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Unless you produce your own food, some combination of you and other humans has to transport it from wherever it’s made to your stomach. In normal circumstances, most people don’t dwell much on that fact, but during a pandemic, it makes deciding just how to procure sustenance highly fraught: Because every option comes with potential negative consequences for you and others—cashiers, shelf stockers, delivery people, restaurant workers, and so on—it can seem like there’s no right way to get dinner.   

For example, is it better to cook at home or get food from a restaurant? Getting takeout means leaving the house and potentially spreading or catching the coronavirus (and ordering delivery means shifting that risk onto someone else). Meanwhile, sticking to your own kitchen is safer for everyone involved—but it means not financially supporting workers and businesses that may desperately need the money. And if you cook, you still have to get groceries somehow, which again means either you or someone else going outside to transport the food. 

What follows is an attempt to work through specific food dilemmas such as this one, including the ethics of getting delivery and how often you should go to the grocery store. In a lot of cases, there are no right answers, but establishing all the trade-offs makes it possible to feed yourself in a way that doesn’t feel wrong.   

Grocery-store, restaurant, and delivery workers, though, are all at risk of getting or spreading the virus no matter which choice you make. Even if you opt out of delivery and spare a courier another potentially risky trip, leaving home to get groceries yourself still heightens others’ risk. “You may be in the store for half an hour, but the workers are there for eight-, nine-, 10-hour shifts, so they have the potential for far more interactions with people,” said Elizabeth Carlton, a professor at the Colorado School of Public Health. Moreover, working conditions can vary greatly, so gauging the risk to whole categories of workers is really hard.   

 Read the full story at The Atlantic.