The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [46]
Yet as I smacked through those sticky, sugary, sludge-covered morsels of dough on those triumphant binges, something was nagging at me. Surely the rest of the world’s Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t have a few hungry teenagers attempting to consume their day’s surplus. Nor did the rest of the world’s bazillions of eating establishments, like the other bakery that was probably closing up shop, too, next door to our gold mine of a Dunkin’ Donuts.
“Anyone want some munchkins?” one of the girls called out to our tour. “I think I’ve got too many.”
She shook her clear plastic bag briefly, sending its contents into a flurry of powdered sugar. Oh, for good times’ sake. I reached forward, and she placed a munchkin in my hand.
I looked down at the bite-sized powdered thing in my palm. Cinnamon. Instead of eating it, I was suddenly filled with an acute and irrational sense of hatred for this nostalgic binge treat. It barely weighed an ounce. Really, it was no more than a millisecond’s worth of cake dough, burped out of some machine, deep-fried in processed oils (then trans fats, before the chain’s decision to move to non-trans fat oil in September 2007), and rolled around in powdered sugars. Maybe it was filled with a nanosecond’s worth of drop-dead-red high-fructose corn-syrup goop dimly related to jelly. Or maybe it had food color and artificial cocoa flavor in the dough to make it “chocolate.” And now it was landfill padding. I found myself hating the cutesy way in which it was advertised as a doughnut hole: presumably a leftover scrap created from the process of making regular ring-shaped doughnuts. Because it wasn’t. Unlike the way I might have seen it as a teenager, none of this was kitschy or cute to me anymore. I gave my doughnut hole away to someone else in the group and wiped my fingers on my jeans.
As people were finishing up choosing munchkins, I wandered over to another trash bag. It had been opened and picked through a bit already. Inside was an endless-seeming concave pile of Dunkin’ Donuts muffins, croissants, and more doughnuts. Streaks of glossy red syrup were visible on nearly all of them, as if a jelly-filled doughnut had spontaneously combusted inside. I picked up what looked to be a chocolate-chip muffin lying near the top. It didn’t look so bad. I had suddenly lost my appetite, but I figured I could find some use for it later on.
At the end of the cluster of Dunkin’ Donuts trash, a final bag lay unopened. Now, with the experience under my belt of feeling bags that were suspiciously full of bread, I put my hand against it and felt a firm, round orb of bread inside.
“Bagels,” Madeline declared, summing up the packed plastic bag’s contents. “But,” she said, with knowing wryness, “we all know that Dunkin’ Donuts bagels aren’t that good.”
So we left those behind.
With that final stop at Dunkin’ Donuts, I called it a night and rode the subway back to Brooklyn. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to the group dinner at one of the members’ apartments the following night, a Friday. I wouldn’t go on another trash tour for a long time after that, at least not with an organized group. But all the ideas that were brought up over the course of that night’s tour were on my mind vividly in the weeks and months that followed.
The first thing I did when I got home was make dessert. The chocolate-chip muffin I’d brought back was crumbly after having ridden with me in my purse. After peeling the paper liner from the bottom, I placed the muffin in a bowl and broke it up some more, to coarse crumbles no larger than ... wait a minute, “a pea.” That was one of the frequent descriptors you’d read in pastry recipes, in the instructions on how to cut butter into dry ingredients. The muffin was so greasy that it clearly had plenty of butter or some sort of fat in it already. Normally, with a basic pie-pastry dough, one would roll it out and then line it against the sides of a baking dish.