A lot of people right now are struggling financially. Do you have any tips, recipes or resources to help them stretch their food dollars?

Melissa Clark: One of the most popular pantry items that people have been stocking is beans. Whether dried or canned, beans are economical and so incredibly versatile. We wrote a guide to beans a few years ago and it’s never been more apropos. It’s also good to bear in mind that cooking all your meals at home is generally going to be less expensive than eating out. Think about how much one large cappuccino is! You can buy pounds of beans for that $4.75.

[Recipe: Lemony Shrimp and Bean Stew]

The coronavirus has been especially brutal to the hospitality industry. How concerned are you about the effect this will have on restaurants and bars, and do you have any ideas about how to help them and their workers?

Pete Wells: It’s a catastrophe. It’s a catastrophe right now and it will be another kind of catastrophe in three months. The big, immediate problem is that huge numbers of hospitality workers need money to pay their bills and buy food. So many people lost their jobs at the same time that simply filing an unemployment claim became a huge ordeal; state websites were crushed by the traffic. Apparently some people, at least in New York, have to call in to complete their claims, and of course the phone lines are getting crushed, too. All of which can delay getting that first payment, and contributes to this anxiety that sort of surrounds everybody like a toxic fog. There is a mental health crisis in the industry, right now.

Rent was due Wednesday. Groceries have to be paid for — don’t forget that a lot of restaurant people are used to getting at least one meal a day at work. So people who’ve lost their jobs, or have been scaled back to just a few hours a week, need money now, while they wait for unemployment and any other government aid that might or might not trickle down to them. (Aid is almost certainly not going to come for some workers, like the undocumented ones.)

I haven’t seen any good long-term solutions. But I have seen a lot of ways to donate to help in the short term. Some restaurants have set up pages for donations to employees. I’m very interested in the employee-led groups that are also taking donations, like the Service Workers Coalition, which has raised about $50,000 for service workers through Venmo, almost all of it in donations of $20 or less. Another volunteer group has set up a national network for sending “tips” directly to service industry workers; it’s organized by locality, so you can tip somebody in your town or somewhere else. Eater has a long list of resources for hospitality workers.

There are also groups popping up that buy restaurant food and have it sent to health care and emergency workers. This is a nice double play, giving restaurants extra work and thus a need for more employee hours while taking care of the people who are taking care of coronavirus patients under conditions few people imagined a month ago. A lot of them are using the hashtag #feedthefrontline and others are using #feedthefrontlines.