A Story About Donuts

As I was walking down the corridor towards my cubicle this morning, I noticed a catering fellow leaving the area with an empty cart.  The group admin has a tendency to feed us treats at random, so I wandered over to see what had been dropped off to welcome us back to work after the holiday weekend.  As the title indicates: donuts.

These are my favorite kind of doughnut, the old-fashioned style, either plain, or iced with chocolate or maple.

(Image from RoadFood, Annie's Donut Shop in Portland, OR)

These are the only kinds of doughnuts I actually care about.  There are other kinds I will eat, like cake doughnuts covered with rainbow sprinkles, but the old-fashioned varieties are the only ones that really tempt me.

I ate doughnuts a lot when I was a child.  They were a popular weekend treat in my house, and they were a cheap breakfast occasionally during the week.  In other news, I was a fat child.  (My sister also ate donuts, and she was a skinny child.  Every body is different.)  I feel as though if I were to eat doughnuts frequently nowadays, I would backslide into a world of processed junk food, full of sugar, white flour, trans fats, and a lack of anything resembling an essential vitamin or mineral.

However, a great way to make something more tempting is to make it forbidden, thus I am totally allowed to eat a doughnut if I want one.  Or half of one.  I personally feel that they have no nutritional value whatsoever, therefore I would never try to make a meal out of them, but treats are fine.

The doughnuts available this morning looked similar to the ones from...ugh...Krispy Kreme: poofy and covered in too-sweet frosting.  Even though I am receptive to the lure of highly-palatable foods (mmm...fried and sweet), these were not exactly what I wanted, so they were not tempting in the least.  I instead enjoyed my breakfast of buttered toast, hard-boiled eggs, apricots, and tea.  Instead of feeling deprived, it was quite the opposite: feeling that I was eating intuitively.