My brother kindly forwarded yesterday's Morning Edition piece on Lender's bagels, which was great because I hadn't heard the whole thing on air. The timing neatly correlates with a cold breakfast paradigm shift I'd previously observed myself. 


Girl Scout troops often plan for a cold breakfast at the end of a weekend long campout to make clean up go faster (no wood fire to put out, ashes to cart away or spread). In the 1970s and early 80s, my Girl Scout troops always chose mini cereal boxes and Sweet 16 doughnuts for Sunday breakfast. And fruit or juice when urged to keep it balanced by our troop leaders. We'd always try to do the thing with those boxes where you cut open the flaps and the waxed paper lining would hold in milk, but it only worked about half the time. 


By the 1980s and 90s when I was a camp counselor, I'd help the girls plan a cold breakfast for the middle Sunday   of our 2-week session, when the cooks had the morning off. By now, campers increasingly often asked for bagels. Puzzled, I'd ask, "You understand I'm talking about ideas for a cold breakfast on sleep-in Sunday?" And they'd say, "Yeah, bagels are good cold." The really cool part was that we'd be able to actually purchase them through our restaurant food delivery service -- and later still we could buy bagels at the Food Lion in Heathsville, Virginia. Crazy.