I’m sure it’s delicious. I wish people would start referring to this recipe by another name.

What I’m about to post will likely get downvoted for being a “Debbie Downer,” but I feel like most people are good at heart, and wouldn’t want to be hurtful intentionally, so I’m hoping to spread a little awareness. Please take my comments in the spirit of educating, not judging. I was just as guilty of ignorance for decades.

I am someone who used to use the term “crack” in a non-serious way. While I don’t recall ever calling food “crack” to express how delicious I thought it was, back in the Eighties, it wasn’t uncommon to hear or say “Are you on crack?” or “Are you smoking crack?” as a response to someone who’d suggested a course of action that would be a Very Bad Idea, such as sneaking out of the house.

I stopped using the word in that way after I read Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. While the book isn’t perfect, the third chapter examines what a sociology student attending the University of Chicago learned in 1989 when he intentionally embedded himself in a crack gang to find out why it existed.

Previously, I knew that the rise of crack cocaine had devastated inner cities, but, honestly, I hadn’t paid much attention. I was a white kid in a small Southern town. I was a teenager in the Eighties, and I saw some headlines, but was more interested in MTV and books. I do not quite know how to explain The Unconnected Life to those who have always had the internet, but we simply didn’t have the firehose of information that exists today: we didn’t have individuals posting on social media about what they were going through. What little we gleaned from a five-minute story on the nightly news or the newspaper seemed very far away.

Even so, we rolled our eyes at Nancy Reagan for her “Just Say No” campaign against drugs. The phrase “white privilege” didn’t exist then in the way that it exists now, but even back then, some of us perceived the naiveté of the well-intended program, sensing that it wasn’t as easy as that for kids in different circumstances where adults were trying to hurt them, rather than help keep them safe.

But I’m an adult now, and I realize how insulated and privileged my childhood was. I realize it is insensitive and offensive to use “crack” casually as a positive descriptor for somebody’s spinach dip or chicken pasta. And I know we all have different experiences: you’ve read different books than I’ve read — I was ignorant for a long time myself. As I said, I’m not judging. I’m making this post to spread awareness.

Of course, most people who pause for a quarter of a second realize that they’d much rather someone force their children to eat the aforementioned spinach dip (assuming the child doesn’t have a severe spinach allergy) than force them to inhale crack cocaine. It is an extraordinarily addictive substance, and it is easy to make. Those latter two factors, that economic foundation, contributed to the meteoric rise of drug dealers, rival gangs shooting each other over who had the right to sell the drug on which street corners, and the fear of poor inner city parents trying to keep their children alive and drug-free so they could survive until adulthood. These folks didn’t have the means to move away. No, the people with income in those neighborhoods were the dealers: a gang leader could make around $100,000 a year, tax-free, in the late Eighties. So, chances were good that you could watch your son die from a drug overdose, or have him become a member of a gang after coveting the fine cars and clothes of the local leader.

Here’s an excerpt: To the kids growing up in a housing project on Chicago’s south side, crack dealing seemed like a glamour profession. For many of them, the job of gang boss—highly visible and highly lucrative—was easily the best job they thought they had access to. Had they grown up under different circumstances, they might have thought about becoming economists or writers. But in the neighborhood where J. T.’s gang operated, the path to a decent legitimate job was practically invisible. Fifty-six percent of the neighborhood’s children lived below the poverty line (compared to a national average of 18 percent). Seventy-eight percent came from single-parent homes. Fewer than 5 percent of the neighborhood’s adults had a college degree; barely one in three adult men worked at all. The neighborhood’s median income was about $15,000 a year, well less than half the U.S. average. During the years that Venkatesh lived with J. T.’s gang, foot soldiers often asked his help in landing what they called “a good job”: working as a janitor at the University of Chicago.

Using the term “crack” as a compliment to someone’s food advertises one’s complete ignorance of the damage that drug has caused, of the lives it destroyed. It shows that one knows nothing of the history of suffering involved. “Within a five-year period, the homicide rate among young urban blacks quadrupled. Suddenly it was just as dangerous to live in parts of Chicago or St. Louis or Los Angeles as it was to live in Bogotá,” says Freakonomics.

TL:DR Stop using “crack” as a compliment for food or anything else you really enjoy. Just say it’s so good that you almost can’t stop eating it.

I know some will say or think: “OMG, quit being so sensitive!” but I wasn’t sensitive for years. Not until I learned how really bad it was. I’m hoping that my post will help by informing others.

Thanks for reading.