Cooking during the coronavirus pandemic has taken on many roles. It’s a way to save money during a time of economic hardship, a way to cope during an era of anxiety and a way to exert control when the world feels like it’s careening off the rails. Eating, meanwhile, has helped to relieve stress (from my Facebook timeline alone, I see the COVID 20 is a thing) and to make people feel healthier while a deadly virus rages.

But mealtime is also a stark divider. For many families, it has been a chance to gather regularly around the table in a way that was unthinkable pre-pandemic; for others facing job loss and financial strain, it has been a time of rising food insecurity. And for those quarantining alone, the coronavirus has stolen that most human ritual — breaking bread together.

So what does this mean for how we eat? And will new habits and routines stick around when we step out of our homes into a post-pandemic world?

“Back in March, I was panic-eating Doritos and wiping down my strawberries with Clorox,” says Karen Cheng, co-founder of Star Anise Foods, a San Francisco business that sells natural Vietnamese cooking products. She and her husband have two kids, ages 8 and 11. “Now, my family is more centered in the kitchen, and my kids are doing a lot more of the cooking. I never used to let my 8-year-old near a hot oven or sharp tools alone. Now, he can handle it.”

Freed from the supercharged logistics of sports and extracurriculars, Cheng says her family has more time to cook and share meals together. “We got a Dutch oven. I upgraded my brownie pans.” Even with some activities returning, they have continued their nightly dinners together.

For Alicia Villanueva, founder of Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas in Hayward, meal planning has become a way to minimize trips to the grocery store. “In the beginning of the week, we make a menu: two days of protein, a vegetarian day, then a really Mexican dish, like taquitos dorados,” she says.

Amid the pressure of trying to shift her business from catering for clients like Google, Amazon and Twitter to selling tamales in grocery stores and direct to customers, Villanueva’s 18-year-old son stepped up and offered to do most of the cooking at home. “He said, ‘I’m going to give you a break and cook for you on the weekdays. You do the weekends,’” she says.

In March, Kerri Lehmann’s three kids, ages 20, 25 and 27, came back to San Francisco to quarantine with their parents. It was the first time they had all been together for an extended period since the oldest was in high school, and for five months, they ate dinner together every night. “It was the part of the day we all looked forward to,” Lehmann says. “We would talk and linger, no one had to rush off.”

They also got carried away with baking. At one point, Lehmann, the founder of jewelry company Rocks with Soul, says that they had eight home-baked dishes in the house: “banana bread, cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies. We looked at each other and were like, ‘We have to stop.’”

As a family, they decided to cut down on sugar and experiment more with new recipes, planning meals around packages from Water2Table, which delivers just-caught fish to consumers, and fresh ingredients from their neighborhood market on 25th Avenue and Clement in the Richmond District. Homemade falafel, fish tacos with fresh corn tortillas and tuna poke bowls all became favorites, and Lehmann and her husband have kept these dishes in the rotation even now that the kids have left.

Naomi Maisel, who moved to Oakland a year ago, has been mostly cooking for one over the last eight months. After eating the same meals on the same plates day after day, she says she got “leftover fatigue.” So while she knows it’s not time-efficient, Maisel has found joy in preparing just a single serving of dinner. “Recently, I made one serving of lasagna from scratch — the noodles, the filling, the sauce.”

Of all the ways the pandemic has changed how we eat, how we grocery shop may be the most profound shift. Subscriptions to community-supported agriculture services, or CSAs, are way up, and many people have outsourced errands to delivery services like Instacart and Amazon Fresh. Good Eggs, the Bay Area online grocer, signed up more new customers by June than it did in all of 2019, and the average order size has increased more than 25%.

Carol Stevenson was happy to have her daughter and son-in-law (who live in the in-law apartment downstairs from the San Francisco home she shares with her husband) take over much of the cooking during shelter-in-place. But she really missed going to the grocery store, which her children asked her not to do. “I’m 73, I raised two kids and worked full time, so I was sort of done cooking for someone else,” she says. “But grocery shopping is my favorite household task.” She grew up with a grandfather in the grocery business and liked the choice and control of doing it herself. “I felt like I lost a lot of agency,” she says.

Stevenson is back to doing some in-person shopping, but other changes are likely to endure. Bulk buying may stick around even after the coronavirus (one dad said his family was on their second 100-pound bag of flour), and given the economic strain of the pandemic, many people have switched to Walmart and Costco for their groceries

Cheng, of Star Anise Foods, has also seen changes in her business. Before COVID, an instant pho noodle soup was a top seller, and while it’s still popular, Cheng says the company has seen an uptick in its light cooking line, “where you throw whatever you have in the fridge into a sauce with brown rice noodles.” Instead of instant food, people want to cook, though maybe not from scratch.

And outdoor dining now feels like a civic duty. Many Bay Area residents say they regularly order takeout to support neighborhood restaurants. Cynthia Solis Yi, director of earned income at nonprofit kitchen incubator La Cocina, thinks some of our eating behaviors have likely changed permanently over the last eight months. “Even with a vaccine, you’ll be reluctant to eat from a salad bar,” she says. “When tech companies do open their kitchens again, they’ll look different. No one is reaching into a big jar of trail mix again.”

Indeed.