Almost certainly. If guests were required to be vaccinated and to get tested, that’s probably true of staff as well.

But Delta. So that end of it shouldn’t be discounted, distancing works best in combo with other shit. And it’d be an important plan b sort of thing.

If I’m buying tomatoes out of season I’ll look for those “Campari” or other mid sized cocktail tomatoes. They tend to be much better off season like cherry tomatoes are. But they’re big enough for slicing. The purple ones are good as well. 

Salting them and letting them sit for a bit tend to be the textural improvement you need. For one tomatoes are much better when they’re seasoned. But the salt pulls off some of the moisture and softens and evens everything out. So you end up with a tomato that’s less mushy or mealy, still soft but a little denser.

The…

Maybe try to find better ones? Often the culprit there is a jar that’s been open too long. But good ones are plenty firm and certainly not slimy. Whole peppers tend to be higher quality than slices or pieces.

Good roasted red peppers are nice and firm, and certainly not slimy.

And I’ve never seen a roasted red pepper that hadn’t been skinned, that’s part of why they’re roasted.

I remember the general quality of tomatoes at my college’s dining hall and various “cafes”.

You 100% did not eat those fucking tomatoes.

Some level of people getting up and moving around is involved in this by nature. Though if you’ve ever watched any of things, they’re not exactly an everyone mingles sort of thing once the “ceremony” starts.

But you’d be kinda shocked at the sort of staff numbers needed to pull this sort of shit off. Not only cater…

It isn’t just “harder to spread”. It is significantly, significantly less likely that a vaccinated person will get infected. Even if directly exposed, and even with Delta.

There is always a chance, with any vaccine, that some individuals might not develop the level of immunity needed to prevent infection. But with…

The virus is airborne. If you’re in the same room, it kinda doesn’t really matter how far away you are.

Agnosticism is the position that it can not be known whether deities exist or not.

Atheism isn’t a “belief system”. You could describe it as a belief, but to a certain extent it is a lack of belief. A negative space, a vacuum.

A tree is an atheist. Babies are atheist. There are religions that are technically or even vocally atheist.

That’s kinda common. Celery powder, and celery extract/juice being a plant product have a varied nitrate content. Different plants, different fields, different seasons are gonna have different concentrations. So early on products were often wildly inconsistent, or had to be reformulated.

More of just an old school thing. Mid Atlantic it’s mostly presented as an Amish and Penn Dutch thing, it’s a pretty big New England thing. And the internet seems to think it’s Southern food, cause all food is Southern if you check the internet.

Dude it's canned pie filling. No one is being wildly creative here, and it's not terribly surprising that cooked apples exist in cans. 

There’s nothing “synthetic” about the nitrates involved here. It’s just pure Sodium Nitrite or nitrate. It’s about as unnatural as the sodium chloride you sprinkle on you food. IIRC we get a lot of it by reacting mined minerals, and it can be extract from plants.

Yeah but what I’m trying to get at is why you see one and not the other these days. 90% chance the difference is labelling convention.

Like I said it’s a thing. Even you weren’t into it.

and I think the USDA shut some of those brands down/forced them to change their labels.

The butcher tells me that they put the slabs of bacon through a brine wash with celery extracts and then, “Into whichever sugar, and it cures like preserving meat in salt, like they ‘dry cure’ expensive caviars,”

A bit you missed is that the vegetable sources used to cure “uncured” products (which almost always celery powder) often have much, much higher concentrations of nitrates than would typically be added to cured meats.