The idea that we should classify food by shape is clearly erroneous. Our food classifications should be based on method of eating, not by shape! A sandwich is any food that uses a carbohydrate to protect your hands from a messier food, so that you can eat it at a card table without getting your hands dirty (a la the origin myth). Let's go through the things here:
Pizza: Yes
Sushi: Mostly no (the carbs don't protect you from the insides, the seaweed does)
Pumpkin pie: No (unless eaten with hands, without falling apart)
Quesadilla: Yes
Toast sandwich: No (inside is not messier)
Victoria sponge: No (eaten with fork)
Hot dog: Yes
Sub sandwich: Yes
Slice of pie: No (unless eaten with hands)
Falafel wrap: Yes
Pigs in a blanket: Yes
Enchilada: No (the one pictured has cheese and sauce on the outside)
Quiche: No (unless eaten with hands)
Cheesecake: No (unless eaten with hands)
Soup bowl: No (I'd love to see you try)
Falafel pita: Yes
Deep dish pizza: If eaten with hands
Salad in a bread bowl: No
Key lime pie: No (unless eaten with hands)
Calzone: Yes
Corn dog: No (if held with stick)
Pie (whole): No (good luck)
Dumplings: Yes (unless they have sauce on them)
Pop tarts: Yes
Uncrustables: Yes
This is the best and most accurate method that actually provides a strict definition that lines up with my intuitions—the cube rule is fun, but you're really gonna claim that a subway sandwich isn't a sandwich?
>A sandwich is any food that uses a carbohydrate to protect your hands from a messier food, so that you can eat it at a card table without getting your hands dirty (a la the origin myth).
>In the US, a court in Boston, Massachusetts, ruled in 2006 that a sandwich includes at least two slices of bread[1] and "under this definition, this court finds that the term 'sandwich' is not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos, and quesadillas,
I don't think the suggestion was that the US court system's definition is supreme. I think the requirement of bread or at something starchy matches most people's intuitions for the definition of "sandwich." Is an apple (eaten whole, with your hands) a sandwich, given that apple peel contains carbohydrates?
Pie has somewhat different meanings in different countries.
In the US pie refers almost exclusively to a desert, some sweet concoction with pastry uon one side (bottom or top) usually served as a slice of a larger pie.
In the commonwealth (UK et al) pies are more likely to be savory with pastry on all sides. Sometimes baked large, and served as a slice, (pastry on top) but that's not as common.
A "real" pie would be consumed by hand - think cornish pasties, pork pies and so on. Some supermarket / gas station pies would have very thin pastry and need a container for structure, but that's more a quality /cheapness issue than a naming problem.
Of course pie, like sandwich or salad is not a definitive term. Food terms almost never are. Taxation attempts to rigoursly categories but ultimately fails, having to arbitrarily group more precise terms together.
Just about every generic food description has this vagueness leading to this same "argument" over and over. What is "bread"?
In the US pie refers almost exclusively to a desert [...]
But you see people in the US refer to pizza as a pie all the time, which considering the overall frequency (pizza seems more popular than other/actual pie, at least online) would argue against that.
As a Scandi, a sandwich is a double sandwich (since a sandwich is open-face by default). Complicated.
> Our food classifications should be based on method of eating, not by shape!
I agree Euclidean geometry isn’t the key to proper classification of sandwich systems.
Rather we need to look towards physics and emergence. Sandwich emergence is the law or phenomenon that which occurs at sandwich scales (in space or time) but not at ingredients scales, despite the fact that a sandwich system can be viewed as a very large ensemble of ingredient systems.
Have you seen the kind of "pie" they sell at McDonald's? Seems to qualify on either criteria. I've never eaten one, but it's on my mind because someone abandoned a box of K-cups at work that are branded "McCafe" and claim to contain "baked apple pie".
A turnover could also be considered a pie and a sandwich simultaneously. Unless you eat it with utensils.
>Dumplings
What is a dumpling to you? My definition has no filling, as in "chicken and dumplings", and is eaten with utensils.
>Soup bowl: No (I'd love to see you try)
There is a semi-fast food chain that has, or used to have "bread bowls" where they take a round loaf of bread, remove the inside, and serve soup in it. What about that?
If you rule out anything eaten with a fork, you immediately rule out open-faced sandwiches, which as far as I know, are universally referred to as open-faced sandwiches. You can pry my open-faced tuna melt on rye out of my cold dead hands.
If you commit yourself to the carbohydrate as a protector from mess, is a messy sandwich still a sandwich? What about cucumber sandwiches (not messy on the inside)?
You say a pie isn't a sandwich, but a small pie can be eaten by hand quite easily. How can the difference be just the size? What if I, with my large hands, can comfortably palm the pie and eat it like an Uncrustable, but my wife can't? Conditional sandwich? Isn't an uncrustable just a small pie.
saying an open faced sandwich is a sandwich is like saying pluto is a planet because it is a dwarf planet- wrong side of history bucko, it ceases to be a sandwich if it is to be eaten by a fork
> if I can comfortably palm the pie and eat it like an Uncrustable, but my wife can't?
if you eat something like a sandwich, then it is a sandwich to you, and if it is meant to be eaten like a sandwich, then it is a sandwich in general.
Open-faced sandwiches are sandwiches that have been transformed. You can (in theory) refold an open-faced sandwich back into a sandwich. Just like if you split the bottom of a cupcake in half and make a sandwich[1], you still are eating a cupcake.
The pie thing is probably just a question of what kind of pie you are thinking of. Some pies are trivially to eat neatly in the hand, others are basically impossible (e.g. a cream-pie with a cookie-crumb crust).
Also, I am completely incapable of eating an in-n-out burger at a card-table without getting very messy, but my wife can eat one with a single hand while driving and not spill a single drop of spread. It seems clear that the purpose of the bun is to prevent you from getting the messier inner ingredients on your hand, so I'm okay calling it a sandwich.
>You can pry my open-faced tuna melt on rye out of my cold dead hands.
You mean pry the plate that it is on? If it were actually in your hands, you'd have a stronger case for calling it a sandwich. The mere fact it's not actually in your hands weakens your case. At least by these definitions. IANAL though ;P
...you eat open faced sandwiches with a fork and knife? I usually eat them like a pizza. But yes, if you eat it with a fork and a knife, it's not a sandwich.
A messy sandwich ceases to be a sandwich as soon as it is no longer possible to eat it without your hands getting significantly less messy than if the bread weren't there. Surely no one would agree that blending a sandwich preserves its sandwichness.
A small pie is a sandwich. A large pie is not. Yes, this depends on the person; I am fine with that.
> you immediately rule out open-faced sandwiches, which as far as I know, are universally referred to as open-faced sandwiches.
I mean, the whole reason they're called "open-faced sandwiches" is to distinguish them from, you know, sandwiches, because sandwiches aren't open-faced.
What is makizushi? Is that some local variant of maki? Traditional maki (with seaweed on the outside) seems to be sushi indeed. California rolls though (inverted maki, rice on the outside) are arguably salads.
If it's so messy that you can't pick it up and eat it by the bread, it's not a sandwich—it's just some turkey on a plate with a soggy crouton beneath it.
I find the cube rule to be naïve in its ignorance of topological spaces. A sandwich is just a cross section of mobius toast. A wrap is just toast projected onto a cylinder. A calzone is just toast projected onto a sphere. Everything is toast! Why can't people see this!
*walks off into the distance muttering obscenities*
"Are you tired of waking up late? Rushing out the door without breakfast, again? Overdue for your fondue? Then you need Toastamak! Our patented quasispace manifold uses space age technology to fetch hot, fresh toast and toastlike products from the interdimensional superposition of spacetime itself. Need it yesterday? No problem! Toastamak's causality-preserving temporal inversion matrix will make ruined dinner parties a thing of the past. Literally!"
(Toastamak products contain no user servicable parts. Only to be used on bread and bread-derivatives. No warranty or liability accepted for breeding-based temporal anomalies. Fusion cells not included.)
When I was in grad school working on semiconductor process equipment I actually had this thought, but I was concerned about the unknown health implications of consuming food treated with plasmas of various chemical species... and graduating. In another universe, pressure cookers evolved into plasma cookers
I appreciate this page quite a bit less than you because I found it absolutely unnecessary to have an entire page of blank space between items blown up so large that they cannot fit in my full-screen viewport on desktop. I tried to zoom and the page completely ignored it.
It is one of the worst perpetrators of this I have experienced on the web and a pox on anyone that ignores browser controls on their site!
It sort of looks like a powerpoint presentation dumped to PDF. But that is not an insult - it is a very nice a fun format, ideal for the attention deficit age we live in.
Classifying mashed potatoes as a salad and then a salad as nachos is hilarious, but not very useful.
I find Soup-Salad-Sandwich to be a better classification, although it is also incomplete. How do you classify ice cream, sorbet, or mashed potatoes? These foods are too solid to be a soup, but they don't have any structure like a sandwich, and they are also homogeneous unlike a salad. Also kebabs.
I see chili dogs come in at {0.3,0.2,0.75}, but now I'm curious what {0.5,0.5,0.5} in the SSS space would look like. Something like niangpi, perhaps? Cold starchy noodles with chunks of wheat gluten (bread), served in a soupy sauce of chilli, vinegar, etc.
This is a great idea, then menus could be organised by their topological equivalences, instead of arbitrary entree, etc. So donuts and coffee would be in the one section as nature intended.
We must somehow account for the feeling of food. Hot dogs don't feel like sandwhiches, they feel different. Why is that? The cube rule gives us an answer to "are hot dogs sandwhiches", but it doesn't give us an answer to "why does it seem so wrong to call hot dogs sandwhiches?"
I think we intuitively know the following:
* Subs are sandwhiches
* Ice cream sandwhiches are sandwhiches, kind of (but they're not lunch).
* Burritos, hot dogs, and tacos are not sandwhiches.
But can we generate a list of rules based on the qualities of the things themselves that explain this? Maybe, I don't know.
But maybe this condition isn't a consequence of the things themselves, so much as it is of our collective associations and connotations to sandwhich. Picnics, lunch, cafeterias, Subway. Mom packing our lunch box. Maybe 'sandwhich' isn't located out there, in the world, but at the intersection of many places in our minds.
Check out Prototype Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory which gives a better way to reason about these types of questions than trying to list properties. And also helps you recognize that words don't match up to classic sets—the answer to "is X a sandwich" may be yes, or no, or almost anything in between.
I used to go very deep on philosophical discussions about the nature of sandwiches with my friends. I’m still digesting the cube rule, but here’s what we came up with:
Every sandwich has an axis. The axis is through the filling. You can roughly divide all sandwiches based on whether you eat along the axis (what we called axially), or around it (what we called radially).
A burrito is consumed axially, while a crunchwrap supreme is consumed radially.
Hope this is interesting, we’ve found pretty much every sandwich can be classified as radial or axial, which seemed like an achievement.
So what would a breaded thing count as? Like a chicken or fish stick? It wasn't "filled" in any direction. At the extreme you could have a breaded, fried donut hole - a sphere that had bread deposited onto it (i.e. the donut hole is the filling of the sandwich), no axis at any stage, and you eat it from all directions equally.
My contention is that the definition-first approach to defining sandwich is wrong, and that we should use PCA/unsupervised learning first to cluster sandwich-like objects into distinctive groups, which we can then name.
I think it's interesting that this discussion is the closest many people come to philosophical discussions. It requires thinking precisely in an abstract way beyond what a lot of average Joes normally do. These sites and threads are reminiscent of Platonic dialogues, discussing the form of this or that. I think it's great.
Given that ribose is a carb inside larger non-carb structures such as RNA, it makes our genetic code, and us humans as a whole, a nacho by the cube rule. I'm ok with it.
I guess my "poor man's" lasagna (pour some boiled pasta/penne/fusili in the bowl, slap some grated cheese on the top, repeat until run out of pasta or cheese) is a (7) Cake then.
I hate the cube rule of food. I know its mostly a joke about taxonomy but some people take it so seriously. Categorization is highly contextual and fluid and any attempt to be authoritative or argumentative about it bothers me. IDGAS if a hot dog is a sandwich I just want a hot dog
BLT and foodstuffs with "soft bread" or other mock breads are not sandwiches for me. A sandwich must be made with real bread like a baguette. Fake breads like hamburger buns, sliced white bread, dry toasts, tortillas and the like are not sandwichogenic.
I personally combine toast/taco/bowl because the boundaries are far too vague, they're essentially the same thing. Flatten a taco, and now it's a toast? Nonsense! It was toast all along! Same with that soggy-bottomed quiche that can't support itself or its family!
And then I add "nacho" as its own top-tier category instead of some weird optional DLC at the end, i.e. "bread surrounded by non-bread". So you have calzones and anti-calzones. Croutons in salads count as soup / nacho / anti-calzones, as do (non-filled) noodles of effectively all kinds - they're all bread with stuff on the outside.
Which brings us to the logical conclusion that the world is a nacho.
Prediction: this thread will contain a thousand onanistic replies which trend toward nihilism. Embrace the cube rule. You need not spend cycles debating the true nature of a taco. Give thanks.
"A sandwich is a food typically consisting of vegetables, sliced cheese or meat, placed on or between slices of bread, or more generally any dish wherein bread serves as a container or wrapper for another food type"
Well, I for a long time working on idea, to register AI algorithms as NFTs, which will make legally valid decisions on such questions, so human fuzziness will not affect life.
This is why building software is hard. If people can't classify food in a simple manner who does one expect a software developer to classify it correctly?
For me, it was always a pancake wrapped around a breakfast sausage.
Took me about 20 years to learn that it wasn't the most common definition. It was just something served by the breakfast place my parents took me when I was little.
Pizza: Yes
Sushi: Mostly no (the carbs don't protect you from the insides, the seaweed does)
Pumpkin pie: No (unless eaten with hands, without falling apart)
Quesadilla: Yes
Toast sandwich: No (inside is not messier)
Victoria sponge: No (eaten with fork)
Hot dog: Yes
Sub sandwich: Yes
Slice of pie: No (unless eaten with hands)
Falafel wrap: Yes
Pigs in a blanket: Yes
Enchilada: No (the one pictured has cheese and sauce on the outside)
Quiche: No (unless eaten with hands)
Cheesecake: No (unless eaten with hands)
Soup bowl: No (I'd love to see you try)
Falafel pita: Yes
Deep dish pizza: If eaten with hands
Salad in a bread bowl: No
Key lime pie: No (unless eaten with hands)
Calzone: Yes
Corn dog: No (if held with stick)
Pie (whole): No (good luck)
Dumplings: Yes (unless they have sauce on them)
Pop tarts: Yes
Uncrustables: Yes
This is the best and most accurate method that actually provides a strict definition that lines up with my intuitions—the cube rule is fun, but you're really gonna claim that a subway sandwich isn't a sandwich?