~ dumbasses who’ve never met a veg*n before always think they can blow your mind by asking, ‘dood what if you like crashed a plane on an island and just like you and this cow survived…you’d eat the cow, right?!’, not grasping that such an implausible scenario deserves only implausible answers: ‘the cow eats me first’ or ‘the cow knows how to build radios’ or ‘what would lisa simpson do?’.

similarly, one might hear, ‘if you are going to die anyway, would it make a difference if you go ahead and ate a hamburger or some shit?’ this notion presupposes that a vegan’s choices are about ‘getting caught’ or ‘being seen’, and not about self-respect or what effects their choices have on the world beyond their own experience, regardless of whether or not they have a heart attack in a ditch beside a bike trail, covered with vomited pumpkin spice clif bars.

but! if we were to lose all integrity for our last meal, it would be by biting into one or more of the following five snacks:

doughnuts
of all things of which one might want to make a ‘vegan version’, the doughnut is the one that has never been successful, in our experience – albeit a limited one as it has not included a visit to mighty-o. all the packaged ‘donuts’ we’ve tried – with one possible exception from jackson, mississippi – have been too damp and greasy or too dry and cake like. none of the ingredients in ‘regular’ doughnuts seem to be so exclusive to be solely animal-derived, so we don’t believe it is a matter of composing the vegan doughnut from the proper ingredients. we believe that the problem stems from the hang ups that most vegans have about their diets being ‘healthier’ than those of others. a decent doughnut is inherently unhealthy, possibly more so than any other dessert, and every vegan who has it together enough to open a factory or bakery isn’t going to have it in them to fully commit to something as awful as a decent doughnut. please try!

apart from the time we spent working at a gas station where we were allowed to take home any doughnuts that didn’t sell by 10pm or so, we have not eaten that many of them; even then, most of the doughnuts we ate were of the glazed or powdered variety, not the colorfully iced or filled objects that get a rise out of us today. so, we don’t crave them because we miss the taste from our diet; we think that what turns us on is the presentation. whether they are in a box or on racks behind a counter, there is something alluring about their arrangement – like styles grouped together, fragile but not individually protected. you probably could put almost any thing in rows or some similar formation and we would want to eat it.

waffle house waffle
we have been to waffle houses hundreds of times – between learning to drive and graduating high school, a week did not go by without seeing us in waffle house at least 3 times; however, we don’t recall ever having never eaten a waffle there, so the ‘desire’ here stems not from experience or taste, but from, we believe, availability and ubiquity – knowing that you could swing in there at any minute of the day, and you know exactly what it will look like. somehow we are suckered into believing that they are masters of the type; would you visit paris and not try a street crepe? nevertheless, in the event of a return to waffle house fare, we would probably forgo the waffle and order scattered and smothered, which actually should still be vegan, if not for the foul surface on which they are prepared.

zero
before we became latchkey kids, we were babysat by a yankee lady who refused to do anything as southerners would do it. for instance, she cooked instant grits in the microwave and ‘brewed’ instant powdered tea and pretended to not notice a difference between pepsi and coke. anyway, one of those southern things must have been snickers or milk way bars, because she would always keep zero candy bars as a treat. apart from the super cool name, the zero bar was awesome for being covered with white fudge. since the colors were reversed, it was like you were eating the opposite of a normal candy bar. you felt like a true outsider.

nutty bars
when we bagged groceries at winn dixie back in the 80’s or so, we would spend our break in the parking lot devouring entire boxes of little debbie’s fudge rounds, star crunches, zebra cakes, swiss rolls and the occasional seasonal junk. recalling how we would wash this down with a quart of chocolate yoo hoo or with a half dozen of little plastic barrels of punch is almost enough to make us sick now. there was no draw to the the fluffy, sticky cakes apart from convenience, but the nutty bars had a process of consumption that made them special – lifting each layer and gnawing out the individual squares of the ‘peanut butter’ grid before biting into the wafers.

during our ‘lost year’ in atlanta, we found a store that carried a vegan off-brand rip off of the nutty bar, but the last we heard, that store had been converted to a trader joe’s, natch, and any pseudo-nutty bars they had left are probably in a dumpster behind big lots in snellville.

generic
this one has no name. we can not think of a 5th brand or particular item that we would eat; we have only the obsession with eating the cheapest, most base form of junk food available in a gas station by the interstate, a state park vending machine, or the ‘deli’ of the piggly wiggly. stop at any flying j or stuckey’s and look along any bottom shelf full of dust-covered cookies/crackers/pies; they should be packaged in a town somewhere within 100 miles of the station and sell for less than 25 cents. whilst some people have a fetish for destroying themselves with heroin or fantasize about passing out drunk in a squalid gutter, our addiction would be bargain-priced, corn syrupy fat and starch. if it is a brand we’ve never heard of, we would eat that junk by the pound, preferably out of our lap, on the road, driving a hot el camino towards our destiny in pierre.

honorable mention: pecan swirls

as a disclaimer, we should note that we discourage anyone from consuming any of the above foods. far from disparaging a vegan diet for missing these pieces, please note that all the foods are total crap, and any diet is better off without them. we don’t lament that we ‘can’t eat’ this shit, because we ‘can’; what we do is choose not to. if we weren’t vegan, which is to say, if we were too lazy to think about anything that we eat, the above is the kind of garbage with which we would thoughtlessly fill our ‘donut stick’ holes. rather than regret being vegan for the lack of shitty food, we are hoping that someone with skills will top these creations with vegan ‘versions’ for the rest of us.

on a personal note, our obsession with these foods appears to be based not upon what they consist of, but upon the appearance of the snack as well as the process of delivering and consuming it. much as we like to orchestrate conversations, situations, and relationships, we seem also to have an infatuation with style and presentation of foodstuffs, perhaps best evidenced by our collection of cake domes, carriers, and tins, and our 7,000+ item photo gallery of cupcakes.