Tears for Schmears: The Great Cream Cheese Shortage of 2021

As if the latest COVID variant weren’t disheartening enough, bagel lovers like me may be facing the new year with no schmear.

The New York Times reports that the nation’s strategic cream cheese reserves are spread dangerously thin, so to speak. As a worshipper at the Church of the Holey Bagel, this concerns me greatly. 

Let others sing hymns, and mutter prayers on Sunday morning. When I set up on my screen porch with my coffee, my New York Times crossword puzzle and my sesame bagel, toasted and topped with cream cheese, tomato, red onion and black pepper, I’m in heaven. 

So the prospect of weekends without cream cheese is a very serious matter, though perhaps not as serious as it would have been a few years back, when I was bageling daily.

Because we wanted them to know the value of a dollar and, more importantly, bring home bagels at the end of a shift, all three of my kids worked at Irving’s bagelry in State College during their teen years. For much of the first decade of this troubled century, my freezer was crammed with bagels. I could have had one for breakfast every morning. Often, I did.

Life was good until word got around that carbs- and calories-wise, eating a bagel is not the same as eating a couple of slices of toast. At the super-sized end of the bagel spectrum, one bagel is the equivalent of six slices of toast. Even at the more compact end, one bagel equates to three slices of toast. 

OK, I thought, maybe a bagel a day isn’t the best way to keep the doctor away. That’s when I became a Sunday bageler. 

Unless I’m in an airport. Or in New York. 

I lived the unbageled life during the six months I spent in Greece a couple of years back, unless you count koulouria, which are what you get when you cross bagels with pretzels. I don’t.

Shortly after I came back to the States, I looked skyward and saw a bagel-shaped cloud. I took it as a sign, and got me to a bagelry forthwith. 

So you can see why The Times story got my attention. I immediately pictured schmear-filled shipping containers, like enormous packages of Philadelphia Cream Cheese, piled high on ships in Long Beach Harbor. 

That’s not quite what’s happening. The United States has not, as far as I know, outsourced its cream cheese production to foreign lands. Rather, America’s dairies raise herds of schmear cows whose milk and cream, when treated with lactic acid bacteria under rabbinical supervision, turn into bagel-worthy spreads.  

The problem is that the cows, tired of working for silage, have joined the Great Resignation and are schmoozing in coffeehouses rather than schmearing in dairy barns. 

OK, that’s not what’s happening either. According to The Times, we’re low on cream cheese for the same reason we’re low on a lot of other stuff – a shortage of truckers and production workers and packaging supplies. 

“At the moment, it’s cream cheese,” Wegman’s State College store manager Adam Fleming told me.  The store hasn’t run out entirely, he said, but it doesn’t always have all the brands it usually stocks. 

And to think I used to make fun of supply chain management as an undergraduate major. 

Exacerbating the problem, according to a spokesperson for Kraft Heinz (makers of Philadelphia Cream Cheese), is more people using cream cheese for such frivolous purposes as the icing on carrot cakes and the filling of cheesecakes. 

Now I like a good cheesecake and carrot cake as much as the next guy – maybe more than the next guy – but this is a triage situation. Joe Biden ought to mount the bully pulpit that supposedly comes with the presidency and call for a moratorium on the usage of cream cheese in desserts so that the supply can go where it’s needed most – to all those naked bagels, yearning to be schmeared.  

Oh, I know what would happen. Red state politicians would say it’s a power play by blue state elites. Would The Times do a story if biscuits-and-gravy were in short supply? 

Well, even Times columnist Bret Stephens, a conservative (but an anti-Trumper), has described the cream cheese crisis as “one of the 10 biblical plagues as reimagined by Mel Brooks.”

But leave it to Frank Zappa to have anticipated the desperation we bagel lovers will feel if we must go schmearless for the foreseeable future: 

Got to find my Suzy Creamcheese
Yeah, yeah, yeah…

Fortunately for Centre County bagelers, we need seek no farther than the Penn State Creamery, which, sales and marketing manager Jim Brown tells me, makes its own cream cheese locally (and sells it to places like Irving’s). Ergo, no supply chain issues.

Phew.