Milk Bar, a dessert chain which opened a Harvard Square location earlier this year, will no longer call its signature sugary tart "crack pie."
Founder Christina Tosi announced on their website that the dish would be renamed "Milk Bar Pie" in response to criticism that the name "crack pie" made light of drug addiction and the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Joining Boston Public Radio to weigh in on this subject was Corby Kummer, who is a a senior editor at The Atlantic, an award-winning food writer, and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition and Policy.
"It's partly post-Me Too, in which the idea of being very careful about terminology finally started to come in," Kummer said.
Kummer said the change also reflects changing attitudes about drug addiction in the wake of the opioid crisis.
"I don't think [the name] started out as a mean to offend," he said.
"But now that opioid addiction ... [is] one of the most prominent causes of suicide and death in this country, there's nothing funny about it," Kummer continued.
