The Alphabet Sandwich

Nick Chipman built a sandwich that hits every letter of the English alphabet, which is the kind of specific, pointless constraint that of course someone felt compelled to hit. Avocado, bacon, cheese, Doritos, egg, fish sticks, garlic bread, ham, Italian sausage, jalapeños, Krispy Kreme doughnut, lettuce, macaroni and cheese, noodles, onion rings, pepperoni, ramen noodles, spinach, turkey burger, and so on through yams and zucchini. By the time you’re stacking that thing together, it’s stopped being food and become something closer to a diagram.

The real appeal of a project like this isn’t flavor or even novelty. It’s the system itself. Someone looked at the alphabet and thought, I could make a sandwich that contains all of that. The constraint is the whole thing. You’re not thinking about taste; you’re thinking about coverage, about making sure nothing gets left out. It’s the same impulse that drives people to collect things, to complete sets, to fill in the gaps in some arbitrary checklist they’ve decided matters.

I don’t know what Chipman’s sandwich actually tastes like. Probably a mess. Probably parts are good and parts actively fight each other—krispy kreme next to pepperoni is a crime. But that’s not the point either. The point is that he looked at an alphabet and saw a recipe. The point is the audacity of insisting that all 26 letters can exist on a single bun.

There’s something appealing about that kind of stupidity. Not stupidity exactly—commitment. The refusal to stop at something reasonable, the willingness to keep adding until you’ve achieved some arbitrary kind of completeness. You know it won’t be edible. You know it probably tastes worse the bigger it gets. You do it anyway because the idea grabbed you.

That’s the sandwich, I guess. Not the food. The idea.