After reading “Life-Changing Garlic Butter Chicken Thighs”, I knew I had a problem.

It was the tenth food article I had read before even getting out of bed. The tsunami of Coronavirus news has been joined by a deluge of food content, some with headlines so desperately gimmicky I am embarrassed by my browser history. In light of the pandemic we have become obsessed with food, and the media is feeding the beast.

The food industry and our relationship with a complex, flawed global food chain deserve intense scrutiny. After all, indiscriminate food safety is how the disease jumped from animals to humans while meat processing plants have become Covid-19 hot spots. I, for one, have been examining and reimagining everything I had taken for granted.

Some of us with the luxury of food security began cooking and experimenting in the kitchen, especially dishes that require an ingredient we never seemed to have enough of pre-Coronavirus: time. My social media feed has been inundated with pictures of sourdough bread, as well as glossy recipe photos and home-cooked attempts at favourite Southeast Asian dishes: beef rendang imbued with earthy spices, fragrant pho, punchy papaya salad, larb flecked with fire-engine red chillis, comforting chicken rice and noodles drowning in rich khao soi broth topped with all the fixings.

If there is a bright spot to all the therapeutic/boredom lockdown cooking, we’ve gained a greater appreciation of the skill and hard work of bakers and pastry chefs, as well as noodle soup vendors and all the other cooks on the front lines of our Southeast Asia travel experiences. Now as I recall experiences through the lens of a pandemic, I see dining out in Southeast Asia in a different light.

Since I have been stuck at home cooking day in and day out, dishwashing is one of my Covid-19 revelations: it just never ends. Today as I tackled yet another pile of dishes, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia. I know that one day in the future I will be back in a soi, hem or floating market scarfing down something incredibly delicious. But what I wholeheartedly yearn for is the luxury of having a pad kra pao, then walking away without having to wash dried egg yolk from the plate, scrub and re-season a wok, dump the oil, clean the grease splatter from the wall and flush my eye with water because, despite washing my hands with soap twice after chopping the chilli, I’ve rubbed my eye and it’s burning like hell. Now when I think upon dining out, it is as much about the clean up as the creation of the food being delivered to my table.

I have lived on and off in Vietnam over the last five years. In a country of almost 100 million people, there’s no pretence at a casual joint such as a noodle soup shop, every empty seat is available so squeeze in. I miss sharing tables with locals. I miss dining solo surrounded by people at the height of a mealtime rush. I would ask the person beside me to pass the bowl of limes. I would sit and slurp and soak up the busy scene.

I miss having a terrific coffee in the most random and remote of places in Vietnam. The roadside sign “ca phe” signals a modern-day caravanserai offering much needed caffeine and rows of hammocks. If it looks sturdy enough, flop down in a hammock and join others resting backs and bums sore from the motorbike. Before the pandemic, I never thought of how enjoyable communal loafing is.

Ernest Hemingway used the expression “a moveable feast” as a metaphor for how the experiences and people of a place make a powerful imprint on a traveller, staying with them for the rest of their life. Sorry chicken thigh recipe, you’re not life changing; travelling abroad and eating with local people is. A life without these frenetic, gregarious dining experiences is hard to imagine, so I dare not think about what will permanently change post-Covid-19 in Vietnam, Southeast Asia and the world.

I know I will savour the freedom as much as the food. I will thank the dishwasher for their service. I will tip them well and maybe shake their hand, if I am allowed.