Our taste for parsing cultural minutiae of all kinds, but particularly those related to food, is overwhelming right now. There seems to be no better way to crack the codes of culture than by cracking the kind of cultural code you eat with cream cheese. That’s why we have so many pieces, on and off line, on everything from the feminist issues embedded in the Starbucks pumpkin-spice latte to the larger, keener questions of the rights and wrongs of eating meat. When food minutiae meet politics, particularly when they meet an ancient form of political mockery—that is, the mockery of candidates who get some piece of New York ethnic food practice wrong—it’s explosive enough that the shards get everywhere.
So it was no wonder that when Cynthia Nixon, the actor who’s running against Andrew Cuomo in the New York Democratic gubernatorial primary on Thursday, made a decision, at Zabar’s the other day, to order a Nova with cream cheese on a cinnamon-raisin bagel, it got more attention than you’d think such an inoffensive-seeming issue could get. Opinions about the cinnamon-bagel incident vary. Some think that it sullies her New York credentials—no one who knows bagels or Nova would put those things together (with capers and onions, no less). Others insist, tongue in cheek, that it’s a sign of latent anti-Semitism—she was deliberately slighting good bagel-ordering practices, and on the eve of the High Holidays, too. Still others think that it shows how sexism creeps into even the cream-cheesed corners of our world. That last claim, which resembles the one offered on the pumpkin-spice latte, goes like this: when women like things, particularly things that are sweeter than things men often like, or are taught to like, then those things are instantly downgraded and mocked as unworthy of serious taste-attention. If a woman likes it, it’s marginalized as infantile by the men who control the discourse. Men like strong whiskey, goes the stereotype, and women like sweet liqueurs—so the sweet liqueur is immediately made less “serious” than the Scotch. What’s wrong with a cinnamon-raisin bagel for Nova purposes, except that dead white dudes didn’t eat it? In any case, the pro-Nixon argument goes on, as a lifelong New Yorker and a longtime Upper West Sider, she knows perfectly well what goes on a bagel. Her rejection of bagel-normative discourse was not ignorance but a creative violation, in the interests of a significantly transgressive and actually delicious sweet-and-salty taste.
A few things need to be clarified before attacking the minutiae. To begin with, this whole business about having or not having a cinnamon-raisin bagel reflects the deep cultural insularity of New Yorkers when it comes to bagels. What they are selling at Zabar’s as a bagel—whether sweetened with cinnamon and raisins or done more traditionally, with white seeds or black—is not a bagel. Let me repeat that: it is not a bagel. The destruction, the corruption, the inflation of the New York bagel—its hole reduced to a mere pinprick, its taste made indistinguishable from a food-cart soft pretzel—is by now an established fact. What are made and baked in wood-burning ovens in Montreal are, alone, bagels. To the degree that a few courageous people in New York are valiantly struggling to make real bagels—I press the Black Seed bakery on you—is the degree to which a real bagel culture persists in the city. We must never normalize the new New York bagel.
But, putting that crucial point aside, the Cynthia Nixon event occupies a very specific place in the annals of ethnic-food-eating faux pas. It is what one might call a faux faux pas. The classic ethnic-political faux pas involves some political outsider, a candidate for office, who wanders into town, orders New York food in a way intended to make him look as though he knows what he’s doing, and then makes some terrible blunder in what he orders or how he eats it that reveals him to be the outsider we knew he was to begin with. In one famous incident, George McGovern ordered a kosher hotdog with a glass of milk. He lost the state in the election. He would have lost it anyway, but the incident added ethnic ignorance to electoral impotence.
What makes Cynthia’s a faux faux pas—in the same category as Bill de Blasio eating pizza with a knife and fork—is that, while we enjoy talking about these incidents as though they reflect eating rules that New Yorkers alone enjoy and intuit and share, the truth is that most of these rules, as they apply to the European-Jewish and southern-Italian cuisines that once were, indeed, the dominant folk form in the city, are by now vestigial or even quaint, rules we’re supposed to know rather than ones we really live by. The actual ethnic food of New York now is not deli-bought but food-cart-delivered, and is far more likely to be Lebanese or Israeli or Filipino or Korean than Ashkenazi Jewish or Italian. Those new foods have their own eating rules. (The Soup Nazi, for instance, a figure beloved by New Yorkers long before “Seinfeld,” had to be imperious, and impervious to chat, because he had a very small staff and a very long line. O.K., he was nasty beyond that need, but the principle was sound.) But the new rules, known by unspoken consent, are not yet neatly formulated and packaged for the sake of an older generation of nostalgic violation spotters. The reference of the Nixon faux pas is to a whole world of ethnic eating that’s now largely passé, and doesn’t reflect the realities of present-day New York.
Maybe, as the Marxists used to say, it’s no accident that we are being asked so ostentatiously to worry about Cynthia Nixon’s bagel. The whole rhetoric of bagels, right and wrong, distracts us from the larger truth that Nixon became famous on “Sex and the City,” the TV show that was singly responsible for the most sickening New York food trend of the past twenty years—the cupcake craze of the early two-thousands, now thankfully past. (Even Magnolia Bakery, though it turns out cupcakes for the occasional tourist, has moved on to better things.) What the honest middle-class bagel is really doing, perhaps, is acting as a coverup for her role in popularizing a one-per-center’s dessert.
Andrew Cuomo has tried to paint his opponent as a Hollywood type posing as a regular woman. Meanwhile, his own taste in bagels, like his actual political ideology, is best described as yet unknown. And we have not even raised the significant point yet that what Nixon ordered, which has been widely called “lox” in the tabloids, is actually not lox at all—lox is super-salty archaic brined salmon. Nova is a very different thing. When it comes to the parsing of cultural minutiae, there is no end, or closing time, in sight.
Sourse: newyorker.com
