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.