold. Call it a primal instinct, greed, or primal greed, but once food is ready to eat there’s simply no point in postponing it. One doesn’t let food get cold. It’s spiritually ungrateful, and also I don’t like waiting.
Of course with home delivery food first needs to go places before it can fulfill its purpose and become the food. It needs to go into a big square bag and the bag then needs to. go to me.
First of all, my narcissism kicks in anytime I see a delivery driver packing a square bag with a big corporate logo that lets everybody know they’re pawns who are quite literally at the bottom of the food chain.
Second, food delivery tech behemoths dispensed the technology that allows me to track my driver (yes: my driver) in the app. It’s like watching The Maze Runner. And when my driver’s sense of direction is really poor I imagine getting a live feed of Katniss trying to escape the arena, or pacman in a universe where pacman has simultaneously become self aware and incompetent. Or any other comparison I fathom during the time I wait for my food to arrive.
And I don’t like watching the maze runner struggle when every time they take a wrong turn my food gets colder.
That feeling of helplessness, when you see your food aching to find its way to you but there’s nothing you can do about, is the pain I associate with covid more than anything else. That and the realization that 1 out of 10 people gets vaccinated because they want to go see a movie instead of, you know, saving lives.
Getting food from A to My House shouldn’t be difficult. For centuries we’ve had a system where streets have names and houses have numbers. Given enough training dolphins could probably figure it out, and they’re aquatic!
It’s now gotten to the point that ordering food equals frustration. Seeing delivery drivers get lost time after time has started to weigh up against the comfort of ordering takeout.
Which is in part why I decided to start a food blog: I realized it’s not clinically nominal to shout at strangers who can’t hear you through a screen as a means to still my appetite.
As you can see, ordering takeout turns me into a raging blob of entitlement, and it always ends in regret.
Because of course my food always gets delivered eventually. And every time I finally get to see my delivery driver in person, I am so relieved my food has arrived I find the inner strength to be empathetic again.
And I thank the driver, because they’re always so friendly and humble, and they look like they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.
So to honor the many food fetchers out there, this blog features a recipe for crispy fried chicken.
How to make crispy fried chicken
Ingredients:
– A phone
Fun fact:
Whenever my boyfriend opens the door to our delivery driver, it’s always a hot guy.
Whenever I open te door to our delivery driver, it’s always an unattractive guy or a woman.
I feel like that could be karma for how I shout at delivery drivers in the app.
Anyway, you grab your phone, you open a food delivery app, find the nearest KFC, order a bucket of crispy fried chicken, and then don’t check the app to see how committed your driver is to your oral cravings. If the driver takes long and you get annoyed, just think of this story from the point of view of the chicken.
Not another fucking food blog 