90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good | Hacker News Reader

90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

economist.com

89 pointslxm69 comments

"Covid-19 seems to have changed [x] for good" is not worth reading, for all values of x, until we have gotten to a post-pandemic environment. It's like saying, in the seconds or even days after a car crash, that the car crash has changed your driving styles for good. Wayyyyyy too early to say.

Yep, some of these predictions are outright comical. "has covid ended handshakes forever" or "will we ever go back to bars?".

Bars and handshakes have survived thousands of years of pandemics. I get that people always tend to think their moment in history is particularly special, but I'm just gonna say if the black death didn't do something in this won't either

> Yep, some of these predictions are outright comical. "has covid ended handshakes forever" or "will we ever go back to bars?".

I agree. Do people think it's really a good idea to always be coddling your immune system? If this were to happen, the next pandemic will probably be far worse. Just saw a study that says that having the cold recently could help your immune system fight covid-19. Of course I don't know how accurate it is, but the one thing I do know is that nobody fully understands covid and how the immune system handles it.

There is some indication that exposure to some other coronaviruses may improve immune response to the pandemic one, but I think it's still a bit vague and undefined. Since there are coronaviruses in circulation which cause colds, this is possibly true.

It's not something to base public health policy around though!

You are certainly right that we lack a lot of understanding, including about various kinds of immune response to the virus which is critical to developing an effective vaccine. The level of scientific activity around this one virus is utterly phenomenal though. I'd like to think this is going to be a defining moment for human medicine, but I fear it might turn out otherwise.

I agree with you and I’ve been repeating this point to my close circle, though this article did (for the first time) make me sort of excited to see what will stick, if anything.

Take the searches for yeast and recipe, for example. I don’t think its totally farfetched to imagine that a sizeable handful of people have wondered, maybe for the first time, how to bake things like bread and cookies or how to make meatballs. It would be really cool if we actually saw these things’ growth in popularity persist in some tangible form into the future. These things have definitely existed for a long time, but I feel like we North Americans have been trending towards fast food and delivered meals for a few decades now.

I agree with the general feeling of promoting home cooked food and having/learning the skill set for it.

However, specifically on the bread making aspect, we should probably do some back of the napkin estimations before supporting this more long term.

One good thing about a bakery is that it uses huge ovens, in which multiples trays of bread are baked, at the same time, with minimal dead space.

Contrast that with the scenario where we all decide to start baking our own bread, in a normal oven, raising it to very high temperatures, for a long period, to bake a single loaf every 1 or 2 days. This sort of makes me worry what would be the carbon impact of that consumer change?

The future of home electric power is renewable power such as rooftop photovoltaic, so maybe the change's carbon impact tracks the trend of the rest of home carbon impact? Efficiency at a community level should be considered, but it should be considered while looking at all the trends.

I'm not sure bars existed in the times of Black Death. I learned recently that a sit down restaurant with a menu is a relatively new thing. Two hundred years or so. Plus minus a few decades.

Your point still stands though. I just thought I would point that out as I found it somewhat interesting because for a long time I had assumed that restaurant business was much older than that.

>I'm not sure bars existed in the times of Black Death

depends what you mean by a bar?

In the UK, taverns certainly existed prior to the Black Death (1346 – 1353). For instance:

> Established in the 13th Century, The White Hart Inn on Drury Lane claims to be London’s oldest pub. Historical records show its first license was granted as early as 1216

https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2017/10/the-15-oldest-pubs...

This article kind of fudges the Black Death and an Italian plague 300 years later, but there were "wine windows" to allow serving without physical contact, and some have been recently put back into service:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/08/10/restaurants...

Restaurants have existed for millennia. It's just that you didn't get to choose what you ate. It was whatever the cook had lots of that day.

> Bars and handshakes have survived thousands of years of pandemics.

Most of those thousands of years we had no clue such things could spread diseases.

We might not have known the specifics however I'm pretty sure we have known for a long time that hanging around sick people makes you sick.

> Yep, some of these predictions are outright comical. "has covid ended handshakes forever"

I hope so. Handshakes are pathogen vector I can easily do without. And they don't seem essential to anyone's livelihood.

> handshakes have survived thousands of years of pandemics. I get that people always tend to think their moment in history is particularly special, but I'm just gonna say if the black death didn't do something in this won't either

Our understanding of infection has advanced since then. Let's apply the knowledge.

Yea, was going to say the same. I'm personally sick and tired of hearing "the new normal". No, it's temporary, get over the doomsday fetish. I swear this is worse than those hardcore preppers who pray for an apocalypse. Every person that goes, "the end is near" over every damn thing is literally the least or naively prepared person for such a thing. It's just a fetish developed by people unable to cope with any state of existence. They just think that if no one is doing well, then they're equal with everyone else.

Not sure you are using the right word.

If a prepper subscribed to your idea wouldn't they think they are better off not equal because of the investments they made.

That's fair.

> They just think that if no one is doing well, then they're equal with everyone else.

A great deal of human existence is comparing yourselves to others, and exalting youself over everyone else when possible. If you can't be better than them at least you can take consolation they're equally miserable.

Your point is true for some, but I dispute 'all values of x'.

Post-pandemic, yes, some items from that page are going to return to pre-pandemic numbers, I'm sure - hangover, restaurant, ticket, etc.

But for people who've discovered that stuff they grow at home - from herbs on the balcony to tomatoes in the yard - taste much better, are unlikely to just forget that.

Similarly people discovering this year that they enjoy the process and flavours of cooking or baking bread are also unlikely to forget it all.

Ditto people who pay more attention to their health and work environment - dumbbell, standing desk.

Google search terms are likely to reach stasis, of course, as people who want this knowledge now have it, but that doesn't mean there won't be a shift in people's behaviours and activities.

> But for people who've discovered that stuff they grow at home - from herbs on the balcony to tomatoes in the yard - taste much better, are unlikely to just forget that.

That is, until everyone has to go back to working in offices etc, and they realise they don't have time to maintain a garden any more.

I expect there to be at least some long term effect. Some number of folks are probably going to switch to work from home semi permanently. Not having to spend all those hours commuting is bound to have some effect.

Not saying "not true for all values of x", I'm claiming "not worth reading for all values of x", because it's way too soon to make predictions about what will stick and what won't. I could imagine that _something_ will stick, I just don't think the Economist or anyone else is going to be any good at predicting what.

I guess TFA doesn't think there's a constraint on how soon they can offer up some predictions based on google search words.

> I just don't think the Economist or anyone else is going to be any good at predicting what.

So your early prediction is that their early predictions are going to be wrong? ; )

Ha! Yes, although technically I'm just saying "frequently wrong", for example maybe half of them, and thus not worth reading.

I don't know. I just listened to this great podcast [1] about victory gardens during WW1 and WW2. Many of them were set up all across the US, but after the war ended people pretty much abandoned them. Turns out growing food is hard work and most people don't want to do it, even as a supplement.

That said I'm definitely making it a goal to never buy green onions again - it's so easy to regrow them.

[1]: https://gastropod.com/dig-for-victory/

Understood, but I suspect some of that may be cultural (allotment gardens in the UK are extremely popular with lengthy waiting lists), and synchronised with the push in the USA during the 1940's and 1950's towards suburbanisation and consumerism.

My gut feel is that because there was already a popular trend to 'getting your fingers in the soil', as well as the slow food movement, that combined with the forced rethink of how we spend time, effort, and money, we will see some longer lasting effects.

Also all those trends it shows are all approaching the old baseline.

I think it's a reasonable assumption that any existing trends that are accelerated by covid will be fairly sticky.

An obvious example in the UK is people switching to grocery delivery. Some people will switch back but a lot will continue because the virus helped them past whatever inertia was holding them back before.

I'm finding a sudden interest in reading letters/diaries from during WWII, when people didn't have the benefit of hindsight.

It's true that people don't have the same information and perspective as they will later, but time also warps and obscures aspects of a period when history is being made.

Just flag the article and be done with it. My tolerance for clickbait headlines has gone to zero during this pandemic.

s/for good/for the better/

In the "it's an improvement" sense, not the "it's a permanent change" sense.

This article is premature. There are many regions still either under partial lockdown or where people remain uneasy about going out. These trends may be interesting if they continue a year from now, but it's too early to tell.

"For good" is often used to mean a permanent change, but the context here is using "for good" as in an improvement which isn't necessarily permanent. Either way, that is sloppy writing and the intention should have been made clearer with a slight rephrasing like "for the better".

I read it as permanent as well. Your interpretation makes more sense but is still not accurate because I hardly think a value judgment that cooking at home more is better, for example, is necessarily valid. And I say this as someone who cooked nearly every meal at home not because I needed to but enjoyed it.

I'd like to offer you my anecdote, suggesting this will have lasting effects:

it forced me to learn cooking! My folks have commented on this a lot, I really stepped up my cooking game in this confinement. I've learned how to make a lot of pasta sauces, and how to do them _easily and quickly_, etc. The key was learning it well enough to become comfortable with it so that it doesn't loom as some esoteric activity which will eat some unknown amount of time.

Moreover, I crossed the point of being good enough that now it's one of the activities I enjoy... and I'm now intrigued about general principles rather than wracking my brain over strictly, unconfidently following recipes to a tee. Basically, it forced me to get on the right track of starting a wonderful adventure.

First days of quarantine, but it being clear that this is going to take a while (Living in Colombia, most of the world has already been hit at this point), I realized that this might well be the easiest time for the rest of my life to change habits because of just how influential your environment is on those.

But it could change as easily for the good as well as the bad.

Thus I made a very concentrated effort for the good even tough work was incredibly stressful at the time. Stopped smoking cold (after 15ish years), more physically active outdoors (also to deal with loneliness and confinement living alone far from family in a large city), daily, much more money/time effective and healthier cooking (I used to mostly only do very elaborate fancy dishes on weekends), more focus on hobbies like music and painting.

Personally it looks like the lock-down which is still ongoing almost 20 weeks in, will have a long lasting positive impact on my life. But unfortunately I also know a couple of people who went in the exact other direction.

So I think there will definitely be impact on society, but it is too early to tell whether overall positive, negative or neutral.

I’m a very proficient cook, but I’ve learned, with 3 young sons, work, stressful days, sometimes going out to eat is a Godsend.

I enjoy it when I can take a night off, where I can do nothing but play crossword puzzles with my kids while drinking a beer, waiting for a great meal, it is one of life’s simple and stress free joys.

That’s great. Iv’e been cooking often for about 6 years now and when you get to the point where you’re more about technique than trying to follow a recipe it’s great. You stop worrying about if something is done yet, you learn to improvise, and you get a feel for when to do things and what to add, etc.

Another nice side effect is you end up getting really good at making basic things quickly too. And you get an instinct for where you can cheat and when to do the work.

Mind to share some good pasta sauce ideas?

Of course!

Marianara sauce: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015987-classic-marinara... You'd have to buy a san marazano can and spaghetti for this, a couple bucks each, and you can store each for quite a while. You can add meatballs in it if you're not a vegetarian.

Pesto sauce: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/07/best-pesto-recip... You might balk at the idea of having fresh basil... I would argue it's one of the things you really need in your life! Buy a small plant, it'll run you 3-4 dollars (if that). Keep it by your window sil so it gets some sunshine, and it looks pretty, and the responsibility of having to water it is calming and enjoyable.

A whit'ish sauce: https://lilluna.com/creamy-garlic-penne-pasta/

It really gets fun when you get fancy with it. I often add whatever vegetable I have at hand (e.g. , get some cumin seeds and bay leaves heated up in some olive oil, add some onions/garlic into this oil... and whatever spices you like and can handle (I'm partial to a bit of cayenne pepper, paprika, ground cumin), and finally add your $VEGETABLE). Add this to your pasta sauce.

Non basil pesto is also amazing. Some of my faves are with flat parsley (more spicy notes), ramps (not in season right now obvi), and mint pistachio

Also Spaghetti Carbonara is super-easy if you're OK with bacon :-). Can also toss in some quickly defrosted frozen shrimp to many recipes. A lot of quick spaghetti recipes.

Nice inspirations, thank you!

I know Italians won‘t like this, but... I use, for a can (400g) of tomatoes: chop a half onion, simmer in olive oil at low temp for 5-10 mins (“soffrito”), add heat, add sugar (2 tbsp, not if the tomatos are really sweet), let it caramelize a bit, add bayleaf and pimenta (allspice), add 0.1-0.2l red wine, reduce until it gets sticky, add tomatoes, stir well, put in 2-3 cloves of garlic, reduce by 20%, add salt, remove garlic, add a bit of oil. The balance of sweetness, acidity, saltiness, bitter notes (from the wine) and umami (from the tomatoes) together with the aromas from the wine, the oil and the spices never disappoints.

A Bolognese sauce (and I'm sure a proper chef would tell you all the ways I'm getting this wrong) is one of those things you can make a big old pot and freeze down for multiple meals.

Brown some ground meat. I'm a fan of some spicy pork sausage and beef. Figure a pound or so. Drain and set aside. Dice up some bacon - figure a quarter of the pack or so. Peel a couple carrots and drop them in with the bacon. Peel and cut an onion in half, toss it in. Do a couple stalks of celery too as the bacon cooks.

Once the bacon starts to crisp up, drain the fat if you need to. Add the meat back in and leave in the veg. Add a can of diced tomatoes. Add a cup of chicken stock. Add a small can of tomato sauce. Stir and cover, and let it sit on the stove for 3-4 hours at a simmer - just making the occasional bubble.

Dice an onion, a few carrots, and some celery. Smash/dice a few garlic cloves. Grab another pan, drop in a 1/4-1/2" chunk of butter, and saute up the onion for a couple minutes, add the carrots, garlic, and celery. When the chucks of garlic start turning brown, throw a half a cup or so of wine (red, white, whatever you've been drinking while you cook) into the pan and scrap up all the good stuff. Take it off heat.

Fish out the original veg you added in a few hours ago, and dump in the fresh stuff you just cooked up. Add some basil and oregano (fresh if you have it) if you have any and let it simmer for another 30 minutes.

Add a cup of milk or cream and let it simmer uncovered for another 15 minutes or so.

Srslywtf? Why is this article talking as if Covid-19 is anywhere near over? If the graphs were focused on say New Zealand I could understand, but taking the world as a whole (and the US specifically) we're still in the thick of it.

I certainly do look forward to having beers and dinner out at a restaurant some time. That time is just well into 2021, iff we are lucky.

All I know is that a crowded elevator is going to be strange experience for many now for a long time, especially those who work in tall buildings.

A small cough in an elevator is the new fart.

How can they possibly come a those conclusions when we’re still in the epidemic

Ironically, the first news article I stumbled across after leaving HN just now was “Simon Cowell broke his back falling off an electric bicycle”.

...why is "hair clippers" listed under "home entertainment"?

Bad haircut pranks?

If that's the case, I "pranked" my cat with hilarious effect.

There is a thing with the media where they seem to take every trend as "the new normal" and extrapolate out to infinity anything that shows even remote signs of being embraced. It's usually not the case.

Sure, there may be some lasting changes that arise from Covid-19, but it's probably not going to be as drastic as is being implied.

Every time something new arises, the media is quick to declare "This is it! This is how things are now and always will be forever!" while ignoring the fact that a change just happened which would seem to imply that another change will probably happen again at some time in the future.

Seems like it would be pretty easy to game this sort of conclusion-making based on Google search terms.

For example, let's say I control a popular app which installed on people's devices -- thousands of developers/corporations/other entities are in this position. I insert some new code in the app (perhaps via an automatic update) that sends a Google query for some search term from a pool of similar terms I have chosen. I can easily mimic the HTTP headers sent by a common web browser, thereby making my request indistinguishable from one that is intentionally submitted by a user, chosen from a list of common browser headers.

By having large swathes of users all appearing to search for the same or similar terms I can make it appear to, say, the Economist, that the public at-large is interested in a given topic. From there, the Economist will make assumptions about the population at-large and then make conclusions about what this means. Then they will publish these "findings" as a story. Many readers will be swayed by the Economist's conclusions. At that point I will have effectively influenced what those readers now believe. All it took were some phoney searches.

Later, I could remove the code in the next auto-update.

By the time something like this was discovered by a user MITM'ing the app traffic and reverse engineering the app, chances are I would have already accomplished my objective: to influence people -- perhaps investors -- to believe a story like the one reported here by the Economist. (Note: I am not suggesting the Economist's conclusions are wrong in this case.)

Your fake example is more convoluted (and less profitable) than just using ads, fake news, and viral marketing to sway opinions.

And don't forget that Google has a vested interest in identifying fake searches, so any large scale attack like you're describing would likely result in your app traffic getting flagged as fake.

Besides, if you really had the ability to push code to millions of devices, and don't mind "being evil", there is a lot more profitable things you could be doing with that influence.

Are you suggesting this has actually happened, or are you just saying it's theoretically possible?

Purely hypothetical. The only things I know for sure are that there is an enormous amount of 1. web traffic being sent automatically by people's devices which they are wholly unaware of and 2. willingness to allow "auto-updates" where no user ever looks at the contents of the code that comprises the update.

It also seems like there is a trend of increasingly important decisions being made based on assumptions arising from analysis of web traffic, however I could be wrong on that observation.

The pandemic proved that remote work is viable. And some people will now be able to do it permanently.

Electoric bicycle fall under the Healthy Living category? Like how?

I've noticed that people who don't identify as bikers are more and more opting for an ebike over an oldskool bike by default (and bikers too, as another steed in the stable).

I don't think this is a bad thing for public health. Ebikes need pedalling too, they just assist. They assist quite a lot, which makes them fun to ride, and probably makes them more enticing to take out. The fact that they assist means you can go further in the same time, which is certainly what I witness happening amongst my bikehead friends and the people I meet in the mountains.

You might get some exercise, but even if you don't, there are benefits to getting outside.

Sunlight improves your mood, improves your sleep cycle, and helps you produce vitamin D. Spending time in green space has mental benefits like reducing stress, improving focus, and improving creativity.

See https://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_StressPhysiology.html

I have an ebike and I get just as much exercise per-minute as I would on a regular bike, Im just going 30mph while riding upright, sometimes with 30lbs of cargo, in instead of languishing at 10-20mph and caring about the direction of the wind

Most of them require you to pedal, few have a throttle.

Oh no, tie-dye has been having a 235% increase in searches.

Being The Economist I suppose it makes sense they left out the absolutely massive shift in the trending of Marxism[1](~+900%) in the last few months.

[1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F065...

I'd like to point out that you are data-illiterate here.

Here is an alternate explanation: Very few people search for 19th century political philosphies on Google, compared to the number of people who search for "hangover". Therefore all it takes is 1 news article, interview, book, movie, etc to cause people to do a quick search and find out what a word means.

So called "using google as a dictionary" is all you are seeing here.

The spike you are seeing, no surprise, coincides with a specific person describing BLM as "marxist".

This has nothing to do with covid. It's honestly stupid for you to try to draw a straight line between COVID and marxism and imply that it's some kind of conspiracy that the Economist is hiding.

This is a pretty hostile post that looks like it violates site guidelines to me. Can you express your point civilly?

I don't think the insults obscure the point. I may be "data illiterate" too but it sounds plausible.

That seems to mirror the trend for "cultural marxism", a term frequently used by the alt-right, so that trend chart may not show what you think it does.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Cultural%2...

Nearly all of the "Related queries" contain reference to BLM. There's arguments to be made for many interpretations of the trends page.

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