One of the internet’s favourite arguments is “What technically counts as a sandwich?” Is it anything with bread? Is a taco a sandwich? A burger? A Pop Tart?
Stephen Colbert even once asked Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg AKA The Notorious RBG whether a hot dog counted as a sandwich. She said yes, as it is a split roll with a filling, the same as a footlong sub.
Are you going to argue with this badass?
The Cube Rule says she’s wrong: a hot dog is a taco.
The Cube Rule is an internet-sourced, geometry-based categorisation system for whether a food is a sandwich or not, illustrated by this diagram by Twitter user @Phosphatide:
are you unsatisfied with current debates regarding what is or is not a sandwich? you should try using the cube rule for identifying what you’re eating!
examples:
– pizza is a toast
– lasagna is a multi-decker sandwich
– pie is a calzone
– pie served as a slice is a taco pic.twitter.com/rGhXQUoe3u— フォス@6/9+6/14 QOP両日 (@Phosphatide) March 14, 2018
The rules? “Starch on the top and bottom that is not connected is, obviously, a sandwich. But starch on the bottom and two opposing sides is a taco. Therefore, a hot dog is a taco.”
Under this system, pizza is toast, quiche is a bread bowl, and mashed potatoes are salad. (Anything where the starches are mixed through is a salad. Soup is just wet salad.)
The Washington Post, in covering the Rule, defined several iconic North American foods according to this system.
Chicken pot pie is an upside-down toast, fried chicken is a calzone (because it’s coated in its starch and entirely encased in it), a Twinkie is a calzone, and poutine is salad.
#cleaneating
But what of our most iconic Australian foods, you ask?
This is where the system is going to fry your brain.
A sausage roll is clearly sushi: starch, rolled around a filling. The Chiko Roll is too.
Weetbix is a toast than you turn into a salad with the addition of milk.
A meat pie is a calzone unless you peel off the top and eat that separately, in which case is becomes a bread bowl.
Fairy bread is toast – which also makes me wonder if fairy bread has also, on some level, always been a kind of pizza.
And a Bunnings snag, AKA a sausage sizzle, is structurally a taco.
Don’t look at me like that. Search your feelings – you know it to be true. It is three-sided, and filled.
Even the traditional mouth-approach technique is the same: fold starch tightly around filling, tilt head, stick pointy end in mouth.
The one Aussie delicacy that may bamboozle the Cube Rule is the humble lamington.
What if the starch is INSIDE, and the food is rolled in a kind of “filling”? If a plain doughnut is a toast, and a jelly doughnut a calzone, is a jam lamington a sandwich, a calzone or something else entirely? Are those flat little brick-shaped lamingtons from the supermarket a different beast to big, squishy square ones with jam and cream from the local bakery?
WHERE IS YOUR PRECIOUS CUBE RULE NOW, AMERICA?
Trust Australia to come up with a food that, like the platypus or the true meaning of the word “mate”, truly defies definition.