The Tao of Dough: The Legend of the Hole

In both donuts and art, negative space is essential. Among the holey lessons the donut teaches, none may be more vital than the importance of emptiness.

According to American folklore, Captain Hanson Gregory is credited with inventing the donut hole in 1847. Before this, common doughnuts (or oly koeks) were simply round dough balls sweetened, spiced and fried.

Hanson Gregory did not like the doughnuts his mother made on his ship. When the outside was cooked perfectly, the inside ended up doughy and cold. If the inside was well done, the outside became oily and burned, an impossible confectionary conundrum

One fateful day at sea, after Hanson had choked down another one of his mother’s doughy wet messes, he was suddenly consumed by the holey fire of divine innovation. EUREKA!! He was suddenly inspired to cut a hole in the dough so that it could cook from the inside out.

The result was pure perfection, a radical shift in donut consciousness. By removing the center, the doughnuts cooked perfectly all the way through in less time, true addition by subtraction!

This fundamental perspective is valuable in nearly every aspect of life. In creative disciplines it is shocking how often the removal of clutter and obstruction improves aesthetic balance in a composition, a color palette, a recipe, a poem, a song, truly anything.

It is the same with all of us witless shuffling homo sapiens. Every single one of us has a bottomless hole through our very center that we constantly try to fill with 31 flavors of folly.

What we don’t realize is that the hole is there by design; it has always been part of the plan. Without it we wouldn’t laugh, we wouldn’t cry, we wouldn’t create, we wouldn’t even try. It is this emptiness that makes us who we are. We are, every one of us, defined by what’s missing. So…

EMBRACE THE HOLE.