It’s like a social virus.It’s spread by a bite and fueled by frenzy. It’s not a zombie plague, although if someone announces a warehouse-full giveaway of the stuff, you would see similar hysteria.

No, New Yorkers are going crazy over the “cronut”, a delectable hybrid of the flaky croissant and the sticky-sweet doughnut. It’s only available at one Manhattan bakery, and New Yorkers are lining up at dawn for just a shot at buying it. Construction workers are getting up early to scalp the product and knock-offs like the “doissant” are already appearing in bakeries in Washington D.C. and Melbourne, Australia. The pastries are even being resold on craigslist, which somehow seems just the wrong forum for retailing fresh foodstuffs.

Doughnuts are great, as everyone knows, but it seems unlikely that the cronut is that much better to justify lines of New Yorkers giving up several hours daily to wait for it as if it were the next iPhone. No, somehow, this pastry has randomly morphed into a form of social currency, much like tulips with the Dutch or Beanie Babies with 90’s Middle America. In a recent queue, one man was waiting in line to get a cronut to use as a peace offering to his girlfriend and another was hoping to bring cronuts to a meeting to impress clients. Some say the cronut’s popularity is just clever marketing, benefiting from an excellent hybrid name, while others say it’s riding the hybrid food wave, which began ingloriously with the tofurky. But really, lightning sometimes just strikes.

I hope this baker knows what he has on his hands. It appears so, as he’s already trademarked the cronut brand. All he has to do is ride the wave just right to license his product and introduce the cronut to the rest of America before the craze collapses on itself, and then he won’t have to roll out dough anymore, because he’ll be rolling in it.