Baking sourdough bread?  Soothing pandemic anxiety with chocolate?  How has COVID-19 impacted your relationship with food?

The University of Kentucky, in collaboration with the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and institutes in more than 30 other countries, is launching a second iteration of the large-scale #CoronaCookingSurvey, a research project that has received worldwide recognition and amassed more than 37,000 participants around the world. 

Earlier this year, the food-related impacts of the pandemic began to emerge: people stared panic buying foods, started baking their own bread every weekend, and planned food shopping trips more carefully than before. Now the pandemic is slowly creeping up on the holidays. How might this change our traditional holiday meals? 

Researchers at the University of Kentucky along with the FOOMS (Food, Media & Society) team at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) are launching a second wave of their large-scale #CoronaCookingSurvey, which studies the impact of COVID-19 on how we perceive and deal with food and food media. Specifically, they want to know how various shifts caused by this pandemic have affected our buying, cooking, eating, and food interaction habits, including our holiday food traditions.

Prof. Dr. Charlotte De Backer, project leader of this study: “In some countries COVID-19 is gaining traction again, and lockdown measures have been reinforced. We’ve seen that this has caused many people to worry about the holidays, and whether they will still be able to see their friends or family and enjoy a meal with them during these festive times…Our study wants to investigate whether this feeling of anxiety about the holidays is widely shared around the world, and also aims to see whether COVID-19 still has the same impact on our food-related habits as it did back in April, when we first launched this project. With our results, we want to emphasize how this pandemic is still affecting our everyday food habits, and to gain an understanding of how the lasting measures related to COVID-19 affect our nutrition in various ways long-term.”

The survey is open to anyone over the age of 18 and will be available until December 15th 2020. 

To participate in the survey, click here. 

For more information about the #CoronaCookingSurvey project, click here.