News of the Week: Eagles Hit Number One, the iMac Turns 20, and Millennials Murder Mayonnaise
- According to a 2018 article in Philadelphia magazine, millennials are killing mayo. The author spends most of the piece reminiscing on her own mayonnaise-soaked childhood and blaming her college-age.
- But what young people really, really love to hate on is mayonnaise. Back in 2013, BuzzFeed ran an article titled “24 Reasons Mayonnaise Is the Devil’s Condiment.” (The writer called it “slime of Satan.”) Just three years later, BuzzFeed ran another piece, “23 Things You’ll Only Understand If You Fucking Hate Mayo.”.
- Millennials aren't eating even condiments the right way according to older generations! Mayonnaise is out, and hot sauce is in. Wall Street Journal reports that mayonnaise sales of fallen 6.7% between 2012 and 2017. The reason mayo.
Michael Jackson vs. the Eagles, Round 36
I hear from a very reliable source that pop music is better than ever. I don’t happen to agree, but then again I’m an old fogey who is set in his ways when it comes to music, and would rather listen to my kitchen faucet drip all night than listen to something by Kanye West. (Note to self: get kitchen faucet fixed.)
A Philadelphia magazine article about millennials killing mayonnaise is going viral for its absurdity and also it's message of white fear. Probably saw success in future hate clicks). Somehow millennials are killing mayo while buying more mayo than any other age range. Or general millennial hate.
There are a lot of people like that, and apparently they’re all buying Eagles and Michael Jackson albums. They’ve been battling for decades. Some years the Eagles’ Greatest Hits (1971-1975) is the number-one-selling album of all time, and other years Jackson’s Thriller is in the top spot. It just so happens that this week Don Henley and company can brag a little bit, though I’m not sure if it’s fair that a greatest hits album goes up against one specific album in an artist’s catalogue. Then again, maybe it’s impressive that one album can challenge a popular band’s greatest hits album. The Eagles 1976 album has sold 38 million copies, while Jackson’s 1982 album has sold 33 million (counting both album sales and online). Elaine’s boyfriend Brett must own several copies of that Eagles album.
Sure, the Eagles are No. 1 right now, but maybe Jackson will come out on top eventually. You know … in the long run.
The Computer That Changed Everything
I remember getting into an argument with a friend of mine in 1997 — actually, a friend of a friend — about the fate and future of Apple. He thought the company was about to go out of business, and I thought they would one day be successful again.
Admittedly, the company went through some really bad times in the ’90s, and it’s not like I had any psychic visions of the iPod or the iPhone (I’d have a bigger bank account if that were the case). But I did know that Apple made great things and that their customers were loyal. I knew they’d be back in a big way eventually.
Apple became the first trillion-dollar company a couple of weeks ago, and it really started with a computer I loved, the iMac (I owned the Bondi Blue one). It’s currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, and I wish Apple still made it, hockey puck mouse and all. It was retro and futuristic, nostalgic and forward-looking, all at the same time.
It’s amazing how the computer influenced not just the computer industry, but pop culture too. Other tech companies started to copy certain features (or lack thereof) of the iMac, and everybody started to release products with rainbow colors. That even continues to this day.
Walmart Honors Shopping Cart Lady
We all have our pet peeves: the little things in life that annoy us. Some of us can’t stand people who drive too slowly, and some of us hate it when people chew their food loudly or cough into their hand. I happen to believe that people who don’t return their shopping carts to the carriage corrals are on par with murderers and arsonists.
Honestly, is there anything lazier? You can’t take 10 seconds to place your cart into the corral after you’ve loaded your groceries into your car? Every time I go to the supermarket, I see random carts all over the place, blocking parking spaces and lanes. I’ve even seen people bring their carts to the side of the carriage corral and leave it there because they’re too damn lazy to bring it a few more feet around to the corral’s opening. It drives me crazy.
So a round of applause to 70-year-old grandmother Sue Johnson of West Virginia, honored by Walmart recently for returning her cart to the corral during a massive rain and wind storm. She got free grocery pickup for a year and a trophy shaped like — you guessed it — a shopping cart.
Think of Sue the next time you don’t return your cart when it’s 70 degrees and sunny.
The Cookie Cage
Score one for PETA.
In 2016, the animal rights organization wrote a letter to Mondelez International, the owner of Nabisco, to get them to update the front of their animal cracker boxes so the animals are out of their cages. Seems like the company actually listened. The new boxes recently made their debut.
Sure, we can be happy that the animal cookies (come on, they’re more cookie than cracker) are now free from their cages, but you know that five minutes later that lion sank his teeth into the giraffe’s neck.
Hold the Mayo
Those damn millennials. They’re responsible for the destruction of everything. They’re destroying the cereal industry because they don’t want to clean their bowls; they don’t go to the movies because they’d rather binge-watch something on Netflix; and they shun going on dinner dates for some reason. They even hate napkins! How are they wiping their faces after they eat their avocado toast and kale salads? With their sleeves?
You can now add mayo to the list of things young people don’t bother with. Yes, they’re mayo-haters, which means they’re missing out on creamy potato salad and tuna fish sandwiches the way tuna fish sandwiches are supposed to be made. One of the reasons is because they don’t like the texture and they think it’s too disgusting to eat. They do know they’re not supposed to eat mayo like ice cream, right?
I hate this story for the simple reason it has introduced me to the phrase “identity condiments.” I had never heard of that concept before and I’m sorry I know what it is now. Soon colleges are going to have to set up safe spaces for students who don’t want to deal with ketchup they don’t agree with.
By the way, can we stop blaming millennials for everything? Not that they don’t deserve a lot of the blame for RUINING EVERYTHING, but we have to direct our ire at the correct age group. Everyone seems to put any “young” person into the millennial category. People in their teens or 20 aren’t millennials! They’re … well, whatever generation comes after that. I have trouble keeping track of all of the different names. Generation Y? Generation Z? As a Gen-Xer, I prefer to call them “the generation who will never know what it’s like not to own a smartphone.”
RIP Barbara Harris, Kofi Annan, Don Cherry, and Miriam Nelson
Barbara Harris was an acclaimed Broadway actress who also appeared in such movies as Nashville, Family Plot, Peggy Sue Got Married, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Who is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, for which she received an Oscar nomination. She died last week at the age of 83.
Kofi Annan was a former secretary general of the United Nations and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He died Saturday at the age of 80.
Don Cherry was not only a top amateur golfer, he was also a popular singer in the 1950s. That’s him singing “Band of Gold” in the very first scene of Mad Men. Cherry actually died in April, but his death is just now being reported. He was 94.
Miriam Nelson was a dancer and choreographer who not only worked with such people as Judy Garland, Cole Porter, and Doris Day, she also worked on many Academy Award telecasts, worked as a choreographer at Disneyland, and even helped put together several Super Bowl halftime shows. She died last week at the age of 98.
This Week in History
Hawaii Becomes 50th State (August 21, 1959)
As if this summer’s eruption of the Kīlauea volcano wasn’t enough destruction from nature, the islands are now being hit by Hurricane Lane, which reached Category 4 status this week.
“Please Mr. Postman,” First Motown No. 1, Released (August 21, 1961)
The Marvelettes song was later covered by several other bands, including the Beatles and the Carpenters.
This Week in Saturday Evening Post History: Drink of Water (August 22, 1914)
The kid on this Frank X. Leyendecker cover should really put those papers down before he drinks from the fountain.
Quote of the Week
“I might not rate her as the single greatest female vocalist of the rock era — Kelly Clarkson and Linda Ronstadt come to mind as more versatile across more genres and more varied in their emotional resonances …”
—an actual sentence written by Dan McLaughlin in his National Reviewobituary for Aretha Franklin. Biggest casino winners ever.
National Waffle Day
You ever think of a food and suddenly realize you haven’t eaten it in years? That’s how I felt when I found out today is National Waffle Day. I’m not really a waffle guy and haven’t eaten them in probably 15 or 20 years. If I am going to eat something in that family, it would be pancakes or French toast. But if you like them, here’s a recipe from Curtis Stone for Whole Wheat Waffles with Strawberry-Maple Syrup. Seems like too much work for me. I’d probably just buy a box of Eggo.
Don’t get me wrong. Homemade waffles are good! They’re just not “Kelly Clarkson good.”
Next Week’s Holidays and Events
National Toilet Paper Day (August 26)
I don’t even want to know how you’re going to celebrate it.
U.S. Open (August 27)
![Mayonnaise Mayonnaise](https://pics.awwmemes.com/boomers-i-hate-my-wife-millennials-i-hate-my-life-66952032.png)
The tennis tournament is marking 50 years of being an “open” event, with special celebrations and a brand new Louis Armstrong stadium, which has a retractable roof.
Social Issueswhat we lost: white supremacy, immigration, and food
Several years ago, I began to notice the patterns and connections that bind up cisheteropatriarchy with toxic masculinity. Patriarchy, with all its queerphobic and femmephobic boundary-keeping, inevitably hurts many men as it strives to keep a certain kind of man in power. Around that time, I also began arguing that one of the reasons that patriarchy should be resisted and eradicated is that it represents a nearly incomprehensible loss of opportunity. What could we have, right now, if it weren’t for patriarchy? What advancements could half the human population have contributed if they hadn’t typically been treated as property and kept chained to a stove?
It didn’t take me long to see that similar patterns exist in white supremacy and racism. What has humanity lost because of white supremacy? What have white people lost in our bigoted, racist quest for power?
For me, personally, the answer has often been: food.
If you were to meet me in “real life,” in my home– in my kitchen– you’d quickly notice that I am pretty obsessed with the entire concept of food. One of my favorite books is Classic Indian Cooking by Julie Sahni, a thick and delightful tome I read cover-to-cover in a single sitting. I love trying new recipes, and adapting cuisines from all over the world to meet the needs of my diet and allergy restrictions. The Great British Bake Off (known in the US as The Great British Baking Show) is one of my all-time favorite things– I have watched and re-watched every single season, some of them multiple times. Nothing brings me quite as much joy as cooking for my friends and family, watching them relish roast chicken con fit or my delectable and toothsome gluten-free chocolate chip cookies.
I also read about food. A lot. I inhale foodie magazines and I’m catching up now on Anthony Bourdain’s show after reading “What Anthony Bourdain Meant to People of Color” by Joumana Khatib. Some of my favorite articles I’ve ever read and that have made a lasting impact on me have been about food: “The Struggles of Writing about Chinese Food as a Chinese Person” by Clarissa Wei has become one of my touchstones and an oft-cited resource. “How it feels when white people shame your culture’s food, then make it trendy” by Ruth Tam is what I direct people to in order to help them understand cultural appropriation. “What’s The Difference Between Ethnic Food in America vs the Homeland (And Does it Matter)?” and other articles like it, covering the immigrant experience through food, is basically a genre all to itself and one I’ll always read.
Articles that treat food as a metaphor are also a favorite. “Hunger Makes Me” by Jess Zimmerman has stuck with me for years, and the most extraordinarily, achingly beautiful article I’ve read this year is “Cravings” by my friend Hännah Ettinger.
***
I hope you’ll bookmark all these and read them later, because now I’m going to talk about a travesty of an article I read yesterday: “How Millennials Killed Mayonnaise” by Sandy Hingston, accompanied by the hilarious subtitle “The inexorable rise of identity condiments has led to hard times for the most American of foodstuffs. And that’s a shame.” I don’t often read the “How Millennials Killed _____” articles until they hit tumblr and have been properly eviscerated first, but this one was about food … so I clicked it. And then read it aloud to Handsome as we drove home from the airport, laughing so hard I cried. It’s so badly written. If I were still teaching writing, this would be the example I’d force all my students to read so they can identify purple prose.
It’s also insidiously white supremacist.
My first thought was “geez lady, so people don’t like your potato salad, get a grip.” I was also entertained by the thought that all millennials hate mayo because I use it all the time, and the people I know– mostly millennials– gobble up my deviled eggs and potato salad like they’ll never eat again. How she’s extrapolating her personal experience onto an entire generation is beyond absurd. However, I wouldn’t be writing about her today if she hadn’t written the following:
My mom was the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born in the era in which huddled masses clambered ashore at Ellis Island, their pockets stuffed with kielbasa and chorizo and braunschweiger and makanek and lap cheong, and were processed in the great American assimilation grinder, emerging to dine happily ever after on Hatfield hot dogs and potato salad. …
America in the 1950s was full of strivers like Mom, desperate to forget family legacies of latkes and boxties and bramboráky, poring through the pages of Family Circle and Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day for stars-and-stripes recipes that repped their newfound land. They wanted all their strangeness to dissolve into the sizzling pot of Crisco that crisped their french (not French) fries. …
Besides, the impetus seemed righteous. In a world torn asunder by the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and two World Wars, our citizenry needed to come together, be united, rally behind a collective vision of what it meant to be an American: You lived in a single-family house, you drove a station wagon, you wore bowling shirts and blue jeans, and you slathered mayonnaise on everything from BLTs to burgers to pastrami on rye. …
My mom’s side of the family have a similar history– except my reaction is not a mastubatory “patriotic” celebration, but a sense of longing and grief. I don’t see the fact that my family’s cultural heritage was beaten out of us by decades of racism and bullying as a good thing like Sandy does. It’s a horrible reality that surviving in America as an immigrant often means exchanging kifle, csirke paprikash, and dobos torte for Waldorf salad and Spam.
Why Do Millennials Hate Mayonnaise
My great-great grandparents immigrated from eastern Europe after the death of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and my great-great grandmother brought with her the recipes of her homeland. My great-grandfather taught us to make kifle for Christmas one year the way his mother used to, in pinwheels instead of little rolled crescents. She’d gotten tired of making the individual cookies for the entire family and decided to cross kifle with another Hungarian desert: beigli. For years, I made csirke paprikash by adding corn to the tomato-sour cream sauce and cooking it all up in a pressure cooker because that was how Grandpa did it: it was quick, and he liked corn. It surprised and delighted me when I found out csirke paprikash doesn’t traditionally include corn– it was what happened when my immigrant grandfather grew up in Ohio. Another family favorite is my grandmother’s spin on halupki: stuffed cabbage in a creamy bechamel instead of tomato sauce.
But so much else has been lost. My grandfather had a cookbook his mother had put together with her Hungrian/Czech/Polish neighbors, and even as a teenager I was thrilled with the discovery. I peppered him with questions: how often did she make this? What does this taste like?
It was a difficult conversation, because his answer often was “I don’t know. She’d stopped making it by the time I was old enough to remember.”
One of my grandfather’s most vivid memories is his mother shouting at his father when he occasionally reverted to Hungarian: “We’re in America now! We speak American!” There is also a thread of resentment woven through his childhood: he grew up being labeled a “Hunky” and eventually anglicized his name from “Vincze” to “Vincent” when he joined the Army Air Corps during WWII. White supremacy burdened both him and his mother with a desperate need to conform– to become bland, homogenous, and uniform. In order to be safe and successful in this country, they had to give up a centuries-old “perfect blend,” as Sandy would put it, of paprika, sour cream, and stewed tomatoes for jello molds and mayonnaise.
***
I fight white supremacy through my cooking.
There’s nothing wrong with mayonnaise– I love my potato salad, made with orange and red peppers instead of celery, and sour cream and paprika mixed with the mayonnaise– but I know in my bones that I have been robbed. White supremacy stole a whole legacy of flavors and dishes and enrobed my family’s meals in a banality of beige.
Millennials Hate Mayonnaise
So, now I cook the delicious food we lost. The recipe I shared above for csirke paprikash is a show-stopper, and easily transformed to be gluten free (Jovial’s GF egg noodles work great). I plan on making dobos torte for my birthday in a month, and can’t wait to indulge in layers upon layers of chocolate and caramel. I’m still struggling to adapt kifle, since yeast-driven rising methods are difficult to accomplish with gluten-free flour– but I swear I’ll get there, and it will be delicious. My family also just discovered that one of my grandmothers immigrated here from Sicily as a mail-order bride, and now I’m happily buried in Sicilian-American recipes.
Aranciniseems like a great place to start.