Canada World Famous for Doughnuts!

[Kathryn41 3,205]

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/s...2058251,00.html

improbable research

Doughnut-shaped world

Tasty facts about Canadian doughnuts

Marc Abrahams

Tuesday April 17, 2007

The Guardian

Doughnuts fuelled Steve Penfold's rise to a professorship. As a graduate student in the history department of York University in Toronto, Penfold had to choose a topic that required original research on a subject of interest to scholars in his field. He chose to write about the place of doughnut shops in the social fabric of Canada.

Canadians eat more doughnuts per capita than any other nation on earth. The largest share of those doughnuts is obtained from and/or eaten at the almost 2,000 Tim Horton's doughnut shops spread across Canada. These shops, named after a professional hockey player (now deceased), outnumber McDonald's restaurants. For many Canadians, and for many Canadian towns, Tim Horton's, with its doughnuts, coffee and well-heated place of shelter from the climate that dominates the Canadian psyche, is the key to social life. Penfold explained to the Wall Street Journal that: "In England, people go to the local pub to socialise; in Canada, they go to the local doughnut shop."

Here are some tasty extracts from his work. "In Canada, the doughnut is widely believed to be the unofficial national food. Expatriate Canadians speak of associating a trip to the doughnut shop with returning home."

"In Canada, the doughnut is mainly produced by large companies, sold in cookie-cutter shops across the country, and served by low-wage workers doing carefully defined, unskilled jobs. Yet the doughnut is also a vehicle for ironic depictions of Canadian life. Ultimately, the effect of doughnut folklore - the nature of its mediation of structure and identity, of mass and community - remains ambiguous."

Writing a doctoral thesis on the sociology of Canadian doughnut shops is not the least stressful of all possible experiences. In a departmental newsletter, one of Penfold's fellow graduate students expressed sympathy:

"I went to a session on tips and strategies for thesis writers. Did I learn anything? Well, yes. Steve Penfold, probably unwittingly, taught me a lesson. On that day, I heard Steve - the doughnut man, for those of you don't know him by his real name - ask twice how not to kill everybody around him while writing his thesis. During the session, when the question came up again, I could not help but to worry about his state of mind, which obviously originated from the fact that he has been working on his thesis ... for too long? Steve's aggressiveness plunged me into deep thoughts about my work and mostly about my life outside academia ... I remain hopeful that Steve Penfold will only stay famous for his passion for doughnuts and not because of some horrific event involving the killing of his family."

In 1999, Penfold was awarded an Ig Nobel prize for his scholarship on the relationships between Canadians and doughnut shops. He obtained his PhD in 2002, and is now an assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto.

· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel Prize