Foodservice in the wake of coronavirus

One of the questions businesses and consumers have been asking themselves during the past few months is what society might look like post coronavirus? In a little more than three months, life has become very different and lockdown has become more than just a word.

While the fight against Covid-19 has united people across continents, it has also profoundly highlighted the different ways in which societies and governments respond in a time of crisis.

Indeed, as protestors took to the streets to condemn racial violence and the killing of George Floyd, some cities such as Paris, Melbourne and Berlin were attempting to reopen their doors. 

Others never closed. In Mexico City, despite 10 weeks of lockdown, around 31.5m Mexicans remain dependent on street vending and continued to work throughout the pandemic. 

For those in Ho Chi Minh City it’s business as ‘some sort of usual’ too, with no community transmission having been detected in almost 50 days and the country’s social-distancing campaign drawing to a close in April.

In Hong Kong, pretty much everything is open apart from the city itself, where residents now have other issues front of mind. For those venturing out, temperature checks, contact-tracing forms and masks await, presenting only minor inconveniences. 

As Lesley Suter explains in Eater, despite the near-universal tragedy caused by the novel coronavirus, the look and feel of our experiences today is anything but uniform, and depends greatly on the place we call home.

So, on June 2, as Parisians sat down at cafes for the first time in months while people in Moscow were still unable to leave their homes between curfews, her team set about recording divergent views of 17 cities around the world on the same day.