Hating on Chopped Sandwiches

(The chopped cheese is the only exception.)

You already made the sandwich in the first frame. Just put it in between two slices of bread!!

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In recent days, my mind has been racked with strange and beguiling questions related to breakfast pizza, breakfast pizza from a gas station, and the best way to eat breakfast pizza. I’m not sure how this opening sentence is relevant to a piece about sandwiches, but it’s tangentially about food, so I will transition into the recent re-release of this sauced-up, scab-looking piece of processed mush colloquially known at the McRib. It is a mystery to me how anyone who has hobbies or relationships to maintain, or just something to look forward to in life, would be caught eating this man-made monstrosity in public. It’s degrading for everyone involved. But I suppose the continual rollout of the McRib is all the proof I need that people can rationalize themselves into anything.

I say this because I am passionate about the Sandwich Lifestyle, and I have been assaulted with another man-made monstrosity—the chopped sandwich. Of course, this newest iteration of culinary malignancy originated from a viral TikTok video, as sometime last year, a chopped Italian sandwich from a New York deli made the rounds on Brain-Rot Central. I thought that grabbing a slice at the Sbarro’s in Manhattan was basically a hate crime against Italian-Americans, but this is like running gabbagool culture through a blender and eating a sandwich smoothie. Anyone munching on this cannot, in good conscience, also enjoy The Sopranos.

But this phenomenon has metastasized and infected other bread-based delicacies. I have been accosted with chopped breakfast sandwiches, chopped Greek salad sandwiches, and even chopped smoked salmon bagels. I don’t know who is asking for a sandwich completely devoid of texture or a contour of flavors, but mincing the contents of a sandwich is just one step closer to becoming a society of pod people slurping a slurry of Soylent and ground-up insects through a straw while The Office loops on Netflix forever.

Defenders of this unpalatable food-processor wreck will argue that a chopped sandwich is an easy life hack for getting the perfect bite every time. This can also be achieved by layering your sandwich properly. If I wanted my food to feel like it was pre-chewed, I would jam a metal chopstick up my nose and check into an assisted living facility.

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