Here's How The Pandemic Changed Food For Nigella Lawson

How did the COVID-19 pandemic change food for Nigella Lawson? As we now know all too well, it completely upended people's routines. People are staying at home to work, if they didn't lose their jobs entirely. We also lost a lot of the activities we took pleasure from, too: family outings to the movie theater, yoga classes, and dinners with friends at a favorite restaurant. If you stop and think about it, the whole lockdown experience has been a huge bummer.

One thing we've been able to hold onto, however, is the ritual of preparing and eating food — something the British author and TV personality considers in her new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, which Lawson wrote while in lockdown (via Penguin Books). The book came out in the UK last year and arrives in the U.S. on April 20 (via Twitter). If the mantra "cook, eat, repeat" sounds like an echo of lockdown drudgery to you, Lawson's book suggests that it doesn't have to be that way. The book's title is "more than just a mantra," Lawson says on her website. "'Cook, eat, repeat' is the story of my life."

Speaking to Penguin Books, Lawson explained how writing her new book in lockdown helped her see how important food's role is in our lives. "I did feel it really heightened my reflections on the importance of food to make a difference to the emotional tenor of the day and our lives," she revealed. "It became so clear that in these very formless days when there was a shapelessness to them, it was food that actually gave us structure and gave a sense of not being in that sort of free floating anxiety state."

Lawson went on to say that if cooking at home was becoming a tedious chore, then a good cookbook can fix that. Cook, Eat, Repeat includes more than 50 new recipes, according to Lawson's website. "In order to not find it too challenging, but not too boring in terms of cooking food day in, day out, you've got to have a balance between cooking familiar recipes and cooking the odd new one," Lawson continued.

Despite the challenges and the possible boredom that comes with cooking at home every day, 71 percent of people surveyed said they would continue to cook more at home after the pandemic, according to the food and beverage PR firm Hunter (via PR Newswire). It sounds like a lot of people have already gotten the message found in Lawson's Cook, Eat, Repeat.