The ‘everything change’ bagel and Margaret Atwood

By Dan Bloom

CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan —  Everyone knows what an “everything bagel” is, and if you don’t it’s time to Google it both as a news item and a photo image so you can see the round bread with a hole in it up close and personal

Unlike a “pizza with everything,” the “everything bagel does not come with cheese toppings and pineapple bits and tomato sauce and everything else you can stuff on the top of a pizza pie. No, the “everything bagel” is just a plain bagel — did I say ”plain”? — with a variety of seeds on the surface: poppy seeds, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, pine nut seeds, even seeds you never heard of

Don’t take my word for it. Google the image first.

Now the story at hand, ‘mit a schmeer, as they say in the old neighborhood of Avenue J in Brooklyn where my dear father was raised in the 1920s.

I was merely minding my own business the other day, when an email wormed its way into my inbox, and it was from Professor Elizabeth (nee Berger) Trobaugh at Holyoke Community College in western Massachusetts telling that in a few minutes she was headed over to her classroom to teach that week’s session of her “cl-fi” literature and science class along with co-teacher Steven Winters.

”So what time is it where you are?” Trobaugh’s email started off. “Here it’s 9:15 a.m. and I meet my cli-fi class in 15 minutes. I’m bringing some ‘everything bagels’ and shmear as I always do on Thursdays. They like food. So do I.”

Now to be honest, living as I do over here in bagel-less Taiwan, I had never heard of this term — “an everything bagel” — before. Blueberry bagels, yes, banana bagels, yes, cinnamon bagels, yes, but “everything bagels”?

I asked the profess for an explanation. She went one step further, even better, and sent me a photo of one of her students noshing on an “everything bagel.” I was astounded. What a piece of work that kind of bagel is! Splendid!

So as I as looking at the photo and repeating that new bagel variety’s name in my brain over and over, I suddenly remembered that Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood had recently coined a new term for climate change, telling an audience at a lecture at Arizona State University that climate change was such a huge issue that maybe it should be called “everything change” instead.

So I impulsively decided to dub the bagels in Professor Trobaugh’s cli-fi class as “everything change bagels” and sent her an email to that effect. She said she loved it. Then I wrote a letter to Atwood and told her that a bagel had now been named after her cool coinage of “everything change.”

I told her I liked the coinage and wanted to name a bagel after it and call it an “Everything Change Bagel” in her honor, and could she tell me more. Ten minutes later, an email popped into my inbox.

“It’s ‘everything change’ especially because climate change is changing everything,” Atwood told me, adding: “Everything is changing: crops, droughts, floods, food availability, heat waves, wind events, sea-level rise, sea acidity, what grows where, what can live where, spread of disease, extinctions, and how we will live, eat, get our energy, view morality. Everything.”

It took me a while to digest all that but I believe Atwood is right on the mark. She also said she liked the new bagel name I had come up with in her honor, although she whispered: “What kind of mischief are you up to now?”

“There are two books everyone should read,” she said, getting serious again. Art and Energy by Barry Lord and Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels by Ian Morris. And on we roll.”

“Note that the Canadian government, which is very oil-driven, recently brought down a national budget that does not once mention the term ‘climate change’,” she told me.

I guess if the Canadian government does not mention the words “climate change” in its budget proposals then climate change must not exist up there, above the Lower 48 line.

Well, hoping to place the “everything change bagel” into the Internet’s memosphere, I sat down and wrote a poem, with a tip of the hat to Dr. Seuss, of course. And I’m hoping to read it on air on NPR if Scott Simon will interview me for Weekened Edition one day.

It’s titled “A poem to celebrate the Everything Change Bagel and its arrival on the world bagel-noshing stage.”

Denial schlimial, everything change
The everything change bagel is very delish

Try one today, with a deli shmeer
With an everything change bagel
There’s nothing to fear.’

And after you eat your very last nosh,
Remember to preserve this very good Earth (oh gosh)

There’s more but you’ll have to wait for my on air appearance on NPR to hear  the full three stanzas. In the meantime, Margaret Atwood has been “bagelized.”

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Dan Bloom, based in Taiwan, is a cli-fi enthusiast, inveterate web surfer and apparently, a bagel connoisseur, when he can get one.  You may comment to him at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website observing the rules below.

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