Many years ago, in the first lesson of one class at high school, we did an ‘introduce yourself’ activity which consisted of saying “My name’s [name] and I like [food starting with that letter]”. The first D in the class (I can’t remember his name) said “I like duck”. The second (Debbie) said “I like dates”, which provoked a few light-hearted comments. When it was my term, I couldn’t think of any other food beginning with D. The teacher finally suggested dill pickles. Some of my classmates started calling me that as a nickname, but fortunately I changed class soon after, for unrelated reasons.
I am now teaching English again part-time, and the first lesson in the textbook was about food. In one lesson I did a similar activity in which students say “I went to the market and bought an apple, a banana etc …” through the alphabetic (vocabulary, pronunciation, countable and uncountable nouns etc). Duck was one of the items in the vocabulary list, so I was expecting the student whose turn it was to say that, but instead she said …doughnuts.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 
If she’d been a real American, she’d have liked do-nuts. 😆
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This took place in Australia, so she might have liked doughnuts and donuts interchangeably. I pondered which spelling to use. Because she *said* that, I didn’t/don’t know what spelling she had in mind, if indeed we have spelling in mind when we speak. I checked Google Ngrams, which shows that doughnut is the still the preferred spelling in American English (I suspect that Google doesn’t include company names, shopfronts and menus in its corpus).
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I’m in Canada, stuck between Mother Britain, and our American Cousins. Do-nuts, to the ‘common man’ in the USA is becoming more and more normal. The corporation ‘Dunkin Donuts’ just dropped the ‘Donuts’, to become merely ‘Dunkin’
I write for my far larger American readership, dropping the French-influenced “u”s, and spelling harbor and honor. The Canadian tail is slowly beginning to wag like the American dog. “Plough” long since became “plow.” 😯
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I must be an unreal American because I hate donuts no matter how it’s spelled 😁
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My spelling is almost always -our and -ise/-isation, but I have consciously decided on burned, dreamed etc rather than burnt, dreamt. Australian vocabulary is usually closer to BrEng than USEng, but more students know elevator, sofa, elementary school than lift, couch and primary school, for example.
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PS But I believe that official names should be spelled officially. I use ‘World Health Organization’ and ‘Centers for Disease Control’ (with gritted teeth) then have to defend those spellings against people who change them or want to change them. But everyone in Australia uses the Labor Party’s own spelling.
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