The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - How About Take Out Tonight? Here's What You Need To Know.

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

Lots of talk .. again today .. about face masks. A moment on the latest.And then time to talk about hospitality workers -- as they try to reposition from in-restaurant dining to take out. It's not an easy transition but many are trying to make it work and they want you to believe in them.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the bridge for this Monday, beginning of yet another week. This will be week four of the Bridge Daily. We started it three weeks ago today, so this begins week four. And it seems like every day there's always something to talk about. You know, when I guess one of the last weeklies we did that touched on this subject of the coronavirus,

I titled, To Mask or Not to Mask. That was February 28th. And doesn't that feel like a lifetime ago? Well, at that time, the whole issue of masking or not masking really hadn't come to the forefront a lot. I mean, there was definitely some people wearing masks. I'd just come back from a flight from overseas, and there were some people on the flight

who were wearing masks, including one flight attendant. And there had been a lot I'd seen at both Heathrow Airport, where I'd been flying through, and at Pearson International when I arrived back in Toronto. But we reminded everybody at that time what was the conventional wisdom, which was you only wore a mask if you yourself were infected, that you were giving off the virus or that had the potential to give off the virus.

So it was really to protect others, not to protect you. That was kind of the way things were said. Now, there have been some back and forth as this virus has become much more prevalent right across the world and across Canada and is taking its toll on a daily, hourly basis. There's some being back and forth on whether or not masks should be worn all the time. The basic principle still appears to be the same. Masks are to prevent others from getting something you may have.

But there's now a feeling that masks can be worn more often than just for that reason. That if you go to the grocery store, you might want to wear a mask. Because you never know what could happen that somehow might impact on your life. And so what they're suggesting is if you can get a hold of one of those non-surgical masks, not the ones that are in dire need at hospitals, although I'm sure hospitals will take any kind of mask they can get right now,

at least hospitals that are running low. But you can also make your own mask, and there's lots of different ways to do that. And, you know, some are clearly better than others, and you go to a designated spot to look at that, whether it's Canadian Health Department's website or whether it's the Center for Disease Control website or the WHO website. They all have videos on how to make a mask,

and actually some of them are very simple. And I guess the principle is it's no harm in wearing one of these. But the basic way to combat this virus is still much simpler than that. Stay at home. Keep physically distant from others. You've noticed that change in language, right? It's always social distancing. Now it's kind of physical distancing.

They felt social distancing might be confusing to some. Physical distancing isn't. Keep your physical distance. What do they say? A couple of meters, length of a hockey stick, length of an alligator, apparently, they're saying in Florida. But, you know, six feet, two meters.

Keep that distance, at least, from others. If you go out for a walk, if you go shopping, if you go grocery shopping. And, of course, wash your hands. Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. If you go out, wash your hands. If you found yourself touching a few things that could run the risk of giving you some sense of the virus, wash your hands and wash them for at least 20 seconds and scrub them and,

you know, go everywhere. Get in between the fingers. Make sure you wash your thumbs. Make sure you clean under your fingernails. Do all those things. Those are still the key elements of fighting COVID-19. The mask. Clearly some people feel comfortable wearing a mask, and if they feel comfortable wearing a mask, okay. But read up on it.

There's lots of stuff online about masks and how protective they may be and how they can give you false comfort in some cases. So keep all of that in mind when you make your decision on the mask situation. And clearly, if you are sharing a home with somebody who has the disease, you absolutely want to make sure that you're using a mask when you go to comfort them, taking them food, taking them whatever it may be. You want to use a mask when you go to comfort them, taking them food, taking them whatever it may be. You want to use a mask. The other element of this whole mask situation is

you may not know if you've got it. You know, the pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic conditions of this disease suggest that there are people who never, asymptomatic, never developed the symptoms and yet have had the disease and therefore can transmit it to others. Pre-symptomatic is those days before it becomes obvious through symptoms that you have the disease. During that period, you also may be giving it off to others. More reason for wearing a mask. Anyway, I'm going on en masse, and I didn't mean to.

I just found it was interesting that one of the very first broadcasts we did on this was called To Mask or Not to Mask. And in that period since February 28th, views have changed. As we learn more and more about COVID-19. And I think that's worth remembering. Meanwhile, we need masks. And there's evidence that we're going to get more masks in the next day or two. Some from the States, some from China.

But they're not here yet. And until they are here, the places that desperately need them, like hospitals, health care facilities, will not be relaxed in terms of how they feel about masks. They need them. They want them. And we've got to get them to them. All right. One of the things I want to do this week,

because I know you get your news on news broadcasts. This isn't a news broadcast. This is a podcast where we get to talk about whatever we want to talk about and try and give some sense of the situation beyond the headlines of the moment. And so what I wanted to talk briefly about today was food. All right, last week we talked about truckers, we talked about farmers, how important they are as part of the way we're carrying on through all this. Well, one of the possibilities we have and one of the options we have in terms of food is takeout. Now, I haven't done it yet. In three weeks or a month, I guess it's a month now that I've been in some form of,

you know, either self-isolation or close to self-isolation. And I haven't tried it because I've been concerned. Like, how safe is it? You know, how do they actually prepare stuff? How should I feel about takeout food? So today we go to a source on this because I think it's important that we ask some of the basic questions about takeout from somebody who knows.

And Charlotte Langley knows. Charlotte is a Canadian food steward. She's an ambassador chef for the Marine Stewardship Council. She knows her food. She knows about restaurants. She knows about takeout. So I wanted to ask her some very basic questions about takeout in this time. Because I know some of you are thinking about it, are thinking about it as a way of taking a break and cooking every night for a family or for whomever.

And you're thinking, should we try it? Is it worth it? Am I taking a risk if I do it? And why is it important if I do it? So here we go. It's not long, a short interview with Charlotte Langley, and I want you to listen to it. Let me know what you think.

Here we go. All right, Charlotte, let me start by trying to get a sense of how difficult is it to change over from, you know, a traditional restaurant into a takeout service? Well, the challenges are, of course, is that you have to kind of close the doors and reassess how you're cleaning and taking care of the space. You want the people that are working with you in the space, as well as the people you're delivering to, to be in the most sanitized, safe environment as possible. So it's a lot of new skills or an advancement of the skills we already have. How busy is it so far? Well, it depends on the restaurant scenario.

Like four out of five restaurants have closed in Toronto, for example, and the ones that are left open for takeout delivery and or contactless delivery are very busy in the sense of they are producing a lot of volume, but they are seeing a dive about 45% in revenue on their annual basis so far since COVID-19 has started. The big question for a lot of people comes down to how safe is it? I totally agree with that and that is a huge thing that we've all been thinking about. So I've been speaking to a few of my colleagues and friends that are doing delivery services producing for frontline workers as well as sort of pivoting as restaurant operators and they have taken extreme precautions

to write new procedures and then do training with their staff in-house. So just looking at the things that we often overlook, you know, utilizing the doorknobs and accessing more sinks, like people are washing their hands more often. That means those guest bathrooms or the staff bathrooms are being used more. The surfaces, they have to stagger break times as well as entry times because you can't have more than, depending on the square footage of your location, certain amount of people in the room at a time.

So it's really great. It's a whole new world of procedures. And the people, the owners and operators are very diligently paying attention to these procedures and creating them to ensure that the safety of the food is made accessible to everybody. And another one of the differences is you're not putting food on plates. You're putting food in boxes or bags or containers of some sort. Now, what is the supply system like for containers? The challenge in the supply system these days is the fact that the majority of our package products come from out of the country.

There are some communities that, or there are some companies that make compostable to-go containers in Toronto, but they're very small and few and probably between the majority of us, you know, use a lot of import export. So people are getting very creative in the sense where they're buying massive amounts of leader containers that are recyclable plastic, that they can be washed and sanitized versus using compostable breakdown containers or styrofoam containers they're a little harder to sanitize you can't apply high heat temperatures or disinfectants to styrofoam or carbone over a

long period of time it will deteriorate so they're finding alternative vessels it's actually sort of containers that we would use in the kitchen to prepare our mise en place anyway. So it's sort of, there is availability of this product for sure. Okay. The bigger question, I guess, in terms of supply is food itself. Yeah. It's a scary one. It is a scary one. And how are you making out on that front?

Well, I'm personally very lucky to have the relationships between a lot of local farmers and producers and artisans in Toronto and the surrounding area. So I feel very, very blessed to be able to call a farmer and say, how can I help? Can I purchase a crop or support you? Can I help sell your produce to my neighbors? What can I do? I think that I was reminded of Victory Gardens. There used to be a lot of the food was being grown and sent overseas to support the military at the time. And now I'm hearing lots of people talking about, I want to grow lettuce in my basement.

I'm going to plant this. I'm going to turn my front yard into this. But when it comes to the food supply chain, you know, they really only say, not to be a fear monger, that we really only have three days if everything's stopped. If the borders closed, if we had no distribution available, we'd have three days of food supply in the city.

So I would say nothing, you know, the hoarding thing is kind of, I'm not really sure how to talk about it. It's very sensitive, but it's very scary because everybody needs to eat. I would say that at this point, supporting our local farmers and producers, as in trying to find opportunities to direct order from those producers, maybe evolving our diets to eating what's grown in our own province. At this point, sort of like the good old days, you put things up and, you know, you went through the seasons. We may be going back to more of a traditional method and approach of eating, which, you know, you can get creative with that.

You can make great things and it's very nourishing and healthy. It's just a bit more planning. You know, that number three days, that started. You're telling me that in a city like Toronto, a big city like Toronto, the supply is cut off. If we had no more access. Three days. No more access to what?

To any foods? To any foods. If we had, like, no delivery, no distribution, no orders. If we were on total lockdown and we had no way to get food to anybody's homes, it would be around three days. Maybe we could stretch it. That's the worst case number. I've heard it up to five, up to a week.

Depends on the scenario. It depends on what happens really. You know, at this point, I think that we are going to find ways to store and pre-process. Like for example, Feed It Forward program is stockpiling food for shelters and food insecure people in the city, 37,000 meals a week, up to every two weeks to store and hold these things. So we have more available. The three-day component is the worst case scenario i've heard this before i have i haven't heard in a while i heard it for the first time the other day and that so i started looking into it and going is that really true everything

was closed we would have not a lot of food supply very quickly um here's the here's the last question. Yeah. It's your chance to kind of pitch to people who are sitting at home, who've been cooking their own meals, who are challenged to try and find some things differently. Isolation for all of us, it can be tough. It goes on you. Yeah, definitely. So why do I think about takeout at this point?

Give me your best pitch. At this point, my best pitch is that we want, when COVID-19 is done and we're all receiving each other on the other side, if we don't support our local farmers, producers, processors, restaurants, that industry, four out of five of them will stay closed forever. There's no way we can utilize the federal government support, as generous as it may be. Loans won't help us.

We need to keep supporting our local producers and our creators. As I say, in times of isolation, we turn to art and music and culture. And chefs are creative. They're working their butts off to ensure that we have safe food as much as possible and support our local communities. So I would say that there's hope for us if we all work together. I think that everyone's doing an amazing job of bending and ordering from your local small producer or a small restaurant

is going to help keep the doors open just a little bit longer, if not permanently. an amazing job of bending and ordering from your local small producer or a small restaurant is going to help you through this just a little bit longer if not permanently well you're right we are all in this together and when we can work together we can find our way out uh charlotte listen thanks so much for this thank you you take care and stay safe thank you you as well. Thanks, Peter. Well, once again, that was Charlotte Langley, chef, co-founder of Scout Canning. She calls that Canada's most modern seafood cannery. Well, you know, I appreciated hearing her views on this subject, and I hope you did as well.

We're going to talk about a couple of other things in the days ahead this week, including this whole issue of are you listening to the news? Is it difficult to listen to the news? Are you listening to the daily news as much as you did or watching it or reading it as much as you did a week ago, two weeks ago, a month ago? Or do you find it just sometimes too difficult that you need to take a break? I told you last week I took a break on the weekend like two weekends ago. I did the same thing this weekend.

I just listened to a minimum amount, one of the Sunday morning programs I watched. And I did a little bit on Saturday. I was watching CBC's coverage of the Prime Minister's daily news conferences. But that was it. I wasn't going by the day, hour by hour, minute by minute. I just at times find it too hard. And I thought I'd take a little break. And I did so on the weekend.

And I'm not watching anywhere near as much as I did today as I was doing a couple of weeks ago. But I wonder about you. And I want to talk about the impact that's having. I've got a special program coming up in the next couple of days by somebody who has been surveying you, trying to get your take on all this in terms of how you're dealing with it, how you're handling it.

I also want to do a program on how we think the world is going to change as a result of this. We are going to come out of this. It is going to happen. There are already predictions today about when that'll be. I'm not holding my breath. I think it's going to be quite a while. But it will happen. And when it does, what are we going to be like? How are we going to be like in terms of how we carry on in the world around us? Do we go to big events? Do we go to theaters? Do we get on airplanes?

How will we relate to our fellow citizens? How is the world going to change? Because it's definitely going to change. All right. That's it for this first episode of the week. Glad you joined us. We've got much more coming up through the week. I'm Peter Mansbridge. If you want to write on any of these thoughts, don't be shy.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been the Bridge Daily. And guess what? We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.