Mayo In Memoriam // Mayo It RIP In Peace

We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of mayonnaise. The humble condiment was taken from us, cruelly and unnecessarily by the millennials. In collusion with “””””””””identity condiments””””””” this all American Hero was taken from us in the year 2018. Mayo it’s memory live on forever.In case you haven’t been able to ketchup with the recent millennial-murders, oops we’ve done it again! According to this random old white chick at the Philadelphia Magazine, Millennials are responsible for the death of mayonnaise, and mayonnaise-based picnic items. Truly Pulitzer prize winning material from the Philadelphia Review. Not since Ronan Farrow’s Harvey Weinstein expose has a piece of journalism mattered so much. In all seriousness though, Boshemia is no stranger to the occasional shit post; just see half of Issue 02 for details (available to buy online!) Let’s really relish in this post and see exactly what we did to poor, poor mayonnaise.

Sandy details the picnic woes: why, dear god, why are people not eating her mother’s famous potato salad?! It wasn’t just her potato salad though; her chicken salad and her macaroni salad also went untouched. Why could this be? Could it be because they’re not salads?

Brief sidebar, but who decided that you can just call anything a salad; potatoes and mayonnaise with a bit of mustard is not a salad. If you tell your doctor you eat a salad every day and you’re confused as to why you’re not losing weight, your doctor will punch you in the face (no we won’t) (or will we?) when she finds out it’s a potato salad. Same deal with pasta; cold pasta coated in mayonnaise is not a salad. Where are the vegetables?! The occasional pity piece of sweetcorn thrown in doesn’t count, and you know it. What salad dressing could you possibly put on it?? Sorry baby boomers, you don’t know what a salad is. Buy a dictionary and stop it.

Essentially, Sandy feels like a loser because she brings vile potato “salads” to the picnic. The first question is obvious; who is inviting this gal to a picnic? Regardless, it seems like Sandy never considered that maybe people want to eat something refreshing and not disgusting It’s hard to say, no one really has picnics anymore, we just have barbeques. (Millennials killed picnics, I’m calling it!)

Sandy then goes on to bemoan these new-fangled nonsensical condiments. Turns out people enjoy salsa, kimchi and wasabi. You know, new condiments that millennials invented, which have absolutely not been around for centuries. Come on white people; you colonised the eastern world for spices, and you’re mad when people actually enjoy them? I’m getting some inconsistency from the whites.

There’s some obvious low-key racism when Sandy talks about identity condiments (not a thing) with such disdain. In an increasingly multi-cultural society, Sandy just wants to go back to the good old days when the only option people had was bland white goop. She’s fed up with the spices and the flavours, and people enjoying their food and opting for authentic cuisine; Sandy wants to Make America Great Again, one bland potato salad at a time.

“Just because something is old and white doesn’t mean it’s obsolete. Look at Shakespeare. Look at me”

Did she just compare mayonnaise to Shakespeare? Did she just compare herself to Shakespeare? Shakespeare revolutionised storytelling and language. Sandy posted her mum’s macaroni salad recipe on twitter.

Oh, also Sandy hates her feminist daughter.

“MY SON JAKE, who’s 25, eats mayo. He’s a practical young man who works in computers and adores macaroni salad. He’s a good son. I also have a daughter. She was a women’s and gender studies major in college. Naturally, she loathes mayonnaise.And she’s not alone. Ask the young people you know their opinion of mayo, and you’ll be shocked by the depths of their emotion. Oh, there’s the occasional outlier, like Jake. But for the most part, today’s youth would sooner get their news from an actual paper newspaper than ingest mayonnaise.”

There is just so much to unpack here. First of all, S-dog, your generation failed so badly at reading the news, you let Russia and Facebook pollute your mind with fake news that ended up electing a reality star as President of the US, so let’s not go into that, but good god why do you hate your daughter so much? She doesn’t even get a name! Jake gets name-dropped twice in 100 words and we have no idea what your poor daughter is even called! Did she consent to this active public slander? What did she do to create such hatred; did she use leftover salad to create a feminist pentagram that even Satan himself would not touch because macaroni salad is disgusting? I’m dying to see the research which links gender studies majors to mayonnaise hatred, since somehow in Sandy’s mind these two traits link “naturally”.

I used to hate mayonnaise; I thought it was a bland white goop that was overused. I still stand by this statement, but when used sparingly (as in not slathering heavy carbs in the stuff) as a dip, maybe with a bit of sriracha, mayo is fantastic. A nice salty, crispy chip offset by the creamy goodness is hard to beat, and the coolest, most hipster millennials are in agreement with me. I have friends who travel all the way to Hull to get their hands on the best chili mayo in all of Yorkshire. And seeing as Sandy was so keen to make this about race, isn’t this a perfect metaphor for whiteness; great when mixed in with everything else, but when you slather everything in white nonsense, nobody’s coming to your picnic Sandy. Nobody’s coming to your picnic.

For more by Q, see "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Juicero" in Issue 02.