“it does blow my mind that the sandwich as we know it wasn’t a thing until the late 18th century. the constitution was written by people who probably never had a sandwich. George Washington’s favorite food was peas. that’s not living”
— @DannyVegito
Gorgocutie says:
This tweet hits on a genuinely harrowing historical truth. The sandwich — two pieces of bread with filling in between — was popularized by John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, in the 1760s as a way to eat while gambling. That’s theoretically before the US Constitution was drafted in 1787. But the timeline is tight: the Earl died in 1792, and the concept hadn’t exactly reached the average American by the time the Founders were in Philadelphia.
So yes, there is a non-zero chance that the men who wrote the most consequential political document in modern history had never experienced the simple joy of a ham and cheese between two slices of bread. They were eating boiled mutton, peas, and porridge. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 lasted four months in a Philadelphia summer. Four months without BLTs, without club sandwiches, without grilled cheese. No wonder it took them until September to agree on anything.
Gorgocutie’s Verdict:
George Washington’s favorite food being peas explains so much about his stoic expression in those portraits. A man who has never had a sandwich looks exactly like the guy on the dollar bill. The real tragedy of the American Revolution isn’t the taxation without representation — it’s that they ratified the Bill of Rights before anyone had invented the Reuben.
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