The price of fish: What lox taught me about thrift and luxury When I was a kid, lox was definitely a luxury. My dad, raised during the heart of the Depression, would watch us on Sunday mornings like an auditor as we placed fingernail-sized bits of lox on a bagel spread thinly with cream cheese. If we put on too much lox, he’d say, “There’s a whole ‘nother meal there!” and force us to put some back.
Once I slept over at a friend’s house, bigger and more luxurious than my own, and watched in amazement and horror as he slapped a slab of lox on an inch-thick shmear of cream cheese. He might as well have taken a $10 bill out of his pocket and burned it.
My wife has similar memories of growing up, and neither of us has really shaken off the Depression-era values of our parents. Even when we try to indulge ourselves or our kids, our internal accountants are watching carefully. In a word, we’re cheap. Breaking the Yom Kippur fast last week, we layered on the lox with the care and efficiency of transplant surgeons.
I’ve always wondered how lox came to be the symbol of Jewish luxury. Just how expensive was a quarter-pound of lox in the early 1970s, when my parents doled it out like gold leaf? I actually looked it up. According to a New York Times article from July 1973, prices ranged from “about $1.15 for a quarter of pound of regular lox (Waldbaum's, Oceanside, L. I.) to $1.49 at Zabar's.” This, mind you, was on the eve of an expected lox shortage, the result of “heavy buying by Japanese and Europeans.”
But even taking the shortage into account, $5.96 a pound doesn’t sound like that much to pay for a cured fish. But then I factored in household income. Fifty years ago, the median family income for households with wage-earners in the 45-54 age bracket was $12,900, which rose to $16,730 for college grads (like my dad).
By contrast, the median family income for the same age bracket in 2019 was $92,221, and rose to $100,164 for college grads. So that must explain it, right? In 1971, a pound of lox would have cost you .46% of your weekly household income. In 2019, when lox sold at the supermarket for, let’s say, $8.99 a pound, it would set you back only … .47% of your weekly paycheck.
In other words, almost exactly the same.
So if household income doesn’t account for the luxurification of lox, what does?
Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture might explain it: It turns out our spending on food — proportional to our income — has “actually declined dramatically since 1960,” according to a 2015 article by NPR. The average share of per capita income spent on food fell from 17.5 percent in 1960 to 9.6 percent in 2007.
“Because of the overall rise in income, and the consistent shrinking of food prices adjusted for inflation, we actually have more disposable income than our grandparents did, according to Annette Clauson, an agricultural economist with USDA's Economic Research Service,” reports NPR.
Which suggests that lox may not have taken a bigger bite out of my parents’ income than it does mine, but it took a much larger bite out of their household food budget. If you were worried about the price of meat (as a lot of people were in the early ‘70s) and just how much three growing boys could eat (which my parents definitely were) you too might go easy on what is essentially a glorified breakfast food.
I also think lox had a cachet beyond its price tag, which teaches us something about scarcity and ritual. I don’t know when lox first became available in vacuum-sealed packs, but growing up my folks got theirs custom-sliced at an appetizing store or at a supermarket deli counter. (I worked at one such counter in high school, and without any training I was told to slice the lox for a customer. The result looked like an autopsy gone bad.) The experience probably justified the expense: You weren’t just grabbing some fish, but having it carefully prepared by a specialist to your specifications, usually on the very same morning you intended to serve it. And this you were going to let your husky son just gobble down?
Our thrift drives our kids crazy, and I sometimes argue with my wife when I suspect she is denying herself an indulgence (which we both do, the voices of our late, cheapskate fathers’ whispering in our ears). But I did inherit an appreciation for lox and other finer things in life, and might not have had I been able to eat as much of it as I wanted as a kid. My wife is definitely a “less is more” person, and she is usually right: If you end up putting too much lox on a bagel, you find yourself masticating a mouthful of fish, instead of appreciating the subtle interplay among the lox, cream cheese and bagel, with perhaps a caper or slice of red onion for a grace note.
I don’t know that my rich friend’s life would have been better if he ate less lox, but let’s pretend it would have. He never learned that thrift is good for the planet and good for the soul.
In the version of the “Al Het” confession I recited on Yom Kippur, the community owns up to sinning “in our eating and drinking.” The confession doesn’t specify in what ways we sinned at the table, but that verse is immediately followed by the sin of “greed and oppressive interest.” We sin as eaters – and consumers – when we bite off more than we can chew, or let our appetites overwhelm our ability to savor. As the food writer M.F.K. Fisher put it – in what, actually, sounds like a confession – “We sink too easily into stupid and overfed sensuality, our bodies thickening even more quickly than our minds.”
The downside of thrift is when we calculate the price of everything and appreciate the value of nothing. I admit, I have been guilty of that. Forgive me, kids. Eating, like life, is a balancing act, between thrift and indulgence, lox and cream cheese. Ken yehi ratzon.
I’m a Numbers guy myself
In a New Yorker profile, Kathryn Paige Harden, the behavior geneticist, describes herself politically as a “Matthew 25:40 empiricist” “(‘The King will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” ’).”
Which got me thinking – what Bible verse best expresses your political leanings?
Maybe it’s Exodus 22:20-23? (“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan.”)
Maybe you are a Deuteronomy 16:18 judicial activist? (“You shall appoint judges and officers for your tribes, in all the settlements that Hashem your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with justice.”)
Or, like Deuteronomy 18:20-22, you are wary of mixing Torah and politics: “Any prophet who presumes to speak in My name an oracle that I did not command him to utter, or who speaks in the name of other gods—that prophet shall die.”
What Torah verse guides your politics? Let me know at editor@jewishweek.org. Photo, top: Timothy Vollmer/Flickr Commons Thanks for reading. Reach me at editor@jewishweek.org. Follow me on Twitter, and don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your friends. |