Takeaway meals from today

TRINBAGONIANS love their belly and they're not ashamed to say so.

So today's reopening of takeaway service - from high-end restaurants to mid-income chicken and chips outlets to the doublesman - is monumental to most citizens.

Yes, people have braved the doubles drought by trying their hand at the indigenous delicacy and then gingerly posting their fare online for friends and family to marvel at, yet will warmly embrace today's return to the full options for dining away from the home-made.

Roti, Chinese food, gyros, stewed chicken and macaroni, and bake and shark will all now be freely bought and sold, from Penal to Parlatuvier to Port of Spain.

We will again experience food as a celebration, not a mere commodity for consumption. It is a chance for random conversation in a food queue or taking a bag of doubles or a box of fries back to your car to share with all within. Oh the excitement of going to buy a takeaway!

Yet, ironically this very love for socialising over food has cast a cloud over the fastfood subsector as interactions in the buying, sharing and consuming of food entail close human contact and opportunities for the virus to be shared with others.

Inevitably, the country saw lockdowns of fast-food outlets, in 2020 and in 2021, to try to combat the spread of covid19, based on a reckoning that outlets could facilitate viral spread.

With the virus arriving in TT early last year, outlets like KFC installed plexiglass screens to try to mitigate virus transmission between customers and staff, plus other covid19 protocols. However despite such steps, the daily infection rates rose and by March 2020 the Government ordered the first shutdown of roadside food vendors, whose protests at inequitable treatment soon led to restaurant closures too. Some restaurants like Trotters innovatively offered delivery service, while one doubles vendor offered a box of disassembled doubles for sale at a gas stations for prompt purchase, minus the usual roadside queue.

This year in April, with rising infections the Prime Minister again ordered the closure of fastfood outlets to try to stem the virus.

For a short while food trucks operated as outlets, with much excited talk on social media about Royal Castle chicken and chips being available at a food truck on the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway. However by May, Dr Rowley stepped in to say these outlets also posed a risk of the spread of covid19 so they had to close too.

So, for over two months people have been unable to buy their favourite fastfood, even by way of a takeaway.

Today that changes. People will be able to indulge their cravings, fastfood workers and itinerant food vendors will be able to again earn a livelihood, and food business owners will try to catch themselves notwithstanding the two months of inactivity.

The nation's essential workers will no longer have to wake up that 30 minutes earlier each day to try to wrangle up something to last the day. They will be able instead to spoil themselves with just that little bit of self-indulgence, surely well-deserved, in the form of a $30 box of chicken and chips, or whatever whets their palate. It will be takeaway, not in-house dining, yet.

The fast-food reopening comes at a time of a gradual reopening of activity nationwide, after last month's starting reopening of book stores as pupils write their CSEC and CAPE exams and buy book lists for September's reopening of schools, and as a CAL flight from Guyana landed on Saturday in the first steps at a managed reopening of national borders.

The fastfood sector reopening also comes the day after TT reached the laudable milestone of having quarter of a million citizens - 250,291 to be exact - having had their first vaccine injection, with another 164,978 people being fully vaccinated with their second shot. More so Sunday also saw notably low rates of new infections (103 cases) and deaths (two people), suggesting good portends for Monday's reopening. Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh on Sunday in a statement deemed the subsector's reopening to be "temporary", which many would read as a call to maintain vigilance in one's interactions at these outlets, continuing the hand sanitising, mask-wearing and social distancing, so as to ensure such places can continue to stay open and continue to keep their central place in the hearts and lives of most of our citizens.