New Disability, Same Indifference... New Way of Life?

 

    Covid sucks. It's shifted from pandemic to endemic because some people weren't cautious enough and a lot more people actively enabled the spread through willful ignorance. Thanks, assholes. Your attitudes have killed several million people- and counting.

    But this isn't about the virus's body count. Nor is it about the ego driven political tribalism that enabled its rise to endemic-dom, or it being the one massive piece of leverage the general public could potentially have used to ensure lasting positive social and cultural change.

    This is about what it's done to food industry professionals. A smaller-stakes issue in some ways, but no less a global problem.

    Remember how it started? People who caught Covid were frequently losing their sense of smell. The phenomenon became so noticeable that papers got written on what was sometimes called the Yankee Candle Review Index, wherein upswings in Covid infection rates were sufficiently correlated with negative reviews of scented candles and other similar products that the surges could be predicted to some degree.

    Industries like food and beverage are hard enough to begin with, on physical, mental, emotional, and financial levels. Professionals still continue to juggle plague-induced operational closings, safety of their staff, their own personal safety, and an endless pile of other problems just to survive. Not only is the pandemic killing more food workers than almost any other demographic, it's maimed a great many more. 

    The cooking school I was teaching in suspended operation in March of 2020, but I'm almost positive I picked up Covid right beforehand. The last event we did was for a passel of people fresh off that damn Disney Cruise. There was no reliable test yet (one of my housemates worked in biotech, and was part of a team developing one of them), and the lockdown was was about to begin. My senses of taste and smell have never failed me. (I do now have a never-ending cough a la General Grievous, but that's another problem.) As far as anosmia, I got lucky. But I know a good few people who didn't.

    Imagine going about your day as normal, and suddenly you're stricken blind. Everything that was familiar now feels as foreign as the moon. That's what it's like when someone whose livelihood is built around food loses their sense of taste or smell. So much of what they knew, expertise honed by constant practice over years, is not simply gone, but often worse- distorted. 

    The olfactory system's nerve pathways don't seem to recover from an attack like this at an even rate, and so all perceptions from it are rendered suspect as recovery slowly, unevenly, uncertainly tries to happen. To be unable to trust one's own senses when others are relying on them is a terrible state of being, and rapidly becoming regarded as another of what are often called "Invisible Disabilities". 

    You know how hard it is to get disability comp in America? Even when it's something physical and as obvious as can be, it's still a hardscrabble fight for every iota of aid and respite. Something like this, that's so much harder to quantify, that we can't even really treat yet? A seemingly futile struggle... and yet it's one that can't help but continue. Too many lives are at stake.

    There are plenty of people, mostly paycheck to paycheck, that are afflicted by the aftereffects of Covid-induced anosmia and parosmia. They're desperate for anything at all to keep them solvent. In lieu of proper disability provisioning or support, the crumbling F&B workforce is giving up their goals in-industry, and taking whatever it can wherever it can to survive. 

    To me, the future of food looks grim. It's always been a marginalized, derided industry, and now it's awash in a new danger full of unknowns. I know where it needs to go, and how to get it there... but I don't think it will get that chance.