If Only Banana Bread Cured COVID-19

Kylie Masterson

Quarantine was a difficult time for everybody, especially since isolation and confinement isn’t natural to humans. With this being said, of course some weird things were bound to happen. However, I would’ve never expected one to be the revival of banana bread. It seemed like every time I opened up social media, my feed was filled with people sharing images of their own fresh banana bread. I decided that I needed to try some myself after seeing all the rage, so I emailed my culinary teacher and asked for a recipe on it. Needless to say, like the rest of the world, once I started, I couldn’t stop. While I’ve always loved banana bread, something about having it during quarantine just made it taste ten times better. I had eaten this recipe before, but never enjoyed it like this. It was such a weird thing to grasp. Why did it taste so much better now? All I knew then was that if banana bread was the cure to COVID-19, we would have been out of quarantine in less than a month.

Aware that this trend was participated in by many, I decided to ask a group of 20 people if they joined in it as well. The results were shocking, but somehow not at all. Out of those 20 people, 18 said that they had made banana bread over quarantine. That means that in this group 90% of people were making it over the course of the lockdown. So, once again I asked myself a question: What was it about banana bread over quarantine that influenced so many people to make it as well? 

Coming to think about it now, I realize that it was so much deeper than just the wonderful taste of the banana bread. It was the sense of feeling all together again; knowing that even though we were separated, at least one thing was keeping us unified.  Banana bread became a comfort food for so many people, even if they didn’t realize it. As crazy as it is to think that this treat could make the whole world feel a little less lonely, it truly did deeply impact many. It reminds me of when people are far apart and say to each other, “When you’re missing me, look up at the moon. Look up and know that even when we’re apart, we will always share the same moon.”  So now, if you’re ever feeling lonely, all you need to do is make our own COVID-19 moon, banana bread.