Donut companies and fast-food franchises are the virgins on the altar for today’s sacrifice.

With fast-food, my complaint pre-dates my living in New York City, all the way back to my childhood in Suburbia.

I’d be sitting in the back seat of the car, intently focused on my Transformer (or, Go-Bot, or He-Man action figure, leaving y’all to triangulate how old I am) when without warning, and without asking, our car (smallish, if not the minivan) would be flooded with the most delicious stench I could ever have imagined.

Sure enough, I’d twist my head and look out the window and see — a franchise burger joint.

Me: “Mommy, mommy!”
Mommy: “No.”

I thank her for it now.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so attuned to this smell in New York City, first because it masks the everyday urban filth, but also because it fulfills a constant childhood wish, often denied.

But no. I say more: in transit on Long Island, or in New York City, I never, ever, ever, ever smell any lunch- or dinner-type food besides deep-fried fast food. Not pizza places, not diners, not sophisticated restaurants where they do as much cooking. I just smell the fast food.

Unless…

There’s a corporate donut shop nearby.

Often, walking past and wiping the drool from my face after passing a fast-food restaurant, thinking I’m in the clear, I’ll be nasally raped by the most wonderful, more wonderful than meat, utterly knee-bending culinary smell that exists ONLY in laboratories, enchanted forests, and chain donut establishments.

There are mom-and-pop donut shops; one’s across the street from me and it don’t smell like this, man.

Floating through a cloud
Of glaze, of dewy sugar
made sweets for the sweeeet

So what’s the truth here? Is it coincidence that the only food smells I encounter on city blocks happen to be the most fattening, most disgusting, unhealthy, tastiest, creamiest, saltiest satisfying food ever concocted by man, using some animal parts?

Nope.

I contend that these places ventilate themselves, if they do, such that the highest number of bystanders and pedestrian passersby will be affected by the exhaust.

And, being animals whose instincts don’t evolve so quickly, these passersby will be drawn in, some of them will, because they, as we all do, love fatty food because it gives us stores for those long winters and treks across the steppes.

Fast-food and fast-dessert places, banking on our base impulses: Understand and resist, or give in by your own will.