Stop Calling Food “crack” for the Last Time
Earlier this year, Cristini Tosi changed the name “Crack Pie” to “Milk Bar Pie”, explaining that the name “does not fit” Milk Bar’s mission to “spread joy and inspire celebration.” It wasn’t exactly an apology, and it was unclear if Tosi really understood why the name was the problem in the first place, but at least the name – finally over ten years later – was changed.
Tosie wasn’t the first to use the word “crack” to mean food is hard to stop, and she certainly wasn’t the last. This word is used to describe a chicken , cooked on a low heat , salt toffee (although some argue that “crack” comes from crackers) andsauce . In Portland, not far from where I live, there is a diner called Cheese & Crack , although only one of these things can be bought.
I have no doubt that a lot of people will tell me to cheer up, but fuck it. It’s 2019, and frivolity over addiction cannot be what can be considered a cute joke or a cunning marketing ploy, and I’m hardly the first to point this out . As Devra Furst explained in her Boston Globe article on the topic, the ability to deal with crack has a lot to do with privilege:
The 1980s crack cocaine epidemic hurt mostly poor, mostly black communities, not people who headed to the East Village to spend $ 5 on a piece of the pie (the price has since climbed to $ 6). The country is now in the grip of an opioid crisis and double standards. This addiction also affects white communities – 78 percent of those who died of opioid overdose in 2017 were white, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation – and our cultural response to it was very different, with dialogue often focused on treatment. … rather than imprisonment … The bakery will never try to sell something called Fentanyl Cake, and the Crack Pie name seems offensive.
People – some of them don’t even sell yuppie food – do that too. (These people are usually white.) Thereis a scene in the episode “The Office” where Pam says that the breadsticks in the restaurant are “like a crack.” Ryan quickly intervenes, “I love it when people say ‘like crack’, who obviously never did crack,” and invites her to compare them to something in ‘her world,’ like scrapbooking. This is one of the few times Ryan has a good opinion, and the 20-second scene clearly shows why equating food with crack is so frustrating. No one who has ever tried crack will tell you that eating breadsticks (or pie, or cheese, or toffee) is anywhere near the experience of smoking crack cocaine. Using the name of the drug, which has devastated predominantly poor and black communities, to sell pieces of chess pie and elaborately crafted cheese platters is not edgy or engaging. Using this as an abbreviation for “very fun to eat” in writing or in conversation is extremely lazy at best, and classicism and racism at worst.
Tosi did a good job of changing the name of her famous pie, and many food writers like food critic Soleil Ho and the Serious Eats staff can write beautifully without using it as a hyperbolic crutch. So don’t say it! This is a hack! If you need a word to describe how much you like the food, enter “delicious” into the online thesaurus and pick something. There are many words, and most of them don’t make it easy to assess addiction.