This article on Serious Eats answers a question I didn't even know I had.
You know how in the movies, people always have pink boxes for birthday cakes or pastries? Yet, growing up in the South, I never once saw a pink box from a bakery. No matter how much I wished for one, because it just seemed more sophisticated, or at least frivolous. I always just assumed there were some fancy schmancy bakeries out there that I never frequented (and there are, to be sure).
Anyway, Serious Eats enlightened me that pink bakery boxes actually came from Winchell's, which is a not-so-nice-actually-sort-of-divey SoCal doughnut chain. Heh. Apparently, a bunch of transplanted Cambodians went to work there fleeing the Khmer Rouge and somehow got the boxes changed from white because white is the color of mourning. Also, in a moment of sad reality about corporations and the creation of an air of desiriability about a product: they went with pink because it was cheaper and because grease stains don't show as well. Sigh. Such is the way of all vestiges of hauteur fed to us by Hollywood.
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