This song feels like a personal note from all the cityfolk who have defected to their friends’, relatives’, or acquaintances’ vacation homes in remote areas. Its chorus, “Send my regards to New York, I’m gone,” is delivered through an upbeat filter from some alternate universe, like wherever all those beachy quarantine-cooking instagram stories are coming from. Back in BK, I keep wondering how many of these brownstones are empty, and how many are temporarily housing people who don’t have enough space of their own (lots, I hope). Take a listen and see whether this comes through as a taunt or an affirmation.
Wait, so you’re not enjoying cobbling together random provisions from a mix of online specialty grocers and the odd deserted bodega? Right. That explains the huge uptick in demand for community garden space. People are knocking down the (figurative) doors for plots in the city, across the country, the seed panic buying has begun. As Tejal Rao explains in the Times, this looks a lot like the Victory Garden movement grown out of the World Wars, at the height of which, an estimated FORTY PERCENT of America’s produce was grown by independent gardeners. Consider this a dare.
What’s the food item you keep stubbornly running out of as you try to avoid the grocery store? In my house, it’s eggs, which makes sense of the nationwide run on chickens. Chicks are selling out as people aim for self-sufficiency, which appears to be in keeping with a historical trend of increased chick demand during stock market downturns and presidential election years. At least that makes something about this moment normal.
Forget the food rush; New York City is running out of dogs. So many people have adopted quarantine pets that our shelters are literally empty— one place called Muddy Paws is fresh out after a 10x increase in fostering applications, and that appears to be the rule rather than the exception. The shortage, however impressive, may be short-lived; shelters expect others to give up pets as soon as their cash reserves dry up, and just like that, this headline stopped being fun.
