Restaurants are giving out fake recipes to keep the customers' craving alive amid Covid-19 lockdown

Fast-food craving is probably the most prevalent malaise that has gone unexamined as attention must remain focused on the Covid-19 pandemic. Those finger-lickin’ images splashed all over social media will probably be linked later to a latent yearning for banished (and vanished) fast-food treats. The flip side is that the weeks of enforced lockdown could become the inadvertent catalyst for en masse junk-food de-addiction.

That could explain why quick service restaurants (QSR) and casual dining chains in the west are displaying a sudden willingness to share jealously guarded recipes of hot sellers, from McDonalds’ Egg McMuffin to Wagamama’s chicken katsu curry bowls. Maybe that is what (spin)doctors have ordered, to keep their fans’ appetites whetted for the real thing.

A more compelling reason for such candour, however, could be the trend of ‘cocooning’, or locked-down cravers trying to reproduce on-trade favourites in their own kitchens. Some of them must have got uncomfortably close to the Real McNugget and the ‘fakeaway’ versions garnering rave reviews online could have warranted the rearguard action of releasing recipes. But KFC taking the battle into home kitchens by offering to grade uploaded photos of replicated versions, acerbic Gordon Ramsay-style, could be a counter-intuitive move for others to follow too.