I have this theory that while most everyone loves donuts, if given a choice, almost no one (except maybe tween-aged girls) will ever eat a pink-frosted or pink-sprinkled doughnut. I realize this is a gross generalization, but it is one that I have come to after personally observing the phenomenon for months.
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Every week, my officemates and I take turns buying two dozen doughnuts on a designated day of the week we call, quite appropriately, “Donut Day.” We all look forward to this day and come in on those mornings knowing we'll get a free doughnut to dunk into our stale, freeze-dried coffee.
The bear claws almost always disappear first, then anything covered in chocolate. After that go the crullers, and then the old-fashioned. But the pink-frosted or the pink-sprinkled doughnut? It will linger for the entire morning, sit there alone and ignored for the remainder of the afternoon, and most likely get thrown out by the janitorial staff after everyone has left for the day.
It matters not where the doughnuts came from. Be it from a mom-'n'-pop or Krispy Kreme, in our office, if it has a pink glaze or pink sprinkles, the doughnut might as well be kryptonite. It is not just me who has noticed. Another co-worker observed the phenomenon first and clued me in on it. And ever since he pointed it out, I have bore witness. It has happened week after week, month after month and, I presume, year after year, even as people come and go.
There are, of course, mitigating factors that might explain this. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that males outnumber females in our office. Is it the male aversion to the color pink? The easiest conclusion is the simplest one: No one in our office likes pink-frosted or pink-sprinkled doughnuts. It may have nothing to do with the predominance of the male gender. Perhaps the pink-frosted and the pink-sprinkled doughnuts just look the unhealthiest, the most unnatural. After all, the hue is the color of Pepto Bismol.
But the amateur statistician in me would like to think that if we, a whole floor of people from different backgrounds and tastes, feel this way, everyone else must, too.
So here's the point of this post: The next time you can observe a box of assorted doughnuts, check what's eaten last or what has been left behind. Is it a pink-sprinkled or pink-frosted one?
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.