Not at any price….
Last week I decided to make some bagels to enjoy as part of a quintessential weekend breakfast. You know, bagels, lox, onion, tomato, the New York Times and, of course, cream cheese. I got the dough started on Thursday so that it could enjoy a nice slow, relaxing, cold fermentation in the fridge and I walked over to our nearby grocery to pick up the other items. What I found there surprised and terrified me.
There was smoked salmon aplenty (crazy expensive as always but no matter). Sweet Vidalia Onions from Georgia? Yes, indeed. Tomatoes? Well, not too bad for grocery store produce at this time of year. They were reddish, in any case. When I got the to the dairy section, however, mine eyes beheld a disturbing sight.
There was every kind of yogurt you could want, with fat percentages that went from zero to fifty in 6 seconds and representing the nations of the world from Greece to Iceland, also heaps of cottage cheese, sliced Swiss, cheddar, and 32-ounce blocks of Velveeta in all its golden glory. But where the cream cheese should have been were just empty shelves.
That’s right. No plain. No whipped. No chives. No veggie. No…nothing! Ok, to be honest, there were a few of sad packages of strawberry flavored cream cheese, but seriously? People buy this? No. No! Just No!!!
An anomaly, I thought. Someone forgot to place an order (heads will roll), or perhaps labor shortages on the loading dock were to blame. (I imagined huge cartons of Philly moldering out back waiting for some diligent worker to bring them inside.)
Luckily, we have a (Rochester, N.Y.-based) Wegmans just 15 minutes up I-270. Still plenty of time to score 250 grams before Shabbes! Friday morning found me speeding up the Eisenhower Highway to the Wegmans in Germantown, Md. only to find… more empty shelves! Not a scrap of Philadelphia regular, low-fat, plain, or whipped! A single schmear of Temp Tee? Fahgetaboutit! It turns out the shortage is real and some are reacting with violence. Do I condone this behavior? Absolutely not! And yet, I have some empathy for Florida man’s sense of frustration.
To be fair, I didn’t walk away empty handed. An enterprising buyer at Wegmans must have obtained some bulk cream cheese somewhere, or perhaps they made it themselves and they were selling it in small plastic tubs with their own custom labels hastily slapped on each one. Because capitalism.
Still I was shaken, if this could happen with cream cheese, what is safe? Even the cyber-attack on the pipeline last year and the ensuing gasoline panic didn’t rattle me like this did. I have a bicycle but what if I had had to eat my bagels with only butter?
The bigger question, of course, is: what happened that we took it for granted that we can have every single thing that we want whenever we want it? We used to have to wait for The Wizard of Oz to come on TV once a year. I only saw the movie once a year on a black and white TV until I was 26 and MGM re-released the movie in theaters. That’s when I first saw the psychedelic switch to Technicolor when Dorothy opens the door in Oz. It was a personal “not in Kansas anymore” moment.
Likewise, bagels were something you had when you went to New York. (Yes, you could get pizza outside New York but you regretted it when you did.) Strawberries were spring, and peaches and fresh corn, only summer. Just a few generations ago, if you wanted to eat a chicken, you had to kill one with your own bare hands. At least you didn’t have to wait 45 minutes at the drive-through.
Apparently, the cream cheese shortage is due, in part, to a cyber-attack. But that is also an indication of how, er, whipped we have become. You can’t make cream cheese because the computer went down? Do they not still train engineers to use slide rules just in case?
So yeah, we had cream cheese on our bagels, albeit a generic product. I couldn’t tell the difference truth be told. Besides, homemade bagels are so good they taste great unadorned. But it made me wonder, if push came to shove, what could I live without and still be happy. Cream cheese? Yes, for sure. Bagels? Maybe. Coffee? Please don’t make me answer that.
I also wonder if it isn’t good for us to understand occasionally that we can’t have whatever we want whenever we want it. I have no desire to wait in line for bread as in Soviet era Russia, mind you. But after the last two years, I no longer take for granted that I will always be able to find my preferred brand of flour, or yeast, or gasoline, or cream cheese that doesn’t have strawberry in it. Perhaps among its other revelations, Covid has taught us that we are allowed to take nothing, absolutely nothing, as granted --that we are reminded to, if I may paraphrase the late, great Warren Zevon in his last interview with David Letterman, to enjoy every bagel. “With a schmear,” he might have added, “if you can get it.”