Scared by Food, Seeking Elegant Meals with a Side of Safety

My email and snail mail boxes have been have been chockablock with food news. First all the negative headlines: Listeria affecting everything from sprouts to ice creams, then bird flu moving from ducks in the Northwest to chickens in Iowa, then the coverage of the glacial pace of the FDA's implementation of food safety modernization standards. But then, comes some very different alerts:

• There's Kitchensurfing.com (I wrote about in an earlier blog), which brings a chef and food to your door to prepare dinner for $25 a person
• A service called Munchery.com, which delivering fresh, nourishing, seasonal, chef-prepared (and! microwavable dinners) to your home daily, on-demand
• And, my own personal favorite, news from the 21 Club that it can now deliver any of its menu items via a service called Caviar! The food is great, but I'm pretty sure I'd miss that dining room with all the toy corporate vehicles suspended from the ceiling

So are we hungering for elegance in our food safety? Or ignoring the worries by outsourcing the selection of ingredients in favor of the Voila! of a curated dining experience?

Home delivery of absolutely everything is on the near horizon. I wonder if there's more than fear of our food supply and a profound desire to be taking care of? Perhaps the more we are able to work, play, study and engage the culture from a secure home base, the less we want to venture out. Call it a hunkering down in the bunker mentality, but it's scary out there.