Doughnuts and the Life, or a Life with Doughnuts...A Meditation on Appetite

A meditation on doughnuts, hunger, Seattle doughnut bakeries and having a wonderfully complicated relationship to food.

From Dooce doughnuts, https://www.docedonut.com

Recently, after a visit to Dooce, a doughnut shop near my house, I bought six beautifully turned-out, doughnuts. In her essay, Joy, Zadie Smith wrote, "I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food, for example—any old food. An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around."

I feel the same about doughnuts. I don't get the same feeling from eating kale or bacon. I love coffee, but my daily consumption places it in the "things I cannot live without" which fits square in entitlement. I don’t feel entitlement about doughnuts. I feel delight. If my brain was being scanned while I was looking at doughnuts, you’d see the pleasure sections in my brain light up.

Studying the doughnuts in the shop and picking them out felt like eating, not in the wasteful sense, but it satiated me. From the half-dozen doughnuts, I consumed the equivalent of one over three days, eating pieces from different doughnuts an inch or two at a time.

In Seattle, doughnut bakeries have become a little highbrow, or as they say in the food business, 'high concept." The General Porpoise is a doughnut chain owned by a local chef who fills her beignets with homemade custards. On my last visit, I had a sugar-encrusted lemon cream beignet reminiscent of a lemon meringue pie or a doughnut version.

Up the street from our house is a vegan doughnut shop that specializes in cake-style doughnuts. The lemon poppy doughnut tastes like pound cake.

Top Pot Doughnuts, View Ridge.

https://www.toppotdoughnuts.com

I am also partial to the reliably delicious maple bar at Top Pot doughnuts; the thick frosting takes me back to those guiltless childhood days (before a calorie entered my vocabulary). As a child growing up in Clarkston, Washington, the only bakery was in the Albertson's supermarket.

I remember entering the store as a kid humming the advertising ditty, “It’s Joe Albertson’s supermarket.” Walking to the baked good sections and marveling at the display, the way the glaze of sugar cracked across the dark surfaces of an apple fritter. The slick tan shine on a maple bar bringing me a joy I didn’t think to question yet. In the post-divorce, single-mom, and no-money phase, I ordered a maple bar, perhaps knowing we could barely afford this made licking the frosting off positively decadent. At a time when decadence or ease or even feeling of security felt hard to come by, I looked forward to my weekly doughnut.

And it is probably why later, years later, when I succumbed to disordered eating in adolescence, that doughnuts became what a therapist would refer to as "A trigger food." Or, a food I had to watch myself around. She wasn’t wrong. And while I respected the therapist's use of the word trigger, I didn’t like the word as it reminded me of guns and violence. And suggested something outside of my interior life caused me to lose control of myself. But whether or liked this word or not, for awhile, it was true.

Once, when I was eighteen, I ate five doughnuts, one after another, until I was so full I thought I might burst. You only have to do this once to understand the problem with these kinds of behaviors.

Hunger is complicated. As bedfellows with desire, hunger encapsulates the mental and physical state, sometimes simultaneously, making hunger challenging to navigate. Sometimes, standing before a refrigerator filled with food, I'll be physically starving, and yet nothing appeals to me. What is up with that? And the truest and only satisfying answer, would be it depends on the mood, right? What you feel to eat, as opposed to, what you think you are supposed to eat.

Recently, I had an interview in The Sun Magazine; where I refer to anger as a suitcase that contains other emotions. Here is a link to the interview. https://thesunmagazine.org/news/big-feelings. But if anger is a suitcase, hunger is the Russian doll, filled with tiny replicas of itself. To understand the complexities of my hunger, I like all of those dolls up, and inevitably, just beyond desire, I'll identify longing, which is harder to deal with than desire as it contains a lick of grief. My daughter recently relocated, and a desire to see her feels easier to navigate than the longing to see her. Longing feels worse somehow.

Here is a doughnut-related story. In my junior year of college, I worked at a doughnut counter inside the Bayview supermarket in Olympia, Washington.

One morning at 6 AM, a customer asked for an old-fashioned glazed. He was a burly guy in a red-and-black checkered hunting jacket with a full thermos of coffee steaming into his beard.

I grabbed the requested treat, placed it on a paper plate, and slid it across my glass counter. The gentleman rattled on, his deep voice booming through the still-quiet store. While I noticed something dark on the doughnut's surface, my unfocused eyes judged the fly a burnt crumb.

I was about to flick off the burnt bit when my eyes narrowed onto the planed-out wings, shiny green eyes, and the tiny black legs of a gigantic house fly. The poor bug must have landed on the doughnut's surface just before the glaze fell in a sheath across the top. The fly looked shellacked like a specimen fly you might have found in a collector's case with little black letters spelled OLD-FASHIONED DOUGHNUT WITH COMMON HOUSEFLY, 1991.

Fortunately, the customer hadn't been paying attention, so I could pull the doughnut back and replace it. I've always thought the doughnut + fly was a symbol of some kind, reminding perhaps, that I needed to lighten up. At the time, I was coping with a lot of uncertainty. At twenty, who doesn't? However, my inability to tolerate my indecisive thoughts around college majors and career options drove me bananas. Funnily enough, the doughnut handling calmed me down. Brought me back to my hands. Brought me back to this earth where I arranged doughnuts on trays. Though I had no culinary ambitions then, it seems to me now that the seed of a culinary career might have been planted then. As far as a chef origin story goes, the doughnut bakery is not bad one.

In this stage of my life, when I am better at navigating and processing my emotions, hunger doesn't often elevate to a craving.

Or, when I do have a craving, I am satisfied more efficiently and do not require six doughnuts.

I have high cholesterol now, along with food allergies associated with wheat products, so one would think this has upped the ante on my relationship with doughnuts, but this has yet to be the case. I have found workarounds. On a doughnut-consuming day, I'll take a Cross Fit class (which reduces the inflammation response) and then take a Claritin.

So far, I have not had an allergic reaction to a doughnut. It seems like such a pitifully small thing to celebrate, but when more of your life is behind you than ahead of you, your aperature for pleasure narrows. The pleasures become smaller and though young me might called such small-minded thinking a compromise, I don’t think so. And why would it matter if I am happy?