âIdentity condiments?â
That sounds less like a threat to Christendom and more like a gag in an early episode of the Good Place. Â
The actual article is wild. This was all triggered because (emphasis is mine):
Momâs extraordinary potato salad â fragrant with dill, spiced by celery seed â went untouched on the picnic table. So did her macaroni salad, and her chicken salad, and her deviled eggs. ⊠When I carted home a good three pounds of painstakingly prepared Waldorf salad â all that peeling and coring and slicing! â I was forced to face facts: The familyâs tastes had changed. Or, rather, our family had changed. Oldsters were dying off, and the young âuns taking our places in the paper-plate line were different somehow.
<Stares in B. Dylan Hollis>
Gee, wonder why you had a hard time moving THREE POUNDS of diced celery and apples coated in mayo and black pepper?
So she realizes that nobody brought Mayo one year. And then this article happened. She goes on to talk about how the 1950s obliterated her motherâs Lithuanian cooking heritage, but:
âŠthe 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 [,,,] How do you think âHold the mayoâ became a saying? There was always mayo, and if you were some kind of deviant who didnât want it, you had to say so out loud.
I donât even know where to start unpacking that particular hovercraft full of eels.
The article then takes some time to meander into a history of mayo. And then starts hitting with stuff like:Â
Clearly, thereâs something more to this river of resentment than a miscible mixture of eggs and oil. And itâs obvious to me that this condimental divide can be traced to young folksâ rejection of what they sneeringly consider a boring white food. Do you think 23andMe and MyHeritage and all those other DNA testing companies are flourishing because people want to find out their ancestors came from Aberdeen? Hells, no; they wannabe from Marrakesh or Manchuria or Malawi. Itâs the same with condiments.
I get that it is (hopefully) intended mostly as a joke. The over-passionate rant in defense of the trivial is a time honored favorite butâŠ
The only reason for this raging mayophobia is a generationâs gut-level renouncement of the Greatest Generationâs condiment of choice.Â
But hereâs the thing: The all-American condiment didnât have to be mayonnaise. It could have been ketchup or mustard. Hell, it could have been horseradish, but it wasnât. Itâs not mayoâs fault that itâs been so successful â that it glimpsed a condiment breach and jiggled right on through. As Boston chef Scott Jones told Ari LeVaux, âThe magic that sets mayonnaise above Coke and Heinz is that mayo is a perfect flavor carrier.â It just makes everything better.
I think its safe to say this isnât about mayo.
Better pity-eat aunt Jantildaâs half-gallon drum of Waldorf salad, kiddos, its the only thing keeping her from storming Congress.
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