Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Food for thought: Milk Bar's Crack Pie is not a cute name, critic says


[Image via Milk Bar]

Milk Bar, a spinoff of David Chang’s Momofuku restaurants, debuted in the East Village in 2008.

And of late, celebrity chef Christina Tosi's dessert spot has been expanding to other cities.

Devra First, the Boston Globe food writer and restaurant critic, checks in on the location that opened last month in Cambridge, Mass.

First has strong opinions on Milk Bar's most famous menu item — the Crack Pie.

If it seemed funny a decade ago to name a dessert after an addictive drug, the joke was one of privilege. The crack epidemic of the 1980s hurt largely poor, largely black communities, not the people who were heading to the East Village to spend $5 on a slice of pie (the price has since gone up to $6).

Now the country is in the grips of an opioid crisis, and a double standard. This addiction affects white communities as well — 78 percent of those who died from an opioid overdose in 2017 were white, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation — and our cultural response to it has been very different, with dialogue often centered on treatment rather than incarceration.

Regardless, here we are. Americans are now more likely to die of an opioid overdose than in a motor vehicle crash, according to a report from the National Safety Council. A bakery would never try to market something called Fentanyl Cake, and the name Crack Pie feels offensively tone deaf.

7 comments:

margo said...

Devra doesn't seem well-adjusted enough to be a journalist. How can she get out of bed in the morning if even a pie's name triggers her? Maybe she'll accomplish something in life and have something else to focus on.

noble neolani said...

This might be the dessert equivalent to that horrid bar "13th Step". @margo how about "shared needle cookies" would that trigger you?

DrGecko said...

Also her English is flabby ("offensively tone deaf"). Writing is her job and she doesn't do it very well.

NOTORIOUS said...

What a tool.

Makeout said...

Just re-learned today that over 50% of peeps don't booze or dope.

Scuba Diva said...

If said pie contains condensed milk—which it probably does—the name is spot-on; after all, cheese is a concentrated form of milk, which contains opiates:

https://gizmodo.com/why-cheese-is-like-dairy-crack-because-its-got-morph-5690088

Anonymous said...

If I have some crack pie with chocolate milk, does that make me a deplorable racist otr a culture appropriator ?