soup-salad-sandwich
something i am oddly convinced about
how i got my start on this was when i tried artichoke’s pizza for the first time.
i do not understand the appeal, but am open to discussion if you feel strongly otherwise because i would love to learn why everyone told me i HAD to try it
i understood what “soup on dough” looked and tasted like for the first time. and while not abhorrently terrible, it was not pleasant either.
this led me to start thinking about food categorizations in terms of texture and composition.
i thought i had stumbled upon a great discovery when i realized i could place all food on the spectrums of being a soup, salad or sandwich, but discovered i was not the first to have done so. i found this (i highly encourage you to open this link and drag it around — it’s very fascinating, and also integral to your understanding of the following argument) which someone had already made — it was slightly disappointing that i wasn’t the first to conceive this, but also greatly validating that i was not the only one to think this way.
i am not often fascinated by ideas for long periods of time. this is one of the few that have stuck. that site is permanently open on a tab in safari on my phone, ready for whenever someone disagrees with my reasoning. some people have tried to convince me it is flawed (i.e. Cam insisting steak cannot categorized within this framework of thinking).
from my understanding, the hotdog-sandwich controversy was the start of this food categorization business on the internet.
how do you determine what a sandwich is? according to this video by Georgetown University, a sandwich could be defined as meat between (two pieces of) bread. according to folks over at r/eatsandwiches, something between pieces of dough is a sandwich. or according to Claire Oh, who was the most generous in her definition — carbohydrate layers enclosing something else.
by that same standard:
*i have also been alerted to the fact that you cannot vote unless you subscribe to my substack so… i guess if you want me to know your opinion you have to subject yourself to being alerted to every other future thing i write. stakes are high here.
that was the first thing that came into my mind when i first heard that but there are so many possibilities! is a burger a sandwich? what about a cake (with layers sandwiching cream between them), or a burrito (it IS carbohydrate layers enclosing something else — a… salad)? other runner-up options: pigs-in-a-blanket or pop-tarts.
it seems that the main argument against why a hotdog is not a sandwich is because the bread isn’t sliced all the way through. what if i was eating a hotdog and the bread broke apart (photographic evidence of personal experience below)? does it become a sandwich halfway through its existence then?
what if i made a PB&J sandwich with one piece of bread and folded it in half — is that not a sandwich? (you can clearly tell whether I think a hot dog is a sandwich.)
and then comes defining what makes up a salad.
here is where i got tired and realized that other people have done a way better job than i could expounding on the topic, so here is a graphic which i think quite cleverly encompasses the spectrum of all salad possibilities.
it was fun trying to break apart and define each disparate category, but my obsession really is with the entire soup-salad-sandwich matrix. rather than forcing the observer to pick sides, it allows for convergence or separation between the different categorizations to different extents.
here is my take on it, a little more personalized to my experiences.
and now i have my answer to Cameron re: steak not falling into any of these categories. it’s not quite, but would veer towards being a salad. hold the veggies and ranch. leave the meat whole.
is this an unpopular opinion? possibly.
am i wrong? not necessarily, in my opinion.
is my opinion inapplicable if it is not recognized by the general public? this Superior Court judge says yes. so maybe what i say doesn’t matter at all.
alas, i have grown slightly tired of thinking about this and will now conclude (as of the time of writing) that to argue about this issue in terms of wholly separate categories is an impossible task, for the examples which make up the definition in every person’s perspective will never be entirely agreed on, and at some point it’s just semantics.
hence, cue the matrix.
thanks for reading. have a great day.
take that to mean what you will.
maybe the greatest honor of being siftologist is that two of my baked goods are in deborah tan's matrix of food categorization