[image via Chris Piascik]

The everything is not the most popular bagel.
That would be plain, closely followed by sesame. But for some, it’s the only bagel that will do. Salty, seedy, and pungent with onion and garlic, it’s the true bagel lover’s bagel.

The everything bagel also has its detractors. They complain that the everything’s yeasty, stinky goodness befouls its milder brethren in the paper sack on the way home from the bagel shop. They whine about garlic breath and the way poppy seeds tuck themselves into the spaces between their teeth.
To them I say: knock yourselves out with a blueberry bagel.

And there’s controversy.
In a promotional post for his 516Ads blog, web entrepreneur David Gussin claims to have invented the everything bagel as a teenager in the early 1980′s. Working an after school job at a Queens bagel bakery, he was inspired to reuse the tasty, toasty, seedy debris he swept out of the oven at the end of a shift. The shop’s customers went crazy for the concoction, and the rest, as he says in a New Yorker Schmear Dept. profile, is history.

Not so, says modern marketing guru Seth Godin. He claims to have originated the everything bagel at least three years earlier, back in 1977 when he was a teenaged bagel shop employee. Godin figures the oversight comes from the fact that the bagel shop of his youth was located in Buffalo—too far off the radar of the bagel elite. Despite a compelling argument from Godin (“…you add the seeds when the bagels are on the wet burlap…the burnt seeds in the oven get pretty incinerated and you wouldn’t want to use em.”) the New Yorker has yet to publish a retraction.

The everything is hands-down the funniest bagel.
There is so much online riffing on the boastful hyperbole of the appellation that blogging pioneer Jason Kottke hypothesized, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought Twitter was built specifically for the purpose of cracking wise about the lack of everything on the everything bagel.” His blog, Kottke.org, rounded up some of the best:

–This “everything bagel” is great. Has onions, poppy seeds, garlic, cheese, q-tips, Greenland, fear, sandals, wolves, teapots, crunkin… @JohnMoe
–The “everything bagel” really only has like three things. Just what I want for breakfast. Lies. @missrftc 
–You might want to scale back on calling yourself an “everything bagel.” I mean, right away I can see there are no M&M’s on here. @friedmanjon 
–Flossing after an everything bagel is important b/c as the name implies, you don’t just have *something* in your teeth, you have every thing. @phillygirl

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You can make everything taste like an everything bagel with a sprinkle of Everything Bagel Spice Mix.

The home gardening adventurers at Plantgasm ask the question, “Can you grow anything from the seeds of an everything bagel?“ 
Nope.

image via Funny Farm

The rumors of the hoax have been greatly exaggerated.

There’s been a lot of chatter about a fruit tree.
An Australian nursery has been making a big splash on food and gardening sites with its trees that are said to bear six or so different fruit. The Fruit Salad Tree Company sells a peach-apricot-plum-nectarine tree, a lemon-orange-lime-tangerine-grapefruit-mandarin-pomelo tree, and apple and pear trees that grow red-green-yellow varieties all in one.
Not everyone is buying it.

Crop circles, the Jackalope, and now the fruit cocktail tree?
It sounds like the stuff of fairy tales; a mythical tree from which you can pluck a whole fruit basket of varieties. But it’s the real deal, and it’s actually nothing new.

Fruit cocktail trees have been around even longer than canned fruit cocktail.
They’re not hybrids or genetically modified, but are created by grafting—attaching the fruit-bearing branches of one tree onto the roots and trunk of another. It’s a simple technique that’s been around for centuries; Aristotle wrote of it in ancient Greece, and even the apostle Paul talks about grafting olive trees in the King James Bible. And I do mean simple: cut the branch from one tree and jam it into a hole you made in the other. If the central tissues make good contact, they’ll fuse together into a single, growing organism.

Grafting is also incredibly common.
Nearly every California lemon is grown on an orange tree base, and in Florida most oranges are grown on lemon trees. Most apples come from grafts, and it’s standard practice for grape growers. Kids everywhere grow pomato plants for their school science fairs, grafting potatoes and tomatoes into a single plant that grows tomatoes above ground and potatoes below.

It’s old, it’s common, so why all the skepticism?
A few years ago, there was a well-known hoax involving a 94-year old Welshman and his 30-year old backyard apple tree. The tree was quite a media sensation when it began producing plums and blackberries, drawing horticulturalists and journalists from across Britain. Alas, it was a fake, although the owner claimed to have had no part in it. Gardeners everywhere felt burned, and it seems they have long memories.

The Australian nursery doesn’t send its trees to the U.S., but there are plenty of domestic growers who will ship you a fruit cocktail tree, including Calloway’s,  House of Wesley,  Citrus Splitzer, and DirectGardening.com. And if you’re still skeptical, you can check the integrity of the grower through The Garden Watchdog.