Bagels and packaging

Back to school means one thing in my diet -- bagels! The food is normally verboten in the household but in the morning it really does get me out of the house and on the road. Yesterday I went to Deja Brew near campus for my coffee and bagel, where the poor counter people must endure my parody of the song, "Deva Vu" and its numerous variations. This coffee shop is inside a rather spacious copy center and is able to provide good coffee and various pastries and bagels. There are two things I'm not happy with, however; the fact that the bagels are wrapped in plastic and put in a big paper bag for to go meals, and the fact that you have to put on your own cream cheese and it comes in either a small plastic container or a packet. Either way, between those two things it's too much packaging. They will, however, put coffee in provided travel mug and even sometimes won't charge me for soy milk. Yesterday I asked one of the sweet people who work there if I could just have a bagel without the packaging and she said that they wrap their bagels immediately after getting them because they go stale over the course of the day. This was kind of b.s., because if you get there past 11 am on weekdays you're almost surely out of luck about getting you a bagel, so there's not much chance of premature staleiosity.

All right, whatever. So this morning I went down the street to Bagels Unlimited (where Deja Brew gets their bagels, anyway) and was able to get a bagel just wrapped in paper, already toasted with reduced fat cream cheese. If I handed the nice counter lady a plastic container to put my bagel in I don't think she'd bat an eye. Maybe I'll try that tomorrow, in preparation for my McDonald's expedition!

Got the picture from Barry's Bagels