America has been slipping in the race to make the most accurate bobbleheads, and we are apparently lagging behind in another crucial field of human endeavor.
The brilliant people of France have taken the worldwide lead in scratch-and-sniff production. While the best we seem to do is to stick a 25-coupon in the mail and have it smell somewhat like Irish Spring soap, the French are making baguette-inspired scratch-and-sniff stamps.
And while some purists, the bakers with the big puffy hats, are claiming insufficient yeastiness on the stamp smell, postal worker Clarisse Briend says, "You just have to rub the stamp here like this with your nails. You can smell the bread, the baguette.”
Here's a bakery manager, Jeanne Barrere, saying it smells more like vanilla. And her chief baker, Harlem Gbodialo, can't pin it down any more than to say the stamps have a “sugary, fruity aroma.”
As you may have heard, baguettes, those long, thin rolls, are a big deal in France. The postal service says they are the “bread of our daily life, symbol of our gastronomy, jewel of our culture.”
French bakers bake six million of them per day, not bad for a country with a population of 68 million.
I guess a few of them have to share.
Anyway, maybe one of us will get a postcard from France with a special scratch-and-sniff stamp. Let me know if it passes the sniff test!
No comments:
Post a Comment