Rumble Bee's Fact of Life: Sometimes you get the honey, sometimes all you get is the sting.

We've all heard it said that we are what we eat, and this article in the New York Times gives credibility to that old saw. The article traces the decline of the hot dog and the rise of the halal platter as the preferred meal of choice offered by street vendors in New York City.

“The hot dog now is for tourists,” said a rueful Chafik el-Mokhtar, office manager at 2M Friend Corporation, a hot-dog cart garage and supply store on West 47th Street near 11th Avenue.

 

“The people usually go for chicken and rice because it’s good for hunger,” he added wistfully.

 

On some corners of Manhattan, halal carts outnumber hot-dog vendors by as much as three to one. Mr. Abouelenein’s cart, named 53rd and 6th, after the Midtown corner on which it sits, stays open from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m., feeding throngs of clubbers, foodies and cabbies. Its success has been such that Mr. Abouelenein recently opened a new cart across the street, supplanting — yes — a hot-dog stand.

It turns out that this shift in demand and food consumption is a result of the immigration patterns and demographic trends in New York. In short, as the ethnic makeup of New York changes, so do the food preferences and available culinary options.

The most obvious explanation for its popularity is that the city is home to many more Muslim immigrants than in the past.

 

Arthur Schwartz, a New York food historian who runs the Web site foodmaven.com, also suggests that a particular kind of customer has been instrumental to the success of halal carts. “You can always tell who the new immigrant group is by the cabdrivers,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Most of the cabdrivers are now Bangladeshi, and the car service drivers are Egyptian. And they are good customers for the carts.”

The rise of halal as the top selling menu item from street vendors in New York City is a good example of why the notion of cultural assimilation that is being advanced in the ongoing immigration debate is such a red herring. Assimilation would keep all New Yorkers eating hot dogs. But free market conditions allow New Yorkers to freely choose among competing food options, with little or no regard given to the cultural identity of the food.

 

People eat what they like and, as such, expose the proponents of assimilation to be anti-choice and anti-free markets. It seems to me that assimilation is about as un-American as you can get.