I realize that I missed the Zombie march in Davis Square this afternoon. But how often does your aunt come to see your new daughter (her great neice?) for the first time. So we drove out to Marshfield and my dad convinced me that it would be good for us to clear all the leaves around the pool so that when it opens at the end of the week it won't immediately fill with rotting stuff. Marshfield was in a bit of disarray and my mother was less than pleased to find that the entire NIMH mouse colony had spent the winter happily munching on a giant stash of dog food and sunflower seeds while sleeping cozily in dishtowels and linens. Spring is a time of rotting things.

But it is also a time of fresh things. I am a huge fan of fresh baked goods. I don't just mean baked goods cooked today. Fresh to me is that the food reaches my mouth within 5 minutes of when it leaves the oven. A fresh baked good should have steam coming off of it or out of it. For example - The popovers at the Jordan pond tea house are rarely handled by hand by the waitstaff for fear of burns and when you poke the top of them a happy burst of steam shoots out. They then melt the butter you spread on them as you are spreading it. On St. Maarten they have a french bakery where you need to go there at 8 AM but if you do you can purchase a croissant that has just finished it's trip in the oven. For more mundane fresh baked goods I used to go to the Mall in Natick with Stephanie and while she would shop I would monitor the Mrs. Fields cookie vending area for the exact moment when the cookies left the oven and then would make certain when I ordered the 6 cookies I planned to immediately eat that I would only take the fresh batch that was still hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth even if they made me sign a waiver that I wouldn't sue them.

So today we were at Brueggers at 9AM and I could see as we reached the front of the line that the everything bagels were rotating in the oven. So I asked when they would be ready and I pulled Sarah and Madeline out of line
to skip over to the coffee and then proceeded to watch the bakery area and everything bagel bin like a hawk for signs that they had arrived from the oven. We did manage to get some excellent bagel sandwiches made with the super fresh bagels.

This brought me to the conclusion that the ultimate futuristic bakery and bagel shop must provide better visibility to roaming tech geeks and teenagers with adequate knowledge of their home computers and cellular phones of when each baked good will be exiting the oven. What I imagine, and I'll bet they already have this in Finland or something, is that the bakery could track batches of baked goods throughout the baking process and with known stages they could forecast the time when the everything bagels would come out of the oven. As the consumer I could subscribe to this information either interactively through a web browser (since all bakeries should be internet enabled) or by subscribing to the information through an RSS feed or SMS message publishing service. Then as I am planning my morning walk over to Breuggers I could leave when the SMS message hit my phone that my favorite bagels would be ready in 8 minutes. Anyways if the Brueggers folks don't like this idea then I think I'll have to start my own high tech bagel concept bakery just to show everyone how much consumer supply technology for perishable foods can improve the freshness of baked goods.