“Throughout history, bread has been linked with political power,” says Lexie Smith, a baker and writer. “Early civilizations with grain-based agriculture, such as the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, were largely made powerful by the riches and stability afforded by a storable, stretchable food supply,” she says. “In wartime, bread, requiring only water, flour and heat, has been known to keep people alive until the world order settles back into something more humane. It can be the line, sometimes literal, between life and death. With this understanding, bakeries and the lines that queue outside of them are notoriously vulnerable in war, as has been seen in Syria, Ukraine and, most recently, Gaza, where a substantial number of bakeries have been damaged by Israeli airstrikes,” Lexie says. #sourdough #pandemic #gaza #nytopinion

“The outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza among U.S. dairy cows, first reported on March 25, has now spread to at least 33 herds in eight states,” says Zeynep Tufekci, an @nytopinion columnist who has extensively covered the Covid-19 pandemic. And recently, “genetic evidence of the virus turned up in commercially available milk. Federal authorities say the milk supply is safe, but this latest development raises troubling questions about how widespread the outbreak really is,” she says. “The H5N1 outbreak, already a devastating crisis for cattle farmers and their herds, has the potential to turn into an enormous tragedy for the rest of us. But having spent the past two weeks trying to get answers from our nation’s public health authorities, I’m shocked by how little they seem to know about what’s going on and how little of what they do know is being shared in a timely manner,” Zeynep says. #birdflu #pandemic #cdc #nytopinion

Has one of your favorite restaurants closed down in the last few years? With “a pandemic, an enormous wave of inflation and an impossibly tight job market,” keeping a restaurant open has become extremely difficult, says Anthony Strong, a chef and the owner of Pasta Supply Co. in San Francisco. These challenges have forced “me and many others to burrow to the very core of what a restaurant does for its guests, workers and community and redefine it from the ground up,” he says. During the pandemic, Anthony converted his restaurant into a general store, providing his neighbors with paper towels and other essential goods when those items were hard to find. Now, Pasta Supply Co. doubles as a restaurant and retail shop. “Resetting expectations can be messy work,” Anthony explains, but “this is an important period of growth for an industry almost all of us play a part in.” #restaurants #pandemic #inflation #nytopinion