Bagels, Lox, and Me

On Sunday, I put on my running clothes, went out to the elevator, and pushed the button. In the time it took for my finger to travel from the wall back to my side, I’d decided that it was not a day for a run but for a trip to the market. I slipped a coat over everything and went to the store, where I bought bagels, lox, and cream cheese, along with some badly needed staples. I then came home and ate. (While, of course, reading the Sunday Times. Sigh. Sometimes it’s tough to be a cliché.)

The run never happened, and that’s unusual in my recent history; I was a near-paradigm of discipline this winter. And I’m pretty disciplined in my eating, too, at least during the day. But something happened Sunday, a combination, I suspect, of annoying little things that led to a short-lived mental breakdown. The cause isn’t important; it’s the response that most interests me.

Consciously, the combination of bagels, cream cheese, and lox doesn’t even rate among my top 10 comfort foods. Getting a good bagel is more challenging than getting a good slice of pizza, on which don’t get me started. I’m pretty much anti-farm-raised salmon in principle, and all the fancy names processors give it don’t change that. Cream cheese is by definition bland; if I’d never eaten it before and you served it to me, I’d see no reason to waste my caloric allotment on it.

But none of that seems to affect my cravings. I wouldn’t claim that turning to bagels and lox and the physical newspaper on a weary-feeling morning is a genetic disposition, but I do come by it honestly. In the 1950s, my father (who turns 91 today!) would send me out for “appetizing”—as these foods were called, for some reason buried in New York history—to “Sol’s,” on the corner of First Avenue and 19th Street. (I picked up the paper on the way home.) In the 1930s, his parents sent him out, to Southern Boulevard in the South Bronx.

(This is not strictly relevant but it is, I think, revealing: He was instructed to buy “a half of a quarter”—that is, an eighth of a pound. For a family of six, that translates to a third of an ounce per person. I will never forget the looks on my parents’ faces when they first saw my older daughter grab an entire piece of lox—an ounce at least—and place it on a bagel.)

For 50 years, through my childhood, my adolescence, my adulthood, my kids’ births and maturation, there were periodic Sunday mornings spent visiting my parents. And every time, there it was: the holy trinity.

Every family, every ethnic group, and every person can talk about their cravings. The comfort food of others rarely appeals to us; it’s our own that matters. I know people who drool at the sight of a bowl of rice, who cannot possibly resist it and, almost needless to say, many people feel the same way about pasta. A Hmong I met a couple of years ago could eat quarts of a shredded cucumber soup that had sustained him as a child (to me its flavor was as subtle as cream cheese, and it didn’t even have the benefit of fat). Last weekend I chatted with a third-generation Irishman whose wife is a vegetarian and does the cooking; he sneaks out once a week for meat, potatoes, and gravy. My younger daughter seeks comfort in white beans with garlic, oil, and greens, which I often made for her when she came home from school during a particularly poignant period of our lives.

Your environment teaches you what comfort food is. Until recently, before marketing penetrated every cranny of our being, family and friends had the biggest impact: the stuff that made them happy made you happy. You can self-train your way out if it, as many of us have, and save it for special occasions.

You don’t need a study to understand that for most of us the foods we come to love as children are the foods that will cry out to us for the rest of our lives; we’ll occasionally seek to regain those feelings. (Whatever their source. I feel the same way about mushy pillows, well-worn cotton T-shirts, a really beat-up couch, and the music from Carousel.)

But with food, it seems these preferences for traditional foods are fading. I don’t think feeling sad about that makes me a reactionary; I think it’s important not to rob children of these kinds of memories, and to encourage those cravings that are driven by genuine traditions. Even if your own comfort food isn’t the world’s “healthiest,” it’s almost certain to be real. It’s almost certain to have a link to your family’s tradition; it’s even likely that it’s a preference that began with your grandparents, or perhaps many generations ago.

I recognize that some of this loss is a result of the homogenization and general loss of ethnicity we sacrifice in becoming “American.” I recognize that this is not a country rich with food traditions, though most of us crave some specific side dish—if not turkey—on the fourth Thursday of November.

But when childhood food preferences are formed around foodlike substances that were invented in the last 50 years by scientists and marketers looking to develop “food” that appeals to that same comfort-craving part of your brain—without any consideration of tradition or quality—that’s a bad situation. If a marketer can make it so that you feel the same way about a bacon double cheeseburger as you do about the special beans-and-greens or roast chicken your grandmother made for you, and then he makes that double cheeseburger available to you almost everywhere you go, he’s got you locked in forever. That’s just not the same thing as bagels and lox.

APRIL 29, 2014