By MARC WOLLIN
It was a lovely brunch, with out-of-town family and friends getting a chance to visit and chat. Being a Sunday morning and being held in a Manhattan apartment, it featured classic New York City fixings, from coffee and fruit to bagels and lox, and I baked a cinnamon coffee cake to add to the bounty. Some good stories, some funny memories, and gracious and welcoming hosts made it a perfect gathering.
Well, almost perfect: I got shut out of the salt bagel I had been eyeing.
There were plenty of others to choose from and so I rolled with it; I had the poppy version and enjoyed it almost as much. But I still had the one that got away in my head, a hankering for a treat I was likely better off not having for dietary reasons, as it exceeded the recommended daily adult intake for sodium by approximately 1,000 percent. Or so I told myself.
Of course, desire often trumps our better intentions. And so the next morning when I got to a client’s location I don’t usually frequent, I went exploring. Their cafeteria had been completely redone since my last visit, making it more like a high-end food court. There was a healthy options bar with steel-cut oats, several space-age coffee machines capable of making every variety of brew at the push of a button, as well as a station with a chef making omelets. There was also a bakery section, with its wares looking appetizing and smelling fresh. Nestled between the whole grain muffins and rye bread was a tray of bagels. And there, sitting like a vein of quartz gems between the cinnamon raisins and plains, was a line of salt bagels. Proof of the deity if ever there was one.
I selected one, split it, toasted it and schmeared it (vegetable cream cheese, if you must know). I got myself a cup of coffee and a fruit cup to complete the meal, and headed to checkout. This facility followed the trend of many newer places, using self-checkout screens with scanners for a DIY experience. I held my coffee up the screen, it recognized the item and started a tab. The same with the fruit cup, scan and post. But then came the crown jewel in its cardboard clamshell container.
If you’ve ever been to a self-serve food bar (and I’m sure you have), you’ve seen these containers near assorted stations in various sizes for users to load up with meals as they see fit. Since they are for multiple uses they can’t really be scanned, and it is up to the individual to find the match in the checkout system and key it in, weighing the container if that is appropriate. I went back to the home screen and started to drill down through the menus. “Breakfast,” a good start. “Baked Goods,” so far on the right track. But here the trail went cold. There were muffins and toast, cinnamon rolls and pastries. No bagel.
As I wondered what to do, a cafeteria employee wandered by. “Oh yeah,” he said, “that’s not in the system. Just pick another baked good and key it in. That’ll have to do for now.” So in a world of AI, where we can recognize voices and respond in kind, create pictures in the style of Picasso that never existed, and write letters of recommendation from a few bullet points in seconds, the best scenario they could come up with was to click on something “Not Bagel.”
It recalled an episode of a show called “Silicon Valley” about a bunch of software developers. One of the programmers living in a hacker house was working on an app called “SeeFood” that was supposed to be able to identify every edible. They test it by scanning a hot dog, and it returns “Hot Dog.” They start jumping up and down, thinking that this will make them rich. Then they test it with a slice of pizza. It says, “Not Hot Dog.” One of the backers asks, “That’s ... that’s it? It only does hot dogs?” The coder responds, “No, it also does ‘not hot dog.’” And that’s about where I was: not bagel.
I cleared the screen and keyed in that I had a coffee and muffin combo, added the fruit and tapped my card. The screen whirred then chirped, and noted the sale was completed. I took my haul and wandered off to find a quiet place to indulge my high blood pressure-inducing gluttony. Yes, it was salty, but that’s kind of like lamenting that a Jeep rides like a Jeep. Sheer breakfast bliss, whatever you call it in the computer. Next time I go there perhaps they will have updated their software, and we’ll see if the price for a bagel is the same as for a “not bagel.”
Marc Wollin of Bedford tries not to eat too many breakfast bakery items, but it’s hard. His column appears weekly via email and online on Blogspot and Substack as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.