Millennials Love Mayo More Than Anyone, Especially Boomers

​Over the weekend an opinion was published on the internet. A shocking development, I know. The opinion in question? Sandy Hingston's trend piece in Philadelphia Magazine, "How Millennials Killed Mayonnaise."

It is, in a word, a frustrating piece. Perhaps you've seen the tweets? That is why you're here, right? You've seen the tweets about mayonnaise but we're so far from the original publish date of the piece and this thing has gone past people linking to the original piece and are now into full-on context-collapse, inside-joke phase.

We could embed a few here, just to prove that, yes, there are tweets about mayo and there are a lot of people tweeting about it. But if you're really unfamiliar with it — and more importantly earnestly want to know (please save yourself from this!) — a good place to look is at the Twitter search results for mayo.

So what's going on here? Well, we have a particularly annoying headline-writing trend — framing generational differences as an intentional, spiteful rejection of tradition. Millennials aren't just eating less mayonnaise — a recent study cited by the Wall Street Journal noted a 6.7% drop in US mayo sales within the past five years — they're killing it, the implication that there's a means, motive and opportunity. 

Hingston's damning evidence? Well, for some reason, her mayo-based side dishes are no longer the hit at the potluck:

Mom's extraordinary potato salad — fragrant with dill, spiced by celery seed — went untouched on the picnic table. So did her macaroni salad, and her chicken salad, and her deviled eggs. … When I carted home a good three pounds of painstakingly prepared Waldorf salad — all that peeling and coring and slicing! — I was forced to face facts: The family's tastes had changed.

Telling! Now, could it be that after years and years of mayo suspensions and salads that they simply tired of the same thing? Of course not, writes Hingston, the reason is because of this dang PC culture we're all forced to live in now.

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.

Interesting! We have two millennials. One likes mayo, the other does not like it. This is, of course, a drastic change from when Hingston was a young person where, presumably, 100 percent of all children loved mayo and no one studied gender and men were men and ladies were ladies and so on. You can perhaps see where this is going.

Mayonnaise isn't bland; it's artfully blended. It's an evocation of the era I grew up in, of the homogeneity of that old, dead American dream.

Are we still talking about mayonnaise here? It seems like we're talking about another kind of "homogeneity." Perhaps one that's similar to the color of mayo? Hingston goes on to explain that the fake news media — run by the SJW lefist millennial fringe — has it out for mayonnaise. BuzzFeed, you see, wrote two articles (importantly, authored by two separate people no less!) about why mayo is bad. And not only is this hypocritical of the millennials (they also eat white semi-soft foods like yogurt!) but it's just downright discriminatory against a group that that, historically, has suffered the most out of anyone else: aging white boomers:

I thought young people today were supposed to be all about inclusion — about kindness and compassion and making other people feel welcome. So how about you include a little mayo in your picnic fare? Mayonnaise has been the building block for a thousand different tweaks in a rainbow of cultures: Russian dressing! Rémoulade! Comeback sauce, fry sauce, Kewpie, salsa rosada, mayochup … Just because something is old and white doesn't mean it's obsolete. Look at Shakespeare. Look at me.

Here's the thing: Millennials actually love mayo. Mayo isn't dying. That same Wall Street Journal story on the decline of mayo also points out that based on production numbers, it's still far and away America's most favorite condiment — 609 million pounds produced in 2017 versus second place ketchup's 454 million pounds. Across the pond, mayo sales are growing, eclipsing ketchup just this past year. I'm a good son. I love my mom's potato salad. I also believe that it's not enough to say that men and women should be equal, but that I must use the advantages that being a cis white man unfairly affords me to see that they're not repeated into the next generation. 

Perhaps the thinking that we must uphold traditions because that's the way things have always been is how we got into this mess into the first place. And I'm not talking about mayonnaise anymore.