#DINING FAUX PAS CROSSWORD CODE#

What’s wrong with a cinnamon-raisin bagel for Nova purposes, except that dead white dudes didn’t eat it? In any case, the pro-Nixon argument goes on, as a lifelong New Yorker and a longtime Upper West Sider, she knows perfectly well what goes on a bagel. Men like strong whiskey, goes the stereotype, and women like sweet liqueurs-so the sweet liqueur is immediately made less “serious” than the Scotch. If a woman likes it, it’s marginalized as infantile by the men who control the discourse. That last claim, which resembles the one offered on the pumpkin-spice latte, goes like this: when women like things, particularly things that are sweeter than things men often like, or are taught to like, then those things are instantly downgraded and mocked as unworthy of serious taste-attention. Still others think that it shows how sexism creeps into even the cream-cheesed corners of our world. Others insist, tongue in cheek, that it’s a sign of latent anti-Semitism-she was deliberately slighting good bagel-ordering practices, and on the eve of the High Holidays, too. Some think that it sullies her New York credentials-no one who knows bagels or Nova would put those things together (with capers and onions, no less). Opinions about the cinnamon-bagel incident vary. So it was no wonder that when Cynthia Nixon, the actor who’s running against Andrew Cuomo in the New York Democratic gubernatorial primary on Thursday, made a decision, at Zabar’s the other day, to order a Nova with cream cheese on a cinnamon-raisin bagel, it got more attention than you’d think such an inoffensive-seeming issue could get. When food minutiae meet politics, particularly when they meet an ancient form of political mockery-that is, the mockery of candidates who get some piece of New York ethnic food practice wrong-it’s explosive enough that the shards get everywhere. That’s why we have so many pieces, on and off line, on everything from the feminist issues embedded in the Starbucks pumpkin-spice latte to the larger, keener questions of the rights and wrongs of eating meat.

#DINING FAUX PAS CROSSWORD CODE#

There seems to be no better way to crack the codes of culture than by cracking the kind of cultural code you eat with cream cheese. Our taste for parsing cultural minutiae of all kinds, but particularly those related to food, is overwhelming right now.

Dining faux pas crossword