The Disappearing Donut and the Demise of Pleasure

The death of the donut is inextricably tied to its identity as a breakfast food -- an association which makes no sense whatsoever. Sugar, glaze, cake, creme -- these do not belong to the class of things which comprise breakfast. These are dessert things. And dessert things come after other things, after dinner, after the business of nourishment has been attended to. The disappearing donut bodes ill in this regard for it would seem that we are never through attending to our lives. That we no longer have time for dessert. No room for donuts.

We tend to be ashamed of the small quirky pleasures which make us happy because we cannot define them. All of our best words having been co-opted in poll results, we have lost our vocabulary of appreciation. We no longer have a framework of shared experience that exists independently of media culture. And yet instead of attempting to forge new, shared preferences we have become obsessed only with insisting on our unique differences. This quest for singularity requires increasingly distinct experiences and the common donut could never function in this regard as an identity-defining pleasure.

It is in this sense that the donut's absence from our collective cultural landscape is profoundly telling.

November 5, 1998

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