‘Counting Donuts’ Is The Latest Food Math Meme That’s Taking Over Reddit

There seems to be an insatiable appetite for math memes lately, with several involving symbols of fast food items that require the ability to execute basic algebra. I’m sure we all felt like geniuses after solving the McDonald’s food math meme a few months ago, and they just keep going.

Now, ‘Counting Donuts’ is the newest food math meme causing a stir — partly because it didn’t make any sense.

The meme, which garnered more than 12,000 upvotes in just one day, was posted by Reddit user Sunbolts to the r/Tumblr subreddit. The post depicts an image of a Tumblr thread, featuring an image of a young woman’s face next to a stack of donuts. Underneath the image is a short cryptic conversation about the purchase of “doughnuts.”

Initially, Tumblr user dingoinnuendo commented:

“I bought 46 doughnuts at the store today”

User antareklause (incorrectly) responded:

“If each pack has 12 doughnuts, wouldn’t it be 48 doughnuts??”

Then things got weird when dingoinnuendo clapped back:

“I have 3 packs of 12 and 1 pack of 10 because they were all out of 12’s i know how to count my doughnuts son.”

While the sum of 46 is correct. For some reason, this thread is gaining some serious traction, but it’s a bit hazy why a pointless meme about counting donuts is climbing the viral ranks.

It’s now peppered with more than dozens of comments, debating whether or not the arithmetic behind this donut equation is actually true.

However, some people thought there might be more to the story. Were two donuts consumed prior to counting? The world may never know.

Eventually, people stopped caring about the cryptic mathematics and started discussing their favorite type of donuts and other random donut preferences.

Regardless of the mystery behind the equation, at least this post gave donut lovers everywhere the ability to express their love for the world’s best pastry.