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1. Surf instructors help Candace Chestnut, of Los Angeles, ride a wave for her first time as she takes lessons. 2. Nicole Mitchell, of Charlotte, N.C., celebrates with fellow beginners after riding a wave. 3. Surf instructors Mike Bennett, left, and Shanden Brutsch, right, cheer on Cassandra Winston as she rides her first wave.
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Allen J. Schaben
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Last Friday, in a bathroom at the Newark airport, I encountered a phrase I hadn’t seen in a long time: Stop the spread. It accompanied an automatic hand-sanitizing station, which groaned weakly when I passed my hand beneath it, dispensing nothing. Presumably set up in the early pandemic, the sign and dispenser had long ago become relics. Basically everyone seemed to ignore them. Elsewhere in the terminal, I spotted prompts to maintain a safe distance and reduce overcrowding, while maskless passengers sat elbow-to-elbow in waiting areas and mobbed the gates.
Beginning in 2020, COVID signage and equipment were everywhere. Stickers indicated how to stand six feet apart. Arrows on the grocery-store floor directed shopping-cart traffic. Plastic barriers enforced distancing. Masks required signs dotted store windows, before they were eventually replaced by softer pronouncements such as masks recommended and masks welcome. Such messages—some more helpful than others—became an unavoidable part of navigating pandemic life.
Four years later, the coronavirus has not disappeared—but the health measures are gone, and so is most daily concern about the pandemic. Yet much of this COVID signage remains, impossible to miss even if the messages are ignored or outdated. In New York, where I live, notices linger in the doorways of apartment buildings and stores. A colleague in Woburn, Massachusetts, sent me a photo of a sign reminding park-goers to gather in groups of 10 or less; another, in Washington, D.C., showed me stickers on the floors of a bookstore and pier bearing faded reminders to stay six feet apart. “These are artifacts from another moment that none of us want to return to,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU and the author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, told me. All these fliers, signs, and stickers make up the “ghost architecture” of the pandemic, and they are still haunting America today.
That some COVID signage persists makes sense, considering how much of it once existed. According to the COVID-19 Signage Archive, one store in Key West had a reminder to mask up during the initial Omicron wave: Do not wear it above chin or below nose. In the summer of 2021, a placard at a Houston grocery store indicated that the shopping carts had been “sanitizd.” And in November 2020, you could have stepped on a customized welcome mat in Washington, D.C., that read Thank you for practicing 6 ft social distancing. Eli Fessler, a software engineer who launched the crowdsourced archive in December 2020, wanted “to preserve some aspect of [COVID signage] because it felt so ephemeral,” he told me. The gallery now comprises nearly 4,000 photos of signs around the world, including submissions he received as recently as this past October: a keep safe distance sign in Incheon, South Korea.
No doubt certain instances of ghost architecture can be attributed to forgetfulness, laziness, or apathy. Remnants of social-distancing stickers on some New York City sidewalks appear too tattered to bother scraping away; outdoor-dining sheds, elaborately constructed but now barely used, are a hassle to dismantle. A faded decal posted at a restaurant near my home in Manhattan depicts social-distancing guidelines for ordering takeout alcohol that haven’t been relevant since 2020. “There’s a very human side to this,” Fessler said. “We forget to take things down. We forget to update signs.”
But not all of it can be chalked up to negligence. Signs taped to a door can be removed as easily as they are posted; plastic barriers can be taken down. Apart from the ease, ghost architecture should have disappeared by now because spotting it is never pleasant. Even in passing, the signs can awaken uncomfortable memories of the early pandemic. The country’s overarching response to the pandemic is what Klinenberg calls the “will not to know”—a conscious denial that COVID changed life in any meaningful way. Surely, then, some examples are left there on purpose, even if they evoke bad memories.
When I recently encountered the masks required sign that’s still in the doorway of my local pizza shop, my mind flashed back to more distressing times: Remember when that was a thing? The sign awakened a nagging voice in my brain reminding me that I used to mask up and encourage others to do the same, filling me with guilt that I no longer do so. Perhaps the shop owner has felt something similar. Though uncomfortable, the signs may persist because taking them down requires engaging with their messages head-on, prompting a round of fraught self-examination: Do I no longer believe in masking? Why not? “We have to consciously and purposely say we no longer need this,” Klinenberg told me.
Outdated signs are likely more prevalent in places that embraced public-health measures to begin with, namely bluer areas. “I would be surprised to see the same level of ghost architecture in Florida, Texas, or Alabama,” Klinenberg said. But ghost architecture seems to persist everywhere. A colleague sent a photo of a floor sticker in a Boise, Idaho, restaurant that continues to thank diners for practicing social distancing. These COVID callbacks are sometimes even virtual: An outdated website for a Miami Beach spa still encourages guests to physically distance and to “swipe your own credit card.”
Most of all, the persistence of ghost architecture directly reflects the failure of public-health messaging to clearly state what measures were needed, and when. Much of the signage grew out of garbled communication in the first place: “Six feet” directives, for example, far outlasted the point when public-health experts knew it was a faulty benchmark for stopping transmission.
The rollback of public-health precautions has been just as chaotic. Masking policy has vacillated wildly since the arrival of vaccines; although the federal COVID emergency declaration officially ended last May, there was no corresponding call to end public-health measures across the country. Instead, individual policies lapsed at different times in different states, and in some cases were setting-specific: California didn’t end its mask requirement for high-risk environments such as nursing homes until last April. Most people still don’t know how to think about COVID, Klinenberg said, and it’s easier to just leave things as they are.
If these signs are the result of confusing COVID messaging, they are also adding to the problem. Prompts to wash or sanitize your hands are generally harmless. In other situations, however, ghost architecture can perpetuate misguided beliefs, such as thinking that keeping six feet apart is protective in a room full of unmasked people, or that masks alone are foolproof against COVID. To people who must still take precautions for health reasons, the fact that signs are still up, only to be ignored, can feel like a slap in the face. The downside to letting ghost architecture persist is that it sustains uncertainty about how to behave, during a pandemic or otherwise.
The contradiction inherent in ghost architecture is that it both calls to mind the pandemic and reflects a widespread indifference to it. Maybe people don’t bother to take the signs down because they assume that nobody will follow them anyway, Fessler said. Avoidance and apathy are keeping them in place, and there’s not much reason to think that will change. At this rate, COVID’s ghost signage may follow the same trajectory as the defunct Cold War–era nuclear-fallout-shelter signs that lingered on New York City buildings for more than half a century, at once misleading observers and reminding them that the nuclear threat, though diminished, is still present.
The signs I saw at the Newark airport seemed to me hopelessly obsolete, yet they still stoked unease about how little I think about COVID now, even though the virus is still far deadlier than the flu and other common respiratory illnesses. Passing another stop the spread hand-sanitizing station, I put my palm under the dispenser, expecting nothing. But this time, a dollop of gel squirted into my hand.
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Yasmin Tayag
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If you have children, you probably already understand them to be very adorable food-waste machines. If you do not have children, I have five, so let me paint you a picture. On a recent Tuesday night, the post-dinner wreckage in my house was devastating. Peas were welded to the floor; my 5-year-old had decided that he was allergic to chicken and left a pile of it untouched on his plate. After working all day, making the meal in the first place, and then spending dinnertime convincing five irrational, tiny people to try their vegetables, I didn’t even have the energy to convince them to take their plates into the kitchen, let alone box up their leftovers for tomorrow. So I did exactly what I’m not supposed to do, according to the planet’s future: I threw it all out, washed the dishes, and flopped into bed, exhausted.
Tens of millions of tons of food that leaves farms in the United States is wasted. Much of that waste happens at the industrial level, during harvesting, handling, storage, and processing, but a staggering amount of food gets wasted at home, scraped into the garbage can at the end of a meal or tossed after too long in the crisper drawer. According to a 2020 Penn State University study, almost a third of the food that American households buy is wasted.
On the individual level, all of this waste is expensive, annoying, and gross. In the aggregate, it’s unfortunate, given that about a fifth of American families reported not having enough to eat last year. But it’s also bad for the planet. Every step of the modern food-production process generates greenhouse gases. Before they ended up in the trash, all of those slimy vegetables and uneaten hunks of chicken were grown using water and farmland and pesticides and fertilizer. They were most likely packed in plastic and paper, and then stored and transported using fossil fuels and electricity. Throwing away food means throwing away all of the resources it requires, but the problems don’t end there: As food rots in landfills and open dumps, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. According to the United Nations, food loss and waste accounts for about 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.
Some amount of food waste is probably inevitable, especially with young kids. “The very youngest children … are still kind of understanding what they like, with novel foods and healthy foods. We want to give them that opportunity,” Brian Roe, a farm-management professor and the director of the Food Waste Collaborative at Ohio State University, told me. “You need to waste a little bit of food while they develop palates.”
More saliently, Roe’s research indicates that food waste is often inversely proportional to spare time: We get busy, we eat out, and our well-intended groceries head to the trash. His data show a 280 percent increase in food waste from February 2021 to February 2022, right as pandemic restrictions were loosening and people with the income to do so started eating out more. In other words, as soon as people had the option to eat without cooking, they did. “When you’ve got more kids and more craziness and a time crunch, all of a sudden, what you thought was going to be 40 minutes to prep dinners is out the window,” he told me. Thus, “those ingredients are more likely to go to waste.”
Wasting less food starts at the grocery store: Most financially secure families simply need less food than they buy. The sustainability consultant Ashlee Piper told me that she likes to take a picture of her fridge and pantry before heading to the store, in order to avoid buying duplicates. She also recommends shopping not for your “aspirational life” but for the one you are actually living: If, realistically, you’re never going to make your own pasta or pack gourmet lunches for your kids, don’t shop for those meals. “There’s no lunchbox sheriff,” she told me. (Comforting!)
Once you unpack the groceries, experts say to be strategic about making perishable foods highly visible, accessible, and appetizing. Julia Rockwell, a San Francisco mom and sustainability expert, recommends an “Eat Me” station, whether it’s a basket, a bowl, a tray, or a section of the refrigerator, which she says is especially helpful for teenagers, inclined as they are to “go full claws into the fridge.” A designated place for high-urgency snacks reminds them, “Here’s a yogurt that you missed, or here’s a half of a banana, or here’s the things let’s go to first,” she told me. Leftovers and soon-to-spoil foods also make great dinners or lunches for younger kids, who will be happy to snack on items that don’t necessarily go together in a traditional meal.
If you’re cleaning out your fridge and pantry strictly according to expiration dates, stop: If a food is past its expiration date but looks and smells fine, it probably is; most of the time, expiration dates are an indicator of quality, not safety. (Deli meats and unpasteurized cheeses are notable exceptions.) Brush up on the language of food packaging—“best by” is just a suggestion, while “expiration” is the date the manufacturer has decided when quality will begin to decline. Frozen food is pretty much always safe, and packaged foods and canned goods without swelling, dents, or rust can last for years, though they may not taste as good. (You can conceal your less-than-fresh nonperishables in another meal, such as adding older ground beef from the freezer to a chili. When in doubt about, say, an older vegetable, Roe says, “coat it in panko and fry it up.”)
And whatever you’re feeding your kids, experts repeatedly told me, you should probably be feeding them less. How many blueberries does your pickiest kid really eat at the breakfast table? And how many do you put on their plate that you wish they’d eat? The difference in this pint-size math equation is an essential factor in food-waste management for families. Jennifer Anderson, a mom and registered dietician, discourages “wishful portions.” “You know the amount you want your child to eat, so you put that much on their plate … Take that amount, cut it in half, then cut it in half again,” she told me. “A practical portion is a quarter of what you wish they would eat.”
Since talking to Anderson, I’ve kept her advice in mind. I still spend more time than I’d like trying to convince my kids to eat yellow peppers when they’ve decided the red ones are the only acceptable type. But the math is simple: Smaller portions on their plate means fewer leftovers in the trash later, and I’ve noticed a real difference.
And I still find myself dumping plates of picked-over food into the trash or compost. But I move on to the next meal with more grace and less guilt for having helped my kids become little stewards of a healthier planet. I want them to understand that our food comes from somewhere, and that not eating it has consequences. That doesn’t mean guilting them for not liking dragon fruit, or demanding that they clean their plate at every meal, or scaring them about climate change. It’s more like bringing them along, helping them participate in a family project with planetary implications. Wish me luck with the peppers.
This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.
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Alexandra Frost
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