![]() ![]() ![]() Now, suddenly, ordering in seems exquisitely luxurious. For those lucky enough to afford it and live within abundant reach of it, restaurant food was just there, a taken-for-granted part of life, whether a ninety-nine-cent pizza slice or a two-hundred-dollar bistro dinner. In the world before mass self-quarantine, letting a restaurant do the cooking was such an easy, pleasurable efficiency that it hardly registered as an efficiency at all. It has also, more quietly, prompted a striking awakening to the relentless labor of domestic life, including the job of feeding ourselves. The coronavirus pandemic currently raging throughout the United States has brought into sharp focus many extraordinary truths about our society: the insufficiency of the American safety net, the catastrophic failure of the Trump Administration to protect its citizens from a foreseeable threat, the ease and speed with which the human body can founder. Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. But compared to, say, hunting for a meal on the Andean steppe to stave off the starvation of my babies? I couldn’t really complain. Was it worth it? The Crunchwrap Supreme was horrible, limp and room temperature the half-life of deliciousness for Taco Bell food is so infinitesimal that it arguably has no business providing delivery in the first place. With a tip to the driver, the total cost for my $12.97 meal, plus the privilege of not having to go get it myself, came to $26 even, which is kind of a lot for Taco Bell. The total for the food was $12.97 (in addition to the Crunchwrap Supreme, my husband and I got a soft taco combo and a bean-and-cheese burrito) there was a $3.99 delivery fee, set by the restaurant, and a $1.62 charge for the delivery platform (“This 12.5% fee helps Seamless cover operating costs”), plus New York City sales tax of 8.875%. I did so little to get this meal, and I paid so little for it. Days and weeks and months before that, others had sown and harvested wheat and lettuce, raised animals and milked or slaughtered them, and switched on the machines that pressed tortillas and shredded cheese. Meanwhile, at a Taco Bell a mile and a half away, a brigade of workers prepared, cooked, wrapped, packaged, and handed off my meal to a delivery person, who transported it directly to my front door. ![]() Then I sat on my sofa, glancing occasionally from television to phone to check, with growing impatience, whether my food was en route. How lucky we are to live in an age of near-effortless, near-instant sustenance! That night, I had grown hungry, briefly interrogated my hunger until I detected a desire for stoner tacos, and then swiped open my iPhone, tapped into an app, selected exactly what food I wanted, and flicked my index finger in a brief rat-a-tat of microgestures to complete the order. It was my Seamless delivery driver, more than an hour past the app’s estimated arrival time, bearing a Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme. At this point, my doorbell rang, and I walked away from the TV. The puma grips the fallen guanaco’s neck with her heavy teeth, and begins to drag its massive, flaccid corpse up and over the high plains of the southern Andes, toward the spot where her hungry cubs are waiting. A third time, she brings a guanaco down, but her long pursuit has brought her dangerously deep into another cat’s territory. Shrugging off the injury, she launches a second failed attempt on the herd. Eventually, it succeeds in hurling the puma off its body the cat slams to the ground, now with a bloody gash in her foreleg. The guanaco, three times the cat’s size, bucks and kicks wildly, its fur ripping away in gauzy chunks under the cat’s claws. She sees her moment, and gives chase to one of the animals, launching herself into the air and onto the terrified creature’s back. As Sir David Attenborough narrates and dramatic music mounts, a puma in the Chilean highlands stalks a herd of llama-like guanacos, watching the graceful creatures with her flat, unnerving predator’s gaze. The “South America” episode of the BBC series “Seven Worlds, One Planet” opens with a sequence of harrowing intensity. ![]()
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