A School Cafeteria Sandwich

Place of Purchase: Haneul Academy, Incheon

Cost: 1000 KRW ($.89)

KCal: I don't know

My favorite part about my weekdays is having school breakfast. I wake up early every day and look forward to it. I always come to work about 90 minutes early because A) I like my job and B)The breakfast is usually good and only costs me a dollar.

The cafeteria has two lines for breakfast. One has western stuff, usually a bread, milk, juice, cereal and yogurt, and the other line has Korean food, which is always rice and a soup, with a protein and vegetables and kimchi. I almost always get the western option because it tastes better to me. I've lived here a long time, and a lot of the Korean food still has very little appeal to me. My wife makes a kind of soup almost every day that makes the whole house smell like old socks. Not my favorite, I'll say that much. I'd say nearly any sensible person when presented a choice would take macaroni and cheese over that soup. My wife says our house smells terrible when I make burritos. I'm not sure how she could say such a callous and culturally insensitive thing, especially about burritos which are objectively delicious by any standard.

The sandwich today looks disappointingly simple. Just some thin sliced ham and a piece of cheap sandwich cheese. I think the four-bread concept is interesting, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. I think the triple-decker is as far as humanity should take this sandwich thing, all else is hubris, a sandwich of Babel.

My coworker tells me that this kind of sandwich is some kind of fad food from Taiwan. How revolutionary of the Taiwanese to put ham and cheese between slices of bread, I think. I guess using four slices of bread was some type of culinary epiphany to world.

Anyways, the sandwich was surprisingly good because there was a sandwich spread of some sort which pleased me immensely. I immediately went to the internet, and sure enough, the Taiwanese sandwich is a thing. It said the spread was just mayo with a spoon of sugar. I don't know if that's what I was eating, but that sauce was delightful. I'll mark myself pleased with this one, and put it into the "better than it looks" category. I'm giving this one 4 stars (deduction for no textural element and the arrogance of four pieces of bread)