All rise.
The Forever Ago Court is now in session.
Please welcome the Honorable Judge Ariana.
Thank you, thank you.
You may be seated.
Today we hear the case of Dolo versus Bagel.
Do you want to tell me your side of the story, Miss Dolo?
Yes, Judge.
It all started on a cold Monday morning.
I was born in a hospital located just beyond the Tennessee River.
When my... No, no, no.
Not your life story.
Why are you in my courtroom today?
Oh, oh, sorry.
I'm here because that Bagel over there is a fraud.
Bagel.
I ordered an everything bagel with everything on it.
But this bagel just had a bunch of seeds, some dried garlic, and salt.
Those are the toppings on an everything bagel.
Oh, yeah?
Well, where are the blueberries?
Or the sardines?
Or the raindrops?
An everything bagel should have everything.
I'm talking roller skates, a pterodactyl skeleton.
Ms.
Dole, that's not actually...
How the... Bonsai trees, lucky rabbit's feet, four-leaf clovers, beetle juice.
Joy, hold on.
What are you talking about?
An everything bagel doesn't have everything on it.
That's impossible and kind of gross now that I think about it.
I throw myself on the mercy of the court.
I plead the fifth.
Order in the courtroom.
I think you've watched too many courtroom TV shows.
I yield my time.
Um, okay.
Uh, Bagel, do you have anything to say?
It can't talk.
It's a bagel.
Come on now.
Right.
Sorry.
Okay, I'm ready to make my ruling.
Bagel, thank you for joining us today.
Joy, maybe you should take a nap.
I hereby rule that it is impossible and inconceivable to have everything on a bagel.
I mean think of the size of the oven, the cost to consumers, all the yucky things that could be on there.
I did think blueberries were a little too much, personally.
Right?
I hereby name bagel the winner of this case.
Aw, shucks.
Thank you.
The bagel can talk!
Welcome to Forever Ago from APM Studios.
I'm Joy Dolo, and my co-host today is Ariana from Elk River, Minnesota.
Hey, Ariana.
Hi, Joy.
Today's episode is all about bagels.
Ariana, how do you feel about bagels?
I absolutely love bagels.
Oh, you do?
What's your favorite kind of bagel?
My favorite kind of bagel is just a plain toasted bagel, of course, and plain cream cheese.
Can't go wrong.
Just plain and plain, huh?
Plain and plain.
You know, I like my stuff plain, too.
I've always been a big fan of vanilla ice cream and just kind of sugar cookies like the plain stuff.
Me, too.
I can't go with all the toppings on top.
Just not my kind of scene.
I just like to be able to taste the cheese and the bread of it all, you know.
I'm going to tell you something.
There's a place in town that I used to work at that was a bagel place.
So I used to make bagels.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would like wake up early in the morning, like three in the morning, and I'd have to go there.
I had to be there at four.
And they were already like pre-rolled and everything.
They were already frozen.
So I used to go there in my sleepy state and bring all the bagels out of the freezer and then – boil them and put them in the baker thing or whatever.
And they would just kind of rotate, rotate, rotate.
And I did that for two hours and like made a whole bunch of bagels before the store opened.
And I loved bagels, but I hated that job.
Oh, no.
How did you wake up that early every day?
Ariana, let me tell you, it was tough.
I am not.
I like to wake up early, but not that early.
Yeah, me, myself and I, I am a night owl all the time.
What would your dream bagel look like?
I think my dream bagel would still be like a toasted plain one because seeds can't do them.
Like you with mayo.
And then cream cheese, still plain.
And then...
Sprinkles with whipped cream like a Girl Scout cookie.
Yeah, like a Girl Scout cookie.
I love some sweets.
Speaking of sweet things, today we have a sweet topic, bagels.
Today we think of bagels as a sort of all-American breakfast food.
But less than 100 years ago, most Americans had no idea what they were.
And because they were a new food in the US, people weren't really sure what to make of them at first.
When they were written about in the newspaper, the reporters had to explain to people what they were, since not everyone knew.
Here are the real things written in real newspapers about bagels back in the 1940s and 1960s.
A bagel is a hard, chewy roll with a hole in the center.
An unsweetened donut with rigor mortis.
Rigor mortis is a word used to describe dead stiff things.
Ugh.
Truly the rudest description of a bagel.
So how did bagels go on a journey from something that needed to be explained to a world-famous food that needs no introduction?
Here to take us on that journey is the Lady of Locks, Countess of Cream Cheese, Brooklyn's Bagel, Baroness Soul, Isle Whaley.
Whale!
Sola and Whaley!
Oh, here.
I brought bagels.
Hey, Sola.
Ooh, you're eating a bagel to get ready to talk about bagels?
Amazing idea.
Love it.
Thanks, Sola.
Whoa, that's got to be the biggest tub of cream cheese I've ever seen.
I love cream cheese.
And when it's on a bagel, you get to call it schmear, which is a very fun word to say.
I got the XXL tub because honestly, are you even making an episode about bagels if you don't end up with cream cheese on your microphone?
I have cream cheese in my hair right now, so we're clearly doing it right.
Sola is a chef, cookbook author, and a fellow podcast host.
Up top!
Yes.
My husband and I did a podcast called Deep Dish, where we explored the stories of some of our favorite foods.
You recently did a deep dive on the history of bagels, right?
Yes, indeed.
So where'd they come from in the first place?
The story of bagels starts in Eastern Europe.
Jewish bakers there had been making bagels for hundreds of years, but in their home countries they faced a lot of anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism is a word for when people hate or discriminate against someone just because they're Jewish.
Because of this discrimination, many Jewish people in Eastern Europe decided to leave their countries in the late 1800s and move to new places.
Around this time, the telephone had just been invented and people were storing their food in ice boxes, which is just an earlier form of a refrigerator.
And this was also a time when lots of immigrants were coming to New York City.
Right, including Jewish bagel bakers from Eastern Europe.
And when people move, they bring their culture with them, including their recipes.
Oh yeah, we talked about this in the fortune cookies episode.
But when Jewish bakers ended up in New York, they ran into a problem.
They couldn't afford their own ovens.
No ovens, no bagels.
Because they couldn't start their own bagel businesses, Jewish bakers started working in bakeries run in the basements of apartment buildings.
And at first, their working conditions were terrible.
It's hotter than a Brooklyn sidewalk in August down here.
Look at this.
My shirt's totally soaked in sweat.
Thermometer says 120.
Phew.
Sorry.
Got some flour in my throat.
You'd think the boss could put a window in here.
Rat.
He is a rat.
No, I mean there's a rat.
Past the broom.
The bakers worked in these tiny, hot, unventilated basements for very little pay.
The working conditions were so bad they even inspired a curse, which roughly translates from Yiddish to may you lay in the ground and bake bagels.
It sounded like this.
Liegen und red und backen bagel.
Oy vey.
Yeah, it was very bad.
But thanks to the hard work and organizing of these bagel makers, it wouldn't be for long.
See, bagels had gotten pretty popular in New York City, so the bakeries were doing really well.
But the bagel makers had a special skill that no one else, not even their bosses, had.
Oh, oh, let me guess.
They could make life-size chewing gum sculptures.
Mmm, I don't think so.
Ooh, they could imitate the calls of six different types of New York City pigeons.
Goo, goo, goo, goo.
I'm a pigeon.
Goo, goo, goo, goo, goo, goo, goo.
Okay, those are really great guesses, but the very special skill bagel makers had was making bagels.
Oh, right.
That makes sense.
Yeah, making bagels can be really hard to do.
The dough needs to have just the right stretchiness, but still be stiff enough to hold its shape.
Then you have to roll the bagels.
You need to use just the right amount of dough so that all your bagels are the same size.
And you need to roll it tight enough that it doesn't fall apart, but not so tight that you can squish it.
Next, the bagels are boiled, which is what makes them chewy and shiny.
Exactly.
And then, finally, you bake them in a super hot oven.
It's a lot of steps, and they each require specific skills.
The bagel makers realized they had these skills, and their bosses didn't.
Hey, what if all us bakers got together and just refused to work for all these rats?
And with these rats, boom, we could demand better pay, vacation days.
Bakeries with windows.
If all of us stood together, the bosses wouldn't have a choice.
In the early 1900s, the bakers decided to take action.
They formed Local 338, a labor union created by and for bagel makers in New York.
Oh, I've heard of labor unions.
They're basically groups of workers that band together to get better treatment at work.
Right.
Unions do what's called collective bargaining.
Collective means in a group, and bargaining is another word for negotiation.
So collective bargaining means the union members work together to come up with a list of things they want the boss to agree to, like how much they're paid or how many vacation days they get.
Then they meet with the boss to negotiate.
Sometimes they make compromises, like maybe workers want three weeks of vacations every year, but their boss only wants to give them one week off.
So they compromise and workers get two weeks of vacation time.
But if the bosses won't agree to what the workers want, the workers might decide to go on strike.
That means they refuse to work until an agreement is reached.
And the bagel makers went on strike many times.
New Yorkers called these strikes bagel famines because no one could get their beloved bagels.
One, two, three, four, we won't take it anymore.
Five, six, seven, eight, bakeries negotiate.
What do we want?
Fair pay.
When do we want it?
Yesterday.
What do we want?
Fair pay.
When do we want it?
Yesterday.
And the union started to get what they wanted, better working conditions and higher pay.
And over time, more and more bakers started joining the union.
To join the union, you had to be related to an existing union member.
And you had to be able to roll at least 832 bagels in an hour.
That's almost 14 bagels every minute.
These bagel bakers were super talented and tough as nails when it came to protecting their craft.
And so, by the 1930s, if you wanted to open a bagel shop in New York, you needed to hire bakers from the union.
But what if someone opened a bakery that didn't hire union bakers?
Oh, that was a game you did not want to play.
We'll talk all about it in a bit.
But first, I know a game you do want to play.
It's time for...
It's the game where we guess the order things came in history.
Today's items are three of our favorite circular things with holes in the middle.
Besides bagels, of course.
Those three things are tutus, cheerios, and hula hoops.
Okay Ariana, which do you think came first in history, which came second and which came most recently.
Oh, gosh, that's hard.
I think tutus might have came first, because fabric was like one of the things that was invented like firstly.
Yeah, people have had clothes for so long, you know?
Right.
So I think tutus came first.
Oh, no.
Cheerios are hula hoops.
It's tough, right?
I like the process of, like, what you're going with.
So we have fabric for tutus, and then cheerios is, like, what, grain?
Yeah.
Right.
So would it be grain or hula hoops?
What is hula hoops made out of?
Like plastic, maybe?
Right.
Did plastic come first or did grain come first?
Probably grain.
I think grain.
Yeah, one would think grain.
So maybe grain came first.
All right.
So, OK, so we have two twos and then you want to say Cheerios?
Yeah, let's go Cheerios and then we'll go hula hoops.
Okay, so number one, tutus.
Number two, Cheerios.
And number three, hula hoops.
Is that your final answer?
Final answer, lock it in.
All right, we'll be back with the answers at the end of the show right after the credits.
So stick around.
We're working on an episode all about our favorite movie snack, popcorn.
And we want to hear from you.
What do you think will be the snack of the future?
Gummy broccoli, dehydrated mozzarella sticks, lemon chips?
Let us know.
Ariana, what do you think will be our go-to snack of the future?
Oh, jumbo Skittles.
Um, sign me up for a jumbo Skittle.
Right?
Who wouldn't eat that?
It's just like, like it would take you so long to eat so you could savor the sugar.
Yeah.
And then the little chewy inside you can just like gnaw on it while you watch movies.
Exactly that's so good listeners.
Record yourself describing your snack of the future and send it to us at foreveragoorg contact.
And while you're there, you can send us episode ideas, drawings and questions.
So keep listening.
Brains on universe is a family of podcasts for kids and their adults, and since you're a fan of forever ago, we know you'll love the other shows in our universe.
Come on, let's explore.
About a hundred bolts of lightning strike the Earth's surface every second.
But there are all different types of lightning.
You can have lightning bolts between clouds, from the ground up to a cloud, even lightning that looks like glowing balls.
Lightning balls.
Zork, where did the signal go?
Must find brains on pod.
Search for Brains On wherever you listen to podcasts.
Welcome back to Forever Ago.
I'm Joy.
And I'm Ariana.
And I'm Sola.
Ariana, can you pass the strawberry cream cheese?
But you're eating a garlic and onion bagel.
With fish eggs?
Yeah, I call this little combo the Dolo Delight.
Mmm, fruity and fishy.
Num, num, num, num.
Anyway, today we're learning about the history of a breakfast classic, bagels.
And before the break we learned that bagels came to the United States with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
At first, baking bagels in the U.S. was a terrible job.
The bakers worked in cramped, super hot basements with no ventilation.
But they banded together to form a labor union and demanded better working conditions from their bosses.
And things did get better.
Let's fast forward to the 1960s.
Groovy!
The 1960s piece, man.
A band called The Beatles had just released their first album and the US was racing to put the first person on the moon.
By this time the second generation of Bagel Union members were running the show, mostly the kids of the original members.
And these bakers were making about $150 a week.
Today, that would be almost $1,600.
That was a lot of money back then.
More than many police officers, teachers, or engineers were paid at the time.
Union bagel bakers could afford to buy houses and send their kids to college.
They also got paid vacation time, good health insurance, and two dozen free bagels every day.
Wow.
And I thought hosting forever ago was a dream job.
I mean, it is, but maybe I should negotiate for some free bagels.
Bagels were getting more popular and some people wanted to open bagel shops without spending a bunch of money on bakers.
They wanted to hire bakers that weren't in the union.
If they did this, they could pay those bakers less and not give them all the great benefits the union had negotiated for.
Uh-oh.
That doesn't sound like something the union would like.
No, definitely not.
The union had all kinds of tricks to shut down these non-union shops, like stealing their delivery trucks.
So long, Gabby.
Hope you didn't need this truck to deliver your bagels.
They even blew up a few trucks with no one in them.
But one of my favorite tricks is that they would break into the non-union bakery in the middle of the night.
And they would add a bunch of yeast to the bagel dough.
Yeast is what makes bread rise.
And normally when you're baking, you just use a teeny tiny bit.
But these union bakers would pour in a lot.
The bagel dough would puff up so much that it would fill the entire room, and then it would turn rock hard.
It would take literally weeks of chiseling to get it off the walls.
Then in 1964, a shop called Bagel Boys opened up right in the heart of Brooklyn without negotiating with local 338, the bagel union.
Did the union add tons of yeast to their dough and steal their delivery trucks?
They actually used another one of their favorite methods, and one that many unions still use today.
They picketed.
Picketing is when a group stands or marches in front of a business to let potential customers know the business has wronged them in some way.
And in addition to chanting and handing out flyers that said please don't buy the union, bakers came up with a genius strategy.
Would you like a free bagel from your friends at Local 338?
Ooh, don't mind if I do.
Genius!
Yeah!
Why would someone go inside and buy a bagel when they could get a free one out front?
Exactly.
They faced threats, intimidation, and dirty tricks.
But Local 338 didn't back down.
And eventually, they won.
Bagel Boys signed a contract with the union to hire their workers.
But while the union was focused on the Bagel Boys another, even more powerful force was gathering steam against them.
Alien bakers?
Zombie bakers?
Robot bakers?
No, well, actually, sort of that last one.
In the late 1950s, a California inventor had invented a bagel machine.
The bagels from this machine were different from traditional bagels.
They didn't have the same famous chew or shiny crust, but they could be made much faster.
And a bakery in Connecticut called Lender's Bagels invested heavily in these machines.
Oh, I've heard of Lenders.
They're one of the bagels you can buy in the grocery store.
Yep.
And by the 1970s, Lenders was the number one bagel producer in the world.
More and more local shops started replacing some of their workers with machines.
The union just couldn't keep up.
Bummer for local 338.
Yeah, it was pretty much the end of the bagel union, which for decades had been a huge force in New York.
By the 1970s, the union was half its original size.
They eventually had to merge with another baker's union that represented all kinds of bakers, not just bagel makers.
But the invention of the bagel machine is probably what helped bagels become known all over the country and the world.
Right.
Lenders also pioneered pre-slicing and freezing bagels, which meant that I could get them growing up in California.
But even though bagel-making machines are used widely these days, there are still bagel shops all over the world making bagels by hand.
And old-fashioned bagel makers are still high in demand.
Ariana actually got to meet a baker in Minneapolis who started hand-rolling his bagels but switched to using a machine when his shop got busier and he needed to make more bagels more quickly.
Hello.
Hi, welcome to the bakery.
It's so nice to be here.
Nice to meet you.
I'm Asa.
I'm Ariana.
I've got some bagel dough here.
I'm going to turn it out onto the bench.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's really pleasant to touch, isn't it?
It's so amazingly soft.
It's like cloud.
We mixed this like a couple hours ago, and so now it's about ready to get divided into smaller pieces and then shaped into a bagel.
You roll this out and then we can cut pieces.
Then we can take this and roll it out like this and then wrap it around your hand and then roll the two ends together.
And there's a slightly lopsided bagel.
You want to try one?
Sure.
So we roll and then we wrap it around.
Yeah, that looks good.
It's like a little mountain.
My first ever handmade bagel.
Awesome.
I will forever remember this moment.
I made them when I was a kid, like in middle school once.
And I remember like spending you know a weekend day on it and then being like well, I'll probably never do that again.
That was so much work.
And then we ate it in 10 minutes, you know.
And yeah, there I am.
The machines, in my opinion, does a pretty clever job of doing the action that we were just doing.
Whoa, it's got a conveyor belt.
Yes, it's got some conveyor belts.
It has two sort of separate machines that are connected.
And so this one, this whole thing, does the job of cutting the bagels into equal-sized pieces.
Then it falls onto this belt, and it starts spreading, lengthening the dough.
And then this belt folds the dough as it travels through, and then it rolls the ends together, just like we did.
Like we did around our hands.
Yep, just like wrapping it around your hand and rolling the ends together.
Stop, that's so cool.
Asa also makes bialis, which have had a different fate than their cousin, the bagel.
Bialy's are another Polish Jewish bread.
They're definitely lighter, kind of in between like a bagel and an English muffin in the texture on the inside.
They didn't kind of make the jump onto every grocery store shelf around the country the way bagels did.
I think part of like why they're less ubiquitous than bagels is that there isn't a machine that makes them start to finish like this.
It's a lot like making a pizza, but a tiny one, where you are stretching it out without deflating the edge so that you get it nice and thin in the middle and inflatable kiddie pool shape around the edge.
And then you put the onion in and it gets baked really hot and quick.
And so then the outside kind of puffs up and the middle stays Yeah.
We've had customers come up and be like, I don't have to have my brother FedEx maybe always anymore.
Thank you.
This is awesome.
Yeah.
I'm so pleased that you are enjoying it.
Bagels were brought to the U.S. with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the late 1800s.
At first, these immigrant bakers faced terrible working conditions.
But they decided to band together to form a union so they could negotiate with their bosses.
The union completely transformed the jobs of bagel bakers in New York City.
They won better pay, great benefits, and vacation time.
The union eventually collapsed when bagel-making machines were invented.
These machines helped bagels become popular all over the country.
But today, more and more shops are going back to making bagels by hand.
This episode was written by Nico Gonzalez-Whistler.
It was produced by Ruby Guthrie and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler.
Our editors are Shayla Farzan and Sandin Totten.
Fact-checking by Katie Ruther.
Engineering help from Josh Savageau and Alex Simpson.
With sound design by Rachel Brees.
Original theme music by Mark Sanchez.
We had additional production help from the rest of the Brains on Universe team.
Beth Perlman is our executive producer, and the executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavadi and Joanne Griffith.
Special thanks to Megan Himes, Max Barber, Asa Diebold, Andres O'Hara and the rest of the Deep Dish production team.
And if you want access to ad-free episodes and special bonus content, subscribe to our Smarty Pass.
Okay, Ariana, are you ready to hear the answers for our first things first?
No, but yeah.
You're so ready for this.
Okay, so as a reminder, we're putting these three round items in order when they were invented.
And you said tutus is number one, cheerios, and then hula hoops.
Are you ready to hear the answers, Ariana?
I am ready, Joy.
Oh, well, guess what, Ariana?
You were right.
You were completely right.
No way.
Actually?
Yeah, actually, you got it all right.
You did, like, a wonderful process of elimination.
I was not expecting that at all.
Let's go.
So first up was tutus.
So tutus made their debut in 1832 in the ballet production of La Sille Fide.
Before 1832, ballerinas usually wore heavy skirts with hoops in them which made it hard to move gracefully.
But tutus changed all of that.
They're made of layers of thin fabric, so they look puffy and big but are light and easy to move in.
That's one of the reasons they're still so popular today.
So you were totally on the right track with the fabric idea.
Wow, I was not expecting that.
Yeah, and then next up was Cheerios.
Cheerios or Cheery Oats, as they were first known when they were introduced in 1941.
Their name was shortened in 1945. to Cheerios.
The first special flavor of Cheerios was called Cinnamon Nut Cheerios, which was introduced in 1976.
Wow.
So we've gone from the 1800s and now we're like in the mid 1940s, 1945 and then 1976.
That's a big time gap.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But we were also still on the same track with the oats, right?
With the grains.
That's true.
I got that from you, though.
That's true.
Do you like Cheerios?
I, you know, I'm I'm going to be a little controversial here, but I'm more of a raisin type of girl.
That's that's that's OK.
That's all right.
Yeah.
I will suggest that sometime you get into some Honey Nut Cheerios.
I'm going to suggest you get into mayo.
All right, touche.
That was a good one.
Okay, and last but certainly not least is hula hoops, which were invented in the late 1950s.
So the hula hoop was patented in the U.S. in 1963, but they're actually Australian in origin.
What?
So they started being produced there in the late 1950s, and they were inspired by bamboo hoops that children whirled around their waist during gym class.
Oh, that makes sense.
Bamboo.
Oh, that actually, that really does make sense.
We need an episode about this.
That should be an episode.
Hula hoops.
It should be an episode.
Oh my gosh, that's so great.
Okay, so the world record for hula hooping is held by Jenny Doan of Chicago, who kept one swinging for 100 hours.
Stop, what?
100 hours.
Can you hula hoop?
Absolutely not.
I can keep it up for like a few seconds, but that's pretty much it.
I can keep it up maybe for like two milliseconds.
So which one of those answers were you most surprised by?
Definitely the, well, okay.
I was going to say the hula hoops, but the bamboo actually makes sense.
The tutus make sense.
Cheerios?
I would say probably the Cheerios, maybe.
Yeah, yeah.
For some reason, like when I first looked at it, I was like I wonder if Cheerios actually came first, because it's been around for forever.
But Tutus, there they are.
And, like, grain is just like, you know, we need food to survive.
Yeah, yeah.
Congrats on nailing first things first, Ariana.
You did it.
Join us next week for a new episode all about movie popcorn.
Thanks for listening.
