Griffin Paterson
Senior Editor
@GPCourant
Among prominent world issues today, shoulder-to-shoulder with the rise of ISIS and global climate change, sits another very important issue that many people are losing sight of at this troubling time in the world; is a hot dog a sandwich?
The issue first came to my attention not at any of the presidential debates or any CNN breaking news alerts as I expected, but through the humble but important reporting of the sports news outlet, Bleacher Report. They had a video of a local reporter asking members of the Buffalo Bills football team whether a hot dog was a sandwich or not.
Such an intellectual and profound question made the usually articulate and well-educated NFL players stumble. Heated debates in the locker room were started and opinions were vehemently polarized at opposite ends of the debate. Since then, the question has gone viral.
I had never before contemplated the profundity and importance of the answer to this question before. I had to know the answer. But to find that out, I had to look deeper. Little did I know how arduous and pain-filled the path I had just embarked on would become.
So like all good investigative reporters, I first started my approach to this enigmatic question from within. “I don’t care,” my mother said when faced with the question. “No, because the meat is not covered,” my sister said. My dog, Scout, declined to comment.
Still without answers, I turned to my peers for guidance. “No, because you can’t get them at Tony’s,” senior William Tingley said. “Yes, because it has two buns surrounding it,” sophomore Stephen Curiale said. “No, because it’s long” senior Megan McKenna said.
Some people reached deeper in their responses to the ongoing issue facing the American people. “For a sandwich to be a sandwich, the two pieces of bread may not be connected or share adjacent contact with each other,” senior Rafael Lovas said. A good point, though easily countered when an unidentified senior shouts in the background of that interview, “What about meatball grinders?”
Others turned to philosophical musings to try and answer the unanswerable. “For most people to answer the question is a hot dog a sandwich, they will look outward and try to define the concept of sandwich and hot dog. I think to answer his question and the universal question of who we are, we need to look inward,” junior Bhaskar Abhiraman said. “Who are we? What is humanity? Who are we to call things ‘hot’ or ‘dogs.’ Shakespeare once wrote ‘That by which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.’ I say, that which we call a dog by any other name would be just as hot.”
Frustrated and weary from the pursuit of the seemingly unattainable answer, I turned to the experts. “What? That’s just junk! Not good, not good,” cafeteria matron Rosa in her heavy Italian accent said.
“Damn man, I don’t have a reason, but a hot dog is just a hot dog, you know! Damn, we might need to start selling hot dogs here now, huh?” an employee of local establishment CT Sandwich said.
Tony’s Deli was my final stop. “No, only for babies,” a sandwich maker at Tony’s said. “When they are young, they eat everything, it’s a sandwich for them. But a hot dog is lots of different types of meat. The junk, you know? So it is not a sandwich. Not like bologna. But in New York, it is a sandwich. They put everything on it there, they eat anything there.”
None of the people in my life seemed to have the answer. So I turned to the thing I turn to in all times of crisis in my life, the place where it all started; the internet. After hours of research, still no definitive answer was found. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for one, suggests the hot dog, as meat between bread, falls into the sandwich category and is subject to USDA inspections as such.
In our own own storied, patriotic, American history, only murkiness about this issue can be found.When it first arrived on American shores from Europe in the late 1800s, the ye olde equivalent of a hot dog was often referred to as a “Coney Island Sandwich” or “Frankfurter sandwich,” adding to the controversy today.
However, the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (NHDSC) disagrees. According to an NHSDC press release on national hot dog day, “limiting the hot dog’s significance by saying it’s ‘just a sandwich’ is like calling the Dalai Lama ‘just a guy’. Perhaps at one time its importance could be limited by forcing it into a larger sandwich category (no disrespect to Reubens and others), but that time has passed. We therefore choose to take a cue from a great performer and declare our namesake be a ‘hot dog formerly known as a sandwich.’”
Weeks of soul searching passed, and yet I had no clear cut answer. Maybe some things humans were not meant to meddle with. Maybe I had stumbled upon the culinary world’s equivalent of String Theory. I come to only one conclusion; the world will never know if a hot dog is truly a sandwich.
