Krispy Kreme

I'll admit it–I'm from the South, and I don't have fantasies about Krispy Kreme doughnuts. They don't dwell in my subconscious. I don't have a Pavlovian response to red lights, ingrained in me after years of waiting around for the flashing "Hot Doughnuts Now" sign. Reading some of the many Southern columnists who claim to have rediscovered their religious attachment to these confections in the wake of their newfound hipness, I feel like I've taken them for granted, ignoring their obvious metaphysical significance.

That's not to say that Krispy Kremes and I don't go way back. Growing up in Nashville, most Sunday mornings meant a run to Kroger for coffee, a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and the Sunday Times. One dozen, every time–four glazed, two crème-filled, two cinnamon, three caramel and a bear claw (for the whole family, not just me). But the fact that they are probably the best doughnuts in the world was completely beside the point–that's all there was.

What gets me, I guess, is that all of the sudden an everyday part of my life has become a national fetish. There's a Krispy Kreme cart in an NYC Macy's. They showed up on Seinfeld. A store just opened in Vegas. And every columnist who has ever driven I-40 has spontaneously developed a nostalgia for glazed dough. Nora Ephron wrote in the New Yorker: "The sight of all those doughnuts marching solemnly to their fate makes me proud to be an American. Sue me. That's how I feel." Jeanne Brooks, a Carolinian ex-pat, wrote in the San Diego Union-Tribune that "in the South, a Krispy Kreme is like a birthright."

Give me a break. It's dough, not manna.

Of course, all this hullabaloo belies a slightly more insidious corporate story. Krispy Kreme is a huge company, whose 1998 profits topped $200 million. They have 140 stores in 25 states, with 40 opening in the last 4 years. What's more, they have foresworn conventional advertising in favor of cultural insertion. Mike Cecil, their Minister of Culture (his real title), is responsible for getting Krispy Kremes mentioned in television shows, movies and, yes, newspaper articles.

And for this, I am a bit nostalgic. Not for some superficial memory of growing up with dough, but rather for a time when I didn't have to declare my cultural allegiance to pastries. For a time when I could eat a doughnut and not think about how hip it made me. For a time before objects in my everyday life were co-opted into corporate cultural insertions. For a time when a doughnut was just a doughnut.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)