Renegade Bakery

Bagel, I don’t even know who you are anymore.

Oftentimes, when I know for sure that my stomach will not allow me to make it to lunch without appeasement, I’ll head down to the cafeteria (site of last week’s donut stampede) for a bagel. Now it’s a simple menu selection, I know, to get a bagel. They appear to be fresh on a daily basis, and serves as a solid palette on which to alternate peanut butter or cream cheese. Plain bagel. That’s how I roll.

You don’t expect much when you plan on eating a plain bagel. There won’t be poppy seeds all over your desk. There’s no additional flavoring that could fight the cream cheese taste and send you into a dizzying taste bud mistake. And because so many other people prefer something a bit more complex, it’s guaranteed there will be at least one available, even when you wait until mid-morning to grab some breakfast. But one thing I do expect my plain bagel to abide by is that is picks its friends wisely.

The plight of a plain bagel is sad, really. You live about 6 hours, and your path in life is either ingestion or ad hoc hockey puck (ad hockey puck?) The only time you get to make friends is by sitting in the bagel bin waiting for a suitor. Parents expect their children to pick their friends wisely. I expect my plain bagel to do the same. And sadly, I’ve been let down.

My bagel has been hanging out with Onion Bagel.

Onion Bagel is the renegade on the block. In most neighborhoods, he’s kept completely separate from the other bagels on reputation alone. Regular bagels don’t car pool with Onion Bagel. If you decide to take Onion Bagel home as your own, as well as some other Bagels, he’s kept in a completely different bag. He comes from a completely different type of household – one in which a mother with breakfast food ancestry mates with one from the vegetable clan. And this is not the sweet smell of cross-food-pyramidial love. The offspring, Onion Bagel, is for lack of a better word, odiferous.

The influence that Onion Bagel wields is very attractive to the other bagels. He’s the morningfood version of the kid with the leather jacket, earring, and the torn jeans. Onion Bagel does not mess with cream cheese or peanut butter. He’s confident enough that he brings enough taste to the show that he doesn’t get partnered with one of those condiment-dweebs on the school field trips to my breakfast plate.

In my experience, Plain Bagels are raised to be honor students. They don’t get involved in the shadier dealings of the bakery. But this morning, Onion Bagel’s influence was as present as ever, as he must have convinced the café workers to let him hang with the other kids. And now as I sit here at my desk with my newly adopted plain bagel, there’s something different about him. Not by sight, or taste, or touch, either. This is olfactory.

He’s definitely friends with Onion Bagel.