New Yorkers Butter Their Bagels

Yesterday, when I was going on a bagel run pre-photoshoot, I asked Crews what he wanted. “I’ll have whatever you’re having,” he said.

“Um, iced mocha and bagel with cream cheese?”

“Yeah!” He looked pleased with himself. “I knew I wanted what you were having. Except butter on my bagel instead.”

I found this to be the strangest phenomenon. Butter on a bagel? Who does that? Do they even offer butter on your bagel in California? I thought hard back to our visits to the bagel shop on Mission Boulevard. Nope. Cream cheese, low fat cream cheese, sundried tomato cream cheese, strawberry cream cheese. No butter.

This morning, I see Pip snagging a bagel from the kitchen at the office. Apparently, I have been missing out on these free Monday morning bagels for weeks. How he (ahem ahem) managed to gloss over this very valuable detail during my first-day orientation is beyond me. Given my current monetary issues, I was like woooooo free food and disregarded all that Glamour has ever taught me about not eating starchy processed carbohydrates.

So I happily slice it open with this giant saw, wondering why we don’t have a bagel slicer and pop it into the toaster. I’m so elated over my discovery of FREE FOOD that I take out my bagel halves, dig my plastic knife vigorously into the tub of white creamy goodness and spread. Liberally. I have been known to eat tubs of cream cheese, straight, so by liberal I mean liberal.

Then I sandwich the halves back together and take a big, crunchin’ bite. That’s funny, I think, it doesn’t taste quite right. So I open it back up and examine my cream cheese, which is melting rapidly. Far, far too rapidly. And seeping into the bagel. And mysteriously… looking… like butter.

I go back to the kitchen to examine the plastic tubs. Yes. Definitely a conveniently unlabeled tub of BUTTER, sitting next to more conveniently unlabeled tubs of jam and what may be cream cheese (but I will be taste-testing from now on to be sure).

I eat my bagel anyway, despite having spread the equivalent of six pats of butter on my bagel. Within 10 minutes I feel slight nausea overtaking me. I remedy this by heading to the kitchen and swooping two squares of someone’s thoughtfully baked peanut butter fudge brownie squares, as if the high cholesterol content in my arteries can only be combated with equally high sucrose levels.

That was a stab by the way. I only got an A- in AP Bio because my teacher liked Asian girls. It could be high glucose or fructose or malodextrose for all I know.

Mel (who may as well have like a guest commenter panel on the side of my blog, with all her witty quips), says buttering your bagel is like eating circular toast. Why would you subject the awesomeness of a bagel to merely being “circular toast”? Plus, butter already gets the joy of being spread on French bread, on toast, on croissants, on baked potatoes… the possibilities are endless. Butter, you’re such a whore. Let cream cheese get some air time. Honestly.

To conclude: Hi, I’m from California, where we spread cream cheese on our bagels, the way they are meant to be eaten. (Is this common up and down the east coast, or is it simply a Big Apple thing?) Anyway, let this be a warning to you all, before you encounter this strange, strange behavior and/or accidentally consume 2347 calories of the incorrect type of saturated fat: New Yorkers, they butter their bagels.

This is why I will never get a paying job. Because instead of doing useful things like 1) working on actual writing 2) catching up on sleep so I can stop overcaffeinating or 3) updating my resume, I have just spent 45 minutes blogging about my anger over the unwelcomed presence of a dairy product in my morning. For the record, this is the toned-down version. At 10:50 my bloggy wrath would have involved far more expletives and exclamation points.

PS: Butter has twice the saturated fat, FYI, fatties.