In many cities right now, supporting your local restaurant means ordering takeout or delivery, but even if you’re not dining in a crowded restaurant, you may be wondering how vigilant you should be about the food that comes via these delivery services. (You may be wondering about sanitizing your groceries, too, which we’ve also addressed.) Here are the best things you can do when you’re receiving delivered restaurant food.
Practice social distancing with delivery people
Choose contactless delivery when possible (which keeps you from ever coming in direct proximity to a delivery person) for both your safety and the delivery person’s sake. In Wuhan, China, where delivery services fed a city on lockdown, authorities required neighborhoods to establish contactless delivery points to eliminate the need to hand food off, which can help reduce risk for both the delivery person and the recipient.
If you’re ordering directly from the restaurant, indicate to the order taker to have food delivered and set at your door, and pay in advance with a credit card. If you’re ordering through an app, Postmates has introduced contactless delivery, and Grubhub and Seamless allow you to personalize your order with instructions. Domino’s has also instituted contactless delivery by allowing customers to indicate in the delivery instruction box where they want the driver to leave their order.
Once the delivery person arrives and sets down your food, wait for them to leave and for any potential respiratory droplets to disperse (let them move at least 6 feet away) and then bring your food inside. And, of course, tip well. Any job that has a high volume of close contact can increase a person’s risk of getting sick.
How should you deal with food that comes through the door?
You probably don’t need to hose down your bags and boxes with alcohol before you touch them.
The CDC says most transmission is thought to be happening person to person through respiratory droplets that enter the nose, mouth, and eyes. Because the virus is so new, not much research on its lifespan exists yet. A small study done by members of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Princeton, and UCLA found that the virus that causes COVID-19 can live on cardboard for up to 24 hours. But the CDC says that although it is possible for a person to get it from touching surfaces, that isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.
Discussing sanitization of mail delivery, which also involves paper and plastic surfaces, in an interview for The New York Times (Wirecutter’s parent company), food safety specialist Ben Chapman of North Carolina State University suggests just washing hands after handling packaging rather than spraying everything down with disinfectant, which is still hard to find a supply of in many places. (The food safety team at North Carolina State University has also compiled more guidance indicating that the risk of contracting the coronavirus from delivery packaging is very low.)
And you probably don’t need to worry about the food (or at least, no more worry than you would usually have about food prep). The CDC notes that no current evidence shows the transmission of COVID-19 through food. “In general the chances of getting this from cooked food, for example, even if someone who is infected is handling it, would generally be very small,” said Stephen Morse, professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on March 25. Serious Eats has put together a great guide to food safety in the time of coronavirus, too, noting that restaurant professionals are in the business of prioritizing hygienic food preparation, coronavirus or no.
Always wash your hands
The best thing you can do with delivered food is to practice the same rules of good hygiene you’ve been practicing since the beginning: Dispose of the packaging and wash your hands thoroughly or use hand sanitizer before you eat. In all likelihood, your chicken tikka masala is fine, but clean hands are always the safest bet.
Ganda Suthivarakom
