Jun4

do-nut know how i missed it!

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yesterday was national donut day and somehow i missed it

but i’ll be sure to make up for it today!

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Keeping it highly academic on the day after National Donut Day. The photo above is from the Sally L. Steinberg Collection of Doughnut Ephemera (that’s its real name) in the Smithsonian National Museum of American HIstory’s Archives Center.

Steinberg describes herself as the “doughnut princess”— her grandfather Adolph Levitt was America’s original “doughnut king.” He developed the automatic doughnut-making machine, opened the first retail doughnut chain in the country and founded the modern American doughnut industry.

She gathered this collection while researching a 1987 book on the history of the doughnut, (not surprisingly  called:”The Donut Book.”)

Why, you ask after looking at the decreasing size of the hole trend in the photo, is the hole not totally gone? Somewhere in the 80’s, the trend of the hole shrinking stopped and the outer rim began collapsing inwards, getting sweeter as it diminished. This became known as the “supernova” era of donuts and continues today.

 

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Sources: Smithsonian Museums, Sally Levitt Steinberg, The Donut Book , Storey Publishing

51 responses »

  8. The small town where I grew up had a grocery store with a donut making machine. I forgot all about it until your post reminded me.
    Not nice to disturb my mind.
    But maybe you could remind me of what I am to do today?

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  10. As an astrophysicist I can tell you that the supernova analogy is perfect!!

    This also means that it will end up either as a super-dense and sweet dough ball, or a black hole, with the outer sugar/icing layer expanding outwards into an ever-more diffuse cloud.

    Such is capitalism I guess 😏.

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  11. “Somewhere in the 80’s, the trend of the hole shrinking stopped and the outer rim began collapsing inwards, getting sweeter as it diminished. This became known as the “supernova” era of donuts and continues today.”

    This all makes sense given that she published her book in 1987, the year of my birth and also the year of SN 1987A which was visible from Earth to the naked eye. A new donut was born as imaged by our space telescopes:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A

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  17. Wait a minute—is Jim Borden sneaking onto other people’s blogs and writing guest posts? I’ll know it’s true if you start providing stats for donut sales based on the size of the holes.🤣

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  24. Pingback: do-nut know how i missed it! – Zoneid

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