The idea that we should classify food by shape is clearly erroneous. Our food classifications should be based on <i>method of eating</i>, 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:<p>Pizza: Yes<p>Sushi: Mostly no (the carbs don't protect you from the insides, the seaweed does)<p>Pumpkin pie: No (unless eaten with hands, without falling apart)<p>Quesadilla: Yes<p>Toast sandwich: No (inside is not messier)<p>Victoria sponge: No (eaten with fork)<p>Hot dog: Yes<p>Sub sandwich: Yes<p>Slice of pie: No (unless eaten with hands)<p>Falafel wrap: Yes<p>Pigs in a blanket: Yes<p>Enchilada: No (the one pictured has cheese and sauce on the outside)<p>Quiche: No (unless eaten with hands)<p>Cheesecake: No (unless eaten with hands)<p>Soup bowl: No (I'd love to see you try)<p>Falafel pita: Yes<p>Deep dish pizza: If eaten with hands<p>Salad in a bread bowl: No<p>Key lime pie: No (unless eaten with hands)<p>Calzone: Yes<p>Corn dog: No (if held with stick)<p>Pie (whole): No (good luck)<p>Dumplings: Yes (unless they have sauce on them)<p>Pop tarts: Yes<p>Uncrustables: Yes<p>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?
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!<p>*walks off into the distance muttering obscenities*
I love this page because it reminds me of the <i>good</i> parts of the "Web 1.0".<p>- Full of content.<p>- Whimsical while staying on topic.<p>- Uses design elements freely, to best represent the content, instead of pouring the content into a design mold.<p>- Colorful and easy to read.<p>- Obviously made by a fan, for the love of the topic.
Reminds me of Soup-Salad-Sandwich space: <a href="http://sandwichspace.xyz/" rel="nofollow">http://sandwichspace.xyz/</a><p>Classifying mashed potatoes as a salad and then a salad as nachos is hilarious, but not very useful.<p>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.
Isn't the choice of cartesian axes creating a false distinction here? Where does a tetrahedral snack with a missing face fit?<p>I think a pure topological approach would be more robust. Count the holes and edges.
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?"<p>I think we intuitively know the following:<p>* Subs are sandwhiches
* Ice cream sandwhiches are sandwhiches, kind of (but they're not lunch).
* Burritos, hot dogs, and tacos are not sandwhiches.<p>But can we generate a list of rules based on the qualities of the things themselves that explain this? Maybe, I don't know.<p>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.
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:<p>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).<p>A burrito is consumed axially, while a crunchwrap supreme is consumed radially.<p>Hope this is interesting, we’ve found pretty much every sandwich can be classified as radial or axial, which seemed like an achievement.
I actually wrote an article about this a couple weeks ago. <a href="https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/is-a-hot-dog-a-sandwich-defining?s=w" rel="nofollow">https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/is-a-hot-dog-a-sandwich...</a><p>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 <i>nacho</i> by the cube rule. I'm ok with it.
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 <i>not</i> 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!<p>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 <i>stuff on the outside</i>.<p>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.
Hotdog being a taco is definitely appealing, but I can't take this seriously when nigiri sushi is classed as 1/toast rather than 4/sushi.
Wikipedia just gets it right as usual.<p>"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"<p>But the real question: are monads a sandwich?
What if we classify based on which direction the food can squeeze out and make a mess?<p>Sandwich (any direction)
Burrito (depends on how well you wrap it but blow out through the backend typical)
Sriracha (only into your eyes)
Etc.
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.
I don't think this will ever end, according to the cube rule:<p>Pizza is toast<p>A stack of pancakes is toast as syrup/butter is on top<p>Nigiri sushi is not sushi, but is toast?<p>Steamed pork buns are calzone<p>Pita pockets are soup/salad w/ bread bowl
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?
This is clearly inferior to Salad Theory.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https://saladtheory.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://saladtheory.github.io/</a>