The humble donut shop has come a long way since hitting Toronto streets back in 1935, when Margaret’s Donuts, using the technological wonder of American Adolph Levitt’s donut machine, began pumping out rings of fatty goodness for the masses. From a neat-o confectionary novelty shop back then, it has grown into a massive industry, with an estimated 10 billion of the sugary cakes consumed annually in North America alone. That’s big business in Canada, especially when you consider that we famously consume three times more donuts per capita each year than our infamously larger cousins in the south.

More recently, though, in large part due to the advertising dollars of corporate monolith Tim Hortons, the donut shop has transcended its meagre roots to become more than just a simple dough-making scheme. It has come to be considered a part of our Canadian identity itself.
Books have been written about it (most recently, Dr. Steve Penfold’s The Donut: A Canadian History); comedy shows such as This Hour Has 22 Minutes have riffed on it; heck, even EYE WEEKLY Senior Editor Edward Keenan once waxed poetic about the significance of it, likening the donut shop to the cultural hubs of Paris café society. Yet, when you look around Toronto today, the donut shop these folks are talking about has almost ceased to exist.

“Whatever are you talking about?” you say. After all, it’s hard to go more than three blocks in T.O. without encountering a Timmy’s in some form or another. In answer, let us be clear: Tim Hortons is not a donut shop. It does sell donuts — quite good donuts in fact, despite them all being produced in a Brantford factory these days. But when we speak about the donut-shop concept that has been woven into the intangible tapestry of our national soul, we are not talking about a place that simply sells tasty edibles. (If that were the case, the Americans, who have quite a healthy appetite for the greasy fritters themselves, have just as much claim to the donut shop as we do. Maybe even more so, considering the idea was imported from the States to begin with.)

The donut shop as Canadian mise en scène, as former Walrus editor Ken Alexander once put it, is bigger than that. It’s the place where, as kids, my cousin, brother and I would head to relax, chat and play a few games of Super Mario Brothers on the new-fangled video-arcade game machine after riding our bikes around Riverdale Square. It’s the place where, as teenagers growing up in Scarborough, we mingled before and after long nights boozing in the parks, sledding down the snowy slopes in winter or just plain wandering about in search of adventure. It’s the place where, later in life, I would go to furiously scribble in dollar-store notebooks, filling page after page with half-baked attempts at the Great Canadian novel. It is the place where people of all stripes and economic backgrounds went to sit and converse — a class intersect where a Bay Street executive might sit across from a sanitation worker and discuss the general issues of the day over a cup of hot joe and a smoke. It is a place of sweaty, mundane poetry and of incubating dreams.

The Tim Hortons of today, with its quick service counters, cramped, isolated two- and four-seat tables, and its extremely successful drive-through windows is most definitely not that place. Neither, anymore, is Country Style, which swapped its wagon-wheel chandeliers, comfy vinyl padded swivel stools and long, Arborite-surfaced communal countertops for a sleeker, more streamlined design years ago (and, in the past few years, has begun refitting the shops once again — this time calling them “Bistros”). These shop models may make smart business sense (heck, it’s hard to argue with Tim’s roughly 3,000 stores), but they don’t encourage the sort of lingering visits and patron interaction the older versions did.

This sort of community can still be found, you just have to swim a bit lower in the fryer basket to find it. It is alive in places like Rose Donuts at Carlaw and Gerrard E., and at the Coffee Times of the world, which have, in many cases, become society hubs for certain swathes of various neighbourhoods. But it is diminished, since these sorts of places never did attract those of the middle class or above. (For them, the conversation has moved on to more effete beaneries like Starbucks, where mingling with the baser folks is less likely.) And following the smoking ban of 2006, the number of donut shops declined further, with many either closing up shop or drastically reducing hours under financial duress.

The reasons are many, from changing consumer tastes to a quickening cycle of poverty, but the fact remains that the donut shop we once so admired for its inclusivity, openness to debate and all around Canadianness is pretty much extinct. For society at large, this means a further widening of the divide between rich, poor and those in between, with each group self-segregating according to sense of value (and ability to pay). And for us for whom the donut shop has always been more about time and space than any product? It means we have a little less of both.