31 July 2014: Oy vey, shmear!

Oy vey, shmear!

There's a trend I've noticed in Paris that strikes me as peculiar. No, it's not the fashion of women wearing men's brogues with everything from dresses to shorts—borrowing from the boys has been "on trend" for decades, and, truth be told, the shoes are pretty cute. Nor is it the pervasive e-cigarette boutiques that have popped up out of nowhere, selling "safe" smoke and all kinds of flavored tobacco juice. (Yes, folks, you're still inhaling nicotine; yes, it's still bad for your lungs; and no, you still don't look cool doing it.) Nor is it the fad of grown men wearing full beards and clothes they clearly stole from their little sisters. (I blame the hipsters for that one.)

While these oddities are noteworthy, the trend that has boggled my mind the most over the past several weeks is a food-related one: bagels.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of bagels—I used to have a Noah's onion bagel with vegetables, lox and sun-dried tomato shear every day on my way to acting class in college (always followed by copious amounts of mint gum, of course). I love how simple, flavorful and satisfyingly bread-y bagels are, the way that they seem to cram a whole loaf of chewy bread into one sleek ring of doughy deliciousness.

What I don't understand, however, is why there are bagels everywhere in Paris. Seriously. You picture the products of Parisian boulangeries and you see oodles of croissants and macarons and baguettes dancing before your eyes, right? Well, insert a plethora of bagels into that foodie fantasy and you'll start to get an accurate picture.

Every café serves "les bagels"—there seems to be no French word for them, they simply appropriated the English term, like "le hot dog" (a sorely misleading food product if ever there was one: a French hot dog consists of a sausage burrowed into half a baguette smothered in spicy Dijon mustard and then covered in melted cheese—the ballpark fan in me cried the first time I had one...then realized that it was actually quite delicious, though misnamed). There are posters and signs everywhere proclaiming the beauty of bagels, and they share prime window real estate with the tortes and macarons meant to entice passersby.

Baffled by the bagel craze, I asked a French colleague of mine if she knew why bagels were suddenly so popular. Is it because cafés think they're all the rage in New York, so they want a piece of the "authentic" Big Apple action to lure tourists? Is it because French people are rediscovering '90s fads in food as well as in fashion? (Crop tops and flatform shoes need to go back to the time capsule from whence they came.) She simply shrugged and said she didn't know—in fact, she hadn't really noticed.

Which means one of two things: the trend started not long after I left Paris in 2010 and is now such "old news" that Parisians just accept the intruding baked goods as part of their gastronomical terrain; or we're on the eve of a carb-pocolypse and we'll soon be bowing to our bagel overlords.

In either case, I think I'll stick to baguettes.

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