Yelp: More than half of restaurants temporarily closed now permanently shuttered

However, I have found free market forces weeding out low quality ones. It's not a perfect solution, but it works.

Most of the food prepared in these curry points is usually fresh.

However, they offer a great way to have a sumptuous meal,with many varieties for very low cost.

Regardless there are always complaints about food standa or trucks anywhere from traffic to matters as petty as park service trashcan fill rate.

1. For the rapidly expanding middle class, with much disposable income, focus has shifted to quality in the last decade. No longer are dingy kitchens acceptable.

2. Modern restaurants and take-out only kitchens (propping up to server customers of food delivery apps) use modern equipment and generally maintain good hygiene.

3. People are willing to spend a bit more for quality food and it shows in the markets. Cheap and dirty kitchens are being phased out.

4. For decades in the past, India had innumerable 'Tiffin Centers', where the primary target is the daily labourer or office goer, who goes to the center, orders a breakfast, stands on the side, eats it and leaves. In these kitchens, the full kitchen is always in view of the customers. There are no tables or chairs for people to sit, just raised platforms on which the plates are placed and food consumed. This culture of an open view kitchen is very prevalent in India, and is usually self regulating, quality wise.

In India, in a typical meal with rice or chapathis (baked wheat flour), the base items form bulk of the food, weight wise. Curries and gravys are mostly garnishing. And there is a lot of spice and chili in most foods. So even among those who eat meat, the portions are relatively small. And milk, curd and milk derivative products are a huge part of the Indian meal.

In fact, in India, food is a carefully curated science, especially the traditional dishes. There are a lot of thumb rules for what to eat when, time of the day wise, day wise, day of the week wise, season wise and what not. The cuisine keeps changing.

For example, in the south, most evening dinners have a dish called 'rasam', which is just tamrind juice with tomatoes and a few spices. A very watery dish, where a litre of water is boiled with about 20 grams of tamrind. The reason it is usually taken in the night and during a heavy afternoon meal, is because it very much improves indigestion and constipation.

Indian scriptures give a lot of research on Food, Health, sex and spirituality.

Edit: Fasting is catching on in recent times in the west, but has been a staple part of Indian life since always. But it was never recommended for those whose life depends on manual labour, like farmers. They were always encouraged to take food, in good quantities every day. Lots of meat and sweets were recommended for the warrior class. Meat was forbidden for thise who are in knowledge work, like scholars, poets etc. This class had the most stringent food restrictions, because they essentially sit and think, and eating meat or drinking wine dulls a sharp mind.

I have seen it in tier 2 cities and towns too.

The point is that the freedoms/rights of the masses are being restricted for the benefit of few.

And to be clear I'm not saying that people should not be prudent whilst retaining their freedoms. It's prudent to wear a seat belt in a car, or a helmet on a motorcycle. Similarly it's prudent to wear a mask and sanitize hands and objects.

But to tell everyone they cannot drive because someone (not the driver) might die, or you cannot drive a motorcycle because it increases your chance of death over alternative means of transport has never been a rational argument. Yet we take similar arguments about covid19 as sufficient?

> Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.” [0]

Pandemics aren't some new thing. They've been happening probably since pathogens and parasites evolved, and they'll continue to happen as long as they exist.

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[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is...

There's no amount of pain that's conserved. It's caused by the fact that people changed behavior that others were relying on, but that's a contingent feature of actual history.

I suspect some small fraction of property owners, however, are unleveraged, absentee, and likely willing to grant rent forbearance for quite awhile. For example, older people holding onto real estate for their children, or who simply really like their tenant and are committed to the community. Restaurants lucky enough to have such landlords, or similarly situated landlord-restaurateurs, are probably counting their blessings right now.

We wouldn't have a very dynamic economy if everybody operated this way, but at least there's some heterogeneity to help us bootstrap things. No comfort for the huge number of people who have effectively lost their life savings, though.