Is a hot dog a sandwich? | The Tylt
It's a debate as old as time... or whenever the hot dog was invented. Most Americans do not believe a hot dog is a sandwich, and when The Atlantic put the gastronomical delicacy through a 4-point test—the results indicated "the hot dog is, categorically and existentially, simply not a sandwich." But Merriam-Webster literally defines the hot dog as a sandwich and plenty of people agree. What do you think? Vote below! 🌭

It's clear Americans love hot dogs. It's estimated that we eat nearly 20 billion hot dogs per year. But our nation is divided on how to categorize hot dogs. Is a hot dog a sandwich or is a hot dog its own thing? 🌭
A nation divided is a nation hungry. 🌭
The Atlantic says "the hot dog is, categorically and existentially, simply not a sandwich." The publication says a sandwich must fulfill the following four requirements:
- To qualify as “a sandwich,” a given food product must, structurally, consist of two (2) exterior pieces that are either separate or mostly separate;
- Those pieces must be primarily carbohydrate-based—so, made of bread or bread-like products;
- The whole assemblage must have a primarily horizontal orientation (so, sitting flush with a plate rather than perpendicular to it); and
- The whole assemblage must be fundamentally portable.
But Merriam-Webster—which makes the mother-flippin' dictionary, folks—says the hot dog is a sandwich by the very definition of what a sandwich is:
We know: the idea that a hot dog is a sandwich is heresy to some of you. But given that the definition of sandwich is "two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between," there is no sensible way around it. If you want a meatball sandwich on a split roll to be a kind of sandwich, then you have to accept that a hot dog is also a kind of sandwich.