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On the Nature of Sandwiches: An Open Letter to Jonah Goldberg
Jonah, I enjoyed reading your column. As always, you have a style that makes the reader want to finish, no matter how much they disagree. It was well thought-out, though your logic was flawed. The biggest mistake you made was one of a closed mind.
Allow me to explain. You claim that sandwiches must meet extremely specific criteria. They are: two distinct slices of bread; proteins (meat), fats (cheese), or vegetables between the slices; eaten with parallel slices of bread on a plane perpendicular to the vector of acceleration due to gravity. This is a perfectly acceptable definition and has no doubt served you well in your life so far. But…
First, some set theory. The classic example we learn in middle school is this — just as all squares are rectangles not all rectangles are squares. Allow me to illustrate. The largest black circle is quadrilaterals or enclosed objects with four sides. The blue circle here represents all quadrilaterals that also have four straight sides and four right angles, or rectangles. Lastly, the green circle includes all rectangles whose sides are equal length or squares.
Your problem, Jonah, is that you’re considering the green circle to be inclusive of all sandwiches when it is just a tiny subset of the universe sandwiches have to offer. The true sandwich definition is this: carbohydrates + filling. Is your mind blown yet? This sandwich expanded universe (SEA) can be scary to some. After all, considering your grandmother’s blueberry pie, fried chicken, or your wedding cake sandwiches can be earthshaking. “But wedding cakes are increasingly a tray of cupcakes,” you say, confident that the SEA ends there.
You poor, poor soul.
Cupcakes are open-faced sandwiches (OFS).* I’ve attached this handy illustration, and will now explain why hot dogs are so contentious. The red circle in the below figure is your sandwich definition. The blue circle represents the SEA, and the black, OFS. How do OFS and SEA intersect you ask? That brings us to the hot dog.
You said it yourself:
…the way we eat a hot dog, with the visible meat facing skyward, you would need a dislocating jaw, like a viper or Sidney Blumenthal.
The wonderful hot dog exists at the intersection of the OFS and the SEA while adjacent to your outmoded (though technically correct) definition of a sandwich. These two sets should be known colloquially as “sandwich.”
“This is unprecedented!” you might want to say if you’ve managed to read this far without achieving a higher state of consciousness, or throwing your phone into a garbage disposal. “You can’t have a set named sandwich and have a subset also named sandwich!”
Gorilla gorilla gorilla. Bison bison bison.
Or, more commonly, the Western lowland gorilla and the Plains bison. Both animals that share a name between their subspecies, species, and genus. This precedent, while not as old as old Earl Sandwich’s allows, us to look at the entire history of man differently. Since the introduction of bread, our history is that of the sandwich. Looking at it this way, after dogs, the sandwich is man’s best friend.
Best,
Conrad
* Scott Lincicome’s nachos are also OFS
Published in Group Writing
Conrad, is a meat ravioli a sandwich?
Ari,
OK, OK, so Ivanka is much too nice to give you a clop on top of your pointy head. However, The Sharper Image has hired a new lawyer. Be afraid very afraid.
Regards,
Jim
I’d rather not think of him in this context.
… it’s a racist dog-whistle?
Is there no God! A more wrongheaded and hateful definition has never been written in all of Man’s history than your definition of a sandwich. Karl Marx had more sense and humility than you sir when he expounded upon the history of capitalism.
Carbohydrate + filling! By this definition a pencil is a sandwich.
A sandwich properly defined is bread topped with some combination of animal protein and fat, with the possible addition or substitution of edible plant or fungus matter.
Pasta(carbohydrate) + meat filling(filling)
Yes, of course.
If you add sauce, then you have multitudes of cute little open-faced sandwiches
Who says hamburger patties have to be beef? Who says they have to be patties?
A bowl of cereal: Is it soup or is it salad?
While I think that a pencil should be able to call itself a sandwich, I’m open to stipulating that a sandwich should be edible.
That said, I’ve owned puppies that have chewed on a pencil like a rawhide bone, so maybe they recognize what we are afraid to.
Afraid? You’ve never chewed a pencil before? Spoiler alert, it pretty much ruins it’s function as a pencil.
Nice avatar, by the way.
@Conrad, you must have a lot of free time on your hands.
But, I read the whole post, so…..
Tasty, tasty pencils!
Sandwich:
I can’t have National Review Online posting appeals to authority and go unchallenged!
yep. that’s what I was thinking
Sandwich:
No no no. It’s a piece of pie. :-)
Looks like a sandwich.
My chicken fajitas self-identify as a rolled-up sandwich . . .
I self-identify as a vegan when the situation calls for it.
I self-identify as a smokin’-hot studmuffin, but my wife refuses to recognize my claim . . .
It’s not that Jonah’s logic is flawed, it’s that your axiom is flawed. A sandwich is some kind of filling sandwiched (see what I did there?) between two slices of bread, not just any carbohydrate. That’s like saying a house is any structure with dirt on the bottom and roofing on top.
Sue her yet?
funny
Wonderful post. Completely, comprehensively, utterly, fabulously, and profoundly wrong — but quite charming. Set theory doesn’t lie, but liars do set theory, as the saying goes.
Jonah is correct, and his adherence to the historically validated sandwich model merely re-confirms his conservative bona fides.
Richard Posner, is that you?
You have proven your case beyond a shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic. You had them at the strawberries, sir.
The introduction of the top-sliced hot dog bun was an evil distraction from the truth.
The only relevant properties required for being a sandwich are:
My definition would actually make hotdogs and Mexican sandwiches (aka tacos) an elite form of super sandwich, because that extra material (a third wall) actually makes them more sandwich-ey, more contained, than an mere 2 walled sandwich. (I did like JG’s tweet quoting his wife: https://twitter.com/JonahNRO/status/1025456696712417280 he clearly married up).
Carbohydrate is the filling. See: chip butty.