The bagel as metaphor

Have you heard? All over Los Angeles, in delis and bakeries and God knows how many private kitchens, bagels are being disemboweled and then eaten.

Senseless slaughter? Pagan ritual?

Those involved use a more benign term: the “scooped-out bagel.”

Vicki Allen, a waitress at Nate ‘n’ Al’s deli in Beverly Hills, says she scoops out 15 to 20 bagels a day. She said this without blinking. The scooping out is accomplished with a spoon. The bagel is then toasted and served without irony but sometimes with cream cheese.

I had one and I don’t get it. I mean, I get that it’s a dietary thing (here come those carbs again, run for the hills!), but I felt so sorry for the bagel. It looked, well, dead -- or at least liposuctioned.

Bagels need heft; this was literally a shell of its former self. What had it ever done to deserve such a fate?

This being L.A., it is easy to assume that the scooped-out bagel is a reflection of a city so often stereotyped as appearance obsessed. We nip, we tuck, we lift. We hover over our bagels with spoons.

It is worth noting, however, that a waitress at Canter’s in the Fairfax District said she scoops out only a few bagels a year, which means if you’re a bagel, you’re probably better off not venturing west of Crescent Heights.

And I have twice now been with people who ordered scooped-out bagels, and both are transplanted New Yorkers, which once again proves that some of the worst images of Los Angeles are perpetrated by people who move here from New York.

Still, a TV writer friend suggested that scooped-out bagels are popular in L.A. because people in the entertainment business have so little control over their job security that they overcompensate by exerting unnecessary control over their bagels.

This got me thinking: Perhaps the scooped-out bagel is just a metaphor, symbolic of a larger, human dilemma for those of us whose lives are clouded by fear, anxiety, vanity, regret.

I now understand, for instance, why I didn’t vote for Gray Davis in last year’s gubernatorial election: He’s a scooped-out Democrat. Tom Cruise is a scooped-out actor, just as Julia Roberts is a scooped-out actress.

George W. Bush is a tougher call: Sometimes, particularly in speeches, he seems so scooped out.

But who knows? Word has it that behind the scenes, in meetings with staffers and senators, he is presidential. He is a bagel.

I take some comfort in the fact that I leave my bagels alone. And yet, like Julia, Tom and Gray, I’m scooping out all over the place.

Is my life not a series of scooped-out relationships with people?

Do I not have scooped-out conversations with my father on the phone? (“So how’re things?” he asks. “Fine, fine,” I say, so very scooped out.)

Do I not visit my great aunt once a week and just sit there with her as we watch golf or basketball, enacting some scooped-out version of familial love and guilt?

Am I not a scooped-out Jew, going to High Holy Days services once a year so I can feel like a Jew without having to be one? Have I not cynically dismissed religion, and is this not some scooped-out fear of death?

And doesn’t my scooped-out fear of death manifest itself as a kind of free-floating nihilism, which in itself is scooped-out nihilism, because I manage to obey various ethical and fiduciary laws, like recycling and paying the cable bill on time?

But I was talking about the bagel.

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Paul Brownfield can be contacted at paul.brownfield@latimes.com.