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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
Why is it impossible to starve in the desert if you don’t wear shoes? Because of the hot dogs there.
Be it resolved:
No matter what the rest of the world thinks, a chicken breast, grilled, fried, poached, irradiated, whatever, in a bun, between two slices of bread, in a tortilla, whatever, is NOT a burger. It is a “chicken sandwich”.
To be a burger, the protein or mushrooms pretending to be such must be ground and shaped into a disc. The name comes from the ground beef that was popularized in Hamburg. Chicken breasts are right out.
I’m looking at you, Australia, New Zealand, and UK.
You are painfully and miserably wrong good sir. I have no idea what he meant by it, but he did not actually have them or anybody else for that matter until the bit about:
Gorilla gorilla gorilla.
Any doubters would have become true believers by the time he got around to telling us about:
Bison bison bison.
Shouldn’t we get the opinion of @majormajormajormajor on this?
I 80% agree with this.
The other 20% says that ground chicken makes a pretty good burger. (But not breast. Dark meat.)
Notice the operative word “ground” there?
And, no, it does not. Yuck. Too dry.
Moderator Note:
[Hmm... The mods will have to think on it...]I think we are being entirely too lenient with the author of this post. I’ve never been one to call for ad hoc speech suppression, but what’s the point of even having such a thing as censorship if we can’t put it to use when sufficiently exercised?
Being clever and cranking out impressive Venn diagrams only goes so far. A riot is a terrible thing to start, but I think it’s about time we started one.
[ That isn’t a CoC violation, is it? ]
A friend tells me that both are yum.
I ordered a whopper once, and to forestall any “do you want fries with that” inquiries I said “Just the burger.” I received a whopper patty in between a bun. No fixings, no condiments, nothing. These days I’m specific to say “just the sandwich.”
good one
The state of New York has not only ruled that hot dogs are sandwiches, but so are burritos, wraps, and seemingly anything else that includes bread.
well that’s that then. next subject?
Next subject? We’re all subjects if we blithely submit to New Yorker tyranny like that! Nuts to the Empire State!
More Yankee imperialism.
Wendy’s might quibble with the “disc” limitation because of their square patties.
Not if she self-identifies as Sandra Bullock . . .
I’ll bet it’s been 30 years since I ate at a Wendy’s. What are they like?
Henry,
Lies, lies, I tried to run the site properly by the book but they fought me at every turn. Hot Dogs, Sandwiches, Strawberries, it never ends. A man tries to use a little geometric logic and set theory but the crew just wanted to walk around with their shirt tails hanging out. Let them!
Regards,
Jim
Serviceable when needing a quick bite on the Interstate. Not as good as Culver’s, better than any other fast food hamburger.
Friend goes both ways?
we made it bois
of course
Spoiler alert: This post will be a topic of discussion on tomorrow’ s episode of GLoP.
Oh good. Now that I have their attention, I can write a piece about Gennessee Beer that they mentioned in this episode
http://ricochet.com/podcast/goldberg-long-podhoretz/harry-potter-and-the-curse-of-glop/