How To Psychoanalyze An Entire Country Part III: Dessert aka The Doughnut Problem

Before I get going on The Doughnut Problem I need to backtrack a bit and comment on Attribute Creep, discussed in Part I. It seems to me that the general tendency toward adding more and more State Attributes is a 21st Century thing. I blame the Y2K scare.

My theory, which could be invalidated at any time in the face of new information, is this; people were so relieved that Society didn’t collapse on January 1, 2000 that they loosened their ties and got serious about commemorating stuff. Prior to this tie-loosening there was no point commemorating anything because a lot of people were pretty certain that we were all going to be catapulted back into the Stone Age.

Anyway, here we are almost 23 years later and things haven’t gone in the shitter. Yet. We should all remember the State Motto of South Carolina if we don’t already have it memorized: While I Breathe I Hope-Prepared in Mind and Resources.

All that aside, before we can talk about The Doughnut Problem we should probably discuss the State Dessert Problem in general and Massachusetts in particular. This requires another Venn diagram. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Per the diagram, only six States have a State Dessert. We’re talking three pies, a cake, a kuchen, and an ice cream cone. There are other pies in the diagram but they’re State Pies, not State Desserts.

Massachusetts elected the Boston Cream Pie. Fair enough. But Massachusetts also has a State Doughnut, a State Cookie and a State Muffin. Massachusetts shares these non-State Pie attributes with five other States: Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Louisiana.

For the time being, I’m going to leave New Mexico alone with its mysterious State Question, elected in 1996 (not shown). No other State has a Question. I think Texas wanted to have one but New Mexico got there first. Eventually, Texas did a retaliatory pivot in 2013 and became the only State with a Cobbler: it happens to be Peach. That’s why it has its own circle down there at the bottom of the diagram.

While it was at it, Texas also elected Pecan Pie as its State Pie and joined in with the other States-With-State-Pies: Florida (Key Lime), Illinois (Pumpkin), Vermont (Apple).

A few questions remain.

Question#1: why didn’t Texas call its Pie a Dessert? Are pies not a dessert? I feel like Texas wants to stand out. Maybe it was ignored as a child. I dunno. Weirdly, Texas also has a State Pastry (along with Wisconsin).

Clearly there is a lot of confusion here and things would much simpler if all this stuff was gathered together under one Attribute: State Stuff That Can Wreak Havoc With Your Insulin-Glucose Axis. That’s a long Attribute but it would make for a cleaner Venn diagram.

Like I said in Part 1, the need for a Grand Unified Theory of State Attribute Categorization and Streamline-ification is dire. Solving differential equations is a piece of cake (!) compared to trying to make sense of all these Attributes.

Question#2: can anyone make sense of the following observations also captured in the Venn diagram?

Texas has a State Pastry, the Strudel. (OK, OK, it wasn’t on the diagram.) Strudel is German for pastry but a lot of strudels look more like pies if you ask me. Or maybe cakes.

My point is that as of 2023, the three States with the highest percentages of German-descended folks are Wisconsin (37%), North Dakota (35.8%) and South Dakota (33.3%): Texas is down around 10% Germanic-type people. Yet, Wisconsin went for the Kringle despite having a lock on the German-American population title.

North Dakota has no State Pastry. Why didn’t it go for the Strudel? (Despite having almost as many Germanic-descended people as Wisconsin.)

To make matters worse, Wisconsin’s Kringle fetish doesn’t make any sense because the Kringle is Danish in origin. Wisconsin’s percentage of Danish people is only 0.97%. The top three States are, wait for it, Utah (4.9%), Nebraska (2%) and South Dakota (1.8%). None of them have a Kringle. In fact South Dakota defected to the Strudel, as shown. Completely understandable given the 33% statistic previously cited.

But let’s get back to Massachusetts. Again, as mentioned, it has a State Muffin, a State Dessert (which is a pie), a State Cookie and a State Doughnut. No other State, except maybe Texas, has so much State Stuff That Can Wreak Havoc With Your Insulin-Glucose Axis. It would be interesting to see which State has the highest per capita percentage of people with Metabolic Syndrome/Insulin Resistance or worse yet, Type II Diabetes.

Maybe Massachusetts was deprived of treats when it was little, what with all those Puritans staggering around everywhere and now it’s making up for lost time. Sort of an Oral Fixation thing. Maybe there should be a new State Attribute: Oral Fixation. I could be overthinking this though. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Speaking of Time, I reckon it’s about time I got to The Doughnut Problem. Part of the problem is that only two States have a State Doughnut: Massachusetts and Louisiana. Louisiana’s Doughnut is actually a Beignet. As you can see, beignets don’t bear much resemblance to doughnuts from both a confectionographic (new word) or topographic standpoint.

I feel like maybe there should just be a State Confection attribute. By definition, a confection is “a food loaded with sugar.” So State Confection would replace State Stuff That Can Wreak Havoc With Your Insulin-Glucose Axis, keep the word count down, cover doughnuts, pies, cakes, strudels, kuchens, kringles and cobblers, potentially dispelling a lot of confusion and eliminating run-on sentences, needless hair-splitting and Ozempic prescriptions, not to mention Wegovy.

Who the hell would even name their drug Wegovy anyways? It’s a totally stupid and meaningless name. And don’t even get me started on the circulating monoclonal antibody drugs.

But getting back to the paucity of States brandishing a State Doughnut, why don’t more States have a State Doughnut? To gain insight into this problem, we should turn to the distribution of Tim Horton’s quick-service restaurants in the United States. Ed. note: there is a small Tim Horton’s nest located in Texas. Coincidence? I think not.

Tim Horton’s aka Timmy’s, with its recyclable coffee cups, is wildly popular in Canada. There are so many Tim Horton’s restaurants here that we are running out of places to put them. Sometimes a new Tim Horton’s will be located inside another pre-existing Tim Horton’s.

(Just so you know, I bear no malice toward Dunkin’ Donuts and its vile styrofoam coffee cups.)

Anyway, the clustering of Tim Horton’s sites in the map above set me to thinking about Emergency Responders, i.e. Police, Firefighters, EMTs and suchlike. In Canada, Emergency Responders are quite often sighted lurking in or near coffee/doughnut vendors.

Maybe the Emergency Responders in the US are, in general, a lot more buff and weight conscious compared to those in Canada and that might be part of the reason for the low State Doughnut count. Low uptake.

It’s know, it’s a stretch. But it’s just a theory. I probably need to do some more correlations. So many correlations and so little time. Such is life.

But that’s for another day. Right now I’m getting a little hungry and sleepy. I’m gonna wind this up and pop down to Timmy’s for coffee and a doughnut.