Photo : dizelen ( iStock )

The Washington Post—investigative powerhouse, arbiter of truth, the newspaper that brought down a corrupt Nixon presidency, keeper of the flame of democracy which each day the currrent powers of darkness threaten to extinguish—yesterday brought us perhaps its most shocking reportage yet: A hot dog is a taco.


WaPo knows America is invested in the existential question of whether a hot dog is a sandwich, perhaps no Americans more so than The Takeout staff. The paper concludes that, per the Cube Rule, a geometric framework advanced by a Twitter user who wants only to be known as Brandon (like the Deep Throat of hot dog-sandwich debates): “Starch on the top and bottom that is not connected is, obviously, a sandwich. But starch on the bottom and two opposing sides is a taco. Therefore, a hot dog is a taco.”

Again, citing the Cube Rule, the following food corollaries are true:

An enchilada is sushi.

A Pop-Tart is a calzone.

Poutine is a salad.

A vanilla soy latte is, technically, a three-bean soup.

What is the nature of our reality? Are we real? Are hot dogs real? Have sandwiches ever existed? Would it be helpful to invoke Derrida’s critique of structuralism to arrive, intellectually, at a sort of ur-hot-dog: “Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?”


While we grapple with this and other such ontological weights, please read more about the Cube Rule over at The Washington Post.