Why are donuts the most popular pastries in the US?
They are terrible. Almost every pastry except scones — which are an abomination — is better than a donut.
Donuts are the fast food of such confections — all similar-tasting, all too cloyingly sweet and with all the personality of a rock.
In Germany, walking into a true bakery for the first time I was agog. I ordered literally as much as I could carry. The pastry counter alone must have been twenty feet long. Approximately 150 selections. There is nothing like that in the US, not even in NYC.
And this was just an average bakery in Germany. There were far better and larger ones, claimed many people.
Absolutely everything I ordered was delicious, better than any almost anything I’ve ever gotten in the US at any bakery.
Why is that impossible here? Perhaps the contemptible donut cabal is suppressing all the good bakeries. 😉 Either way, nearly all the food I’ve had overseas is better than what you can get in the US at any price, generally speaking.
Businesses in the US generally abhor true diversity. What they like instead is combinatorial diversity. Take certain simple elements and take all combinations to create the illusion of diversity. In the case of donuts, it’s fried dough, glaze, chocolate cream and vanilla cream. You can get a dozen ‘different’ kinds of donuts but they are essentially all the same donut. Same with drinks. If you’ve seen those new Coca-Cola machines – they claim to serve you hundreds of different drinks but actually serve you different combinations of the same handful of syrups and soda.
Why? Because combinatorial diversity is scalable. You can make sure that *every* Starbucks serves you the same kind of coffee. If you court real diversity, there is no way to ensure uniformity. Every bakery shop in Germany, for example, would be different. You can’t be a nationwide chain.