There’s a tiny door in Community Food & Juice that takes you
inside Josh Ozersky. You see the world through Josh Ozersky’s eyes, and
then after about 15 minutes, you’re spit out onto a ditch on the side of
the New Jersey turnpike.
“This is another example of the artisanal version being worse than
the ShopRite Bakeshop version. Well, I’m very disappointed in myself and
in my inability to appreciate good things.” Josh Ozersky takes mincing bites from a “Dough” doughnut,
grimacing in disgust. Safely removed from the owner’s gaze, Ozersky
samples each variety and, like a petulant child force-fed broccoli,
bemoans his not-so-sweet desserts. “It should be sweet,” Ozersky says.
“Life is too short for savory doughnuts.” Famous for effusively praising
certain chefs and products, Ozersky rarely meets a food he does
not like.
Dough, a bakery in Bed-Stuy serving fancified doughnut flavors
like hibiscus and “real” chocolate (no cocoa powder here), applies an
artisanal ethos to simple breakfast fare. Ozersky does not lament that
ethos per se, but instead criticizes its consequence: an unpleasant
doughnut. Ozersky describes the problem of hipsterfied and
fancified food well—oftentimes, it just doesn’t taste good. Although I
enjoy a Doughnut Plant
creation as much as the next easily impressed sweet tooth, I appreciate
the doughnut’s humbler forms, too. Like Ozersky, I’d rather eat a tasty
doughnut than a doughnut with pedigree any day.
In his poem “All-Nite Donuts,” Albert Goldbarth writes:
A customer’s blowing
smoke rings almost
heavy as the dough o’s rising
out of the vat of grease.
Outside, the whores are whistling
their one note, lips thick
donuts strawberry-glazed.
The artisanal doughnut feels deeply ironic—a perverse distortion of
an American symbol. Whereas doughnuts once represented the seedy,
too-sweet commodification of American life, now artisanal bakers
viscerally reject that formulation. Of course, the artisanal
doughnut embodies a bourgeois ethic, a mode of consumption that signals
class separation. Dough is a product and producer of gentrification in
Bed-Stuy and its wares emblematize class categories. An affordable and
deviously unhealthy food made unaffordable—the violence of exclusion
seems unavoidable. In an attempt to escape a sordid aesthetic, Dough
reifies the latent divide between “have” and “have not.” To be bourgeois
is to eat an artisanal doughnut; and the transformation of the doughnut
from ShopRite to the imperative “eat right” extracts class from
everyday consumption.
Oh Columbia student, do not think that the artisanal doughnut’s
violence is limited to the outer boroughs. In Morningside Heights, a
restaurant perpetuates this code of bourgeois consumption with gleeful
fervor. This restaurant is also, in my opinion, the worst restaurant in
Morningside Heights: Community Food & Juice. Continue reading →
