#donut folklore

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

[The connection between donut folklore and market saturation] speaks to the relationship between mass culture, imagined community, and authenticity in a consumer society. The donut shop became a touchstone for imagined community not in spite of its status as a mass institution, but because of it. That it sold a mass commodity, that it became one itself, that it crossed boundaries of geography, taste, class, and gender, that it seemed to unite disparate groups of consumers, that it served ‘everybody,’ was precisely the source of its authenticity and folkloric power. This was especially true of Tm Hortons, which had taken pride of place in donut folklore by the 1990s as it increasingly transcended particular local and regional economies.

Penfold, The Donut, 195.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

Much of donut folklore played on irony and absence, poking fun at the unsophisticated hinterland and the pretentious metropolis, half-jokingly recognizing that few things united Canadians besides a coffee and donut . . . many observers have noted that this sort of double-edged, ironic posture seems endemic to Canadian cultural life, driven by a belief in our status as Other. ‘Canadian consciousness,’ writes Andrew Wernick, ‘is . . . an ironic duality that borrows the clothes but not the spirit of American razzle-dazzle, and . . . knows itself to be rooted in the dull daily experience of living in a peripheralized region in which nothing really happens.’ Perhaps, in this sense, both the donut (as a quirky snack food devoid of nutritional substance) and the donut shop (as a utilitarian commercial space with few cultivated pretensions) were perfectly suited to the ironic purposes of the Canadian popular imagination.

Penfold, The Donut, 188-89.