BAGELS!….One of these days I guess I’m going to have to try a bagel when I’m in New York City. My crappy taste buds being what they are, I suppose my reaction is going to be the usual (i.e., “they just taste like bagels to me”), but I’m still curious. It hardly seems plausible that transplanted New Yorkers can’t make good bagels elsewhere in the country, and insufficiently developed consumer taste doesn’t seem like a good explanation for this lack, as it often is for ethnic food of other varieties.
(Can you order a New York City bagel over the internet? I mean, I’m sure you can, but do they survive the shipping process tasting as good as if they were bought locally? Or do I really have to get on a plane and head east to perform this experiment?)
Anyway, this spate of bagel blogging was inspired by a David Bernstein post about bagels over at the Volokh Conspiracy, and what really amused me wasn’t the bagel stuff itself, but Bernstein’s being annoyed that the book he was reading, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, “relies on union sources, the story is completely one-sided; the reader doesn’t get the perspective of any of the bagel bakery owners, just the workers.” We all have our pet peeves, so I guess I shouldn’t laugh, but Bernstein seems constitutionally incapable of ever letting a positive mention of unions pass unnoticed, insisting that every advance in worker rights would have happened anyway due solely to rising union standards. I say: tell it to the janitors, pal. Rising living standards don’t really seem to have helped their cause a helluva lot. In fact, tell it to the median worker in general, who’s made virtually no gains at all over the past three decades despite a near doubling in per capita GDP during the period.
Eh. I guess that just shows that I have some pet peeves too. I still need to try a real NYC bagel one of these days, though. If and when I do, which shop should I try, O commenters?
