Every Letter Has Its Price

Nick Chipman built a sandwich containing an ingredient for every letter of the alphabet. Not metaphorically. Literally: avocado, bacon, cheese, Doritos, egg, fish sticks, garlic bread, ham, Italian sausage, jalapeño peppers, Krispy Kreme doughnut, lettuce, macaroni and cheese, noodles, onion rings, pepperoni, queso blanco dip, ramen noodles, spinach, turkey burger, bratwurst, veal Parmesan, waffle, coconut, yams, zucchini. All of it, stacked, documented at Dude Foods.

What I appreciate about it is that Chipman committed fully—this isn’t ironic, it isn’t art-project distanced, it’s a man who genuinely wanted to put every letter of the alphabet into one sandwich and did exactly that. The X was the hard one. Xylocarp, which is technically a real word for hard-shelled fruit, meaning he effectively smuggled a coconut in on a technicality. Respect.

Somewhere between the Krispy Kreme and the ramen noodles this stops being a sandwich and becomes something else—a philosophical position, maybe, or a gastrointestinal dare. You know it won’t taste good. He knows it won’t taste good. None of that is the point. The point is finishing what you started, no matter how deranged the premise. There’s something almost admirable about that, in the way that anything completely arbitrary pursued with total sincerity eventually becomes admirable.