When it comes to food, there are a few types of food that immediately stick out in my mind as favorites. Any restaurant that serves Italian, Indian or various types of pan-Asian cuisine is good in my book. I also have a few favorite foods that are staples in my diet. Cheesesteaks, Hot Pockets and ravioli are guaranteed to make me salivate. But there is only one food I know that has earned the right to be called “the perfect food.”

Friends, I present to you, the perfect food: the bagel.

What makes the bagel a perfect food? The bagel possesses two features that make it stand tall among its culinary brethren.

First, the bagel goes well with just about any topping put on it. Bagels are one of the few foods (along with chocolate-covered pretzels) that taste just as good with salty toppings as with sweet toppings.

Even plain, the bagel can serve as a breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert or snack, depending on what you place between its halves. The classics, butter and cream cheese, fit with just about any time of day, but a bagel can also be topped with a fruit spread or peanut butter for breakfast or dessert or deli meats, cheeses and certain vegetables (cucumbers, sprouts, tomatoes) for lunch and dinner. And this doesn’t even consider the possibilities that arise when you throw in the myriad of bagel flavors. From onion, to garlic, to poppyseed, to cinnamon raisin, to the flavor overload of everything, there’s a universe of flavor options waiting to be tried.

Second and more importantly, bagels have the uncanny and mysterious ability to function as a meal in themselves. Some may scoff, but I have found that even the most basic of bagel combinations – plain with cream cheese – possesses enough nutrients to sate my hunger. While I was living in the dorms, grabbing a bagel as one of my items at Mirror Lake or Buckeye Express helped stretch my meal plans out a little further. I took great pleasure in getting a sub from Mirror Lake many a late night and waking up the next morning with a bagel and cream cheese as a satisfying breakfast.

These are dark times for bagels, at least in Columbus anyway. In the course of a year, from spring 2003 to spring 2004, our bagel options immediately off campus were halved. Barry’s Bagels closed down, seemingly for the summer in 2003, then never re-opened. Last spring, I came back from spring break to see Beekman’s Bagels ingloriously shut down.

Although I never went to Barry’s Bagels, Beekman’s closing really hurt, because I had just discovered it a couple of months before. It was one of the few places I could eat at during a brief fling with vegetarianism that actually served a decent variety of vegetarian food (beyond subs that were nothing but other sandwiches’ toppings and cheese pizza). The first time I had their Sunny Hummus I heard my taste buds singing the “Hallelujah” chorus inside my mouth. A mixture of cheddar, hummus, honey mustard, onion and sprouts, it managed to be vegetarian and have good taste – a rarity for me.

Best of all, Beekman’s was the holy trinity of college food: cheap, filling and good. I could pick up a couple of provolone-and-marinara-sauce bagels with a small drink for around five bucks and that would easily fill me up. In the precious little time I knew Beekman’s, I tried to spread the gospel to as many people as possible. I convinced a friend visiting me to eat there on one of his rare trips down to Columbus, and was pleased when a group of friends went over there after their final English 565 class let out.

With these restaurants replaced by yet another burrito place and a chicken fingers restaurant, my bagel intake dramatically decreased. The only places I know of off campus that serve bagels are the Hillel Bagel Cafe and Bernie’s, places that are a little too far away from my house to go to regularly.

But I got a little taste of the good life last week. I ordered a couple of bagels with cream cheese at Brenen’s in the architecture building and remembered their sublime goodness. I ate one for lunch immediately and saved the second one for dinner.

Benjamin Nanamaker is a senior in English and journalism who wishes he had a bagel steamer so he could make his own Sunny Hummus. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].