The Recalcitrant Sandwich Episode V

The Recalcitrant Sandwich Episode IV

The Recalcitrant Sandwich Episode III

The Recalcitrant Sandwich, Episode II

"The German language," began Dr. Lenker, "has no commonly used single word that means literally 'sandwich,' and thus, although the sandwich is a relatively common appearance in the German everyday, speakers will often find themselves either importing the English word 'sandwich,' or they employ a modification of the word 'bread.'"

Here Dr. Lenker cleared his throat, and stared for a moment at the empty seat at the back of the hall, where just a moment ago, his third student had been sipping a bottle of cola.

"It is possible to eat a cheese bread, or a covered bread, and these are the most common designators of what would in English be called a sandwich. It should be noted that the emphasis, in these cases, is on the outermost layer of the food item. We innocently proclaim to be eating bread, and we choose to pass over, more or less in silence, what is actually inside the sandwich."

The two remaining students slowly took notes with their pencils, but Dr. Lenker, frowning, visibly doubted any of his thoughts would make it onto paper.

"It is therefore the case that the sandwich, when spoken of in German, is articulated through a rhetoric of concealment."

One of the students noticed that, on the desk beside Dr. Lenker's lecturn, there laid an irregular stack of papers. The student almost thought she saw, under a heap of creased test sheets, one or two thin slices of bread, with an ugly filling peaking out from between them.

The Recalcitrant Sandwich Episode I

It is a well documented fact that in the months leading up to and during the invasion, the propaganda corps deftly engineered a sandwich craze within a culture that had, up to that point, literally no experience with such fare. The introduction of foodstuffs peculiar to sandwich-making and of a quality vastly superior to other foods available during the blockade virtually assured the ascendancy of the sandwich.

The logic behind this peculiar and subtle act of war was as diabolical as it was inspired. If the traditional practice of a communal family meal could be reduced to or replaced by an essentially individualistic act; that of eating a sandwich, then the society facing invasion would be that much the weaker. What was once a time for sharing not just food, but the burden and the bounty of collective living became largely a solitary act of self-preservation.
 The results were devastatingly effective. The months following the introduction of the sandwich saw a drastic increase in the production and consumption of pornography, astronomical increases in prostitution and drug use, an almost total cessation of communal feasts and celebrations and the rapid disintegration of a centuries old patriarchal structure which was not and has not been replaced with a new, sustainable social order.

-Susan Sontag, 1967