I recently worked on a pretty fun project. Our #WSU social media team tries hard to showcase our faculty members demonstrating their expertise by addressing fun, lighthearted, and/or relevant topics. For example, we have recruited WSU professors to explain how to construct a perfect paper airplane, what makes an impactful Super Bowl commercial, and why pi is such a mysterious mathematical concept. But our latest video decided to tackle a much more controversial (but still very fun) and very timely question…

Is a hot dog a sandwich? 🌭

Since July is National Hot Dog Month and tomorrow is the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, could there be a better time to settle this debate once and for all? Thankfully, we had the most credible person you could think of to answer this question.

We made a video that asked one of our #WSU professors if a hot dog is a sandwich.

Blake Foraker, Ph.D., is a WSU meat scientist within our Department of Animal Sciences. I reached out to him and asked if he would weigh in with his opinion. Dr. Foraker didn’t hesitate to help out and before you knew it, we were in a kitchen inside the Food Sciences Building interviewing our expert.

Thanks to our talented videographer Kara Billington, the shoot and her editing yielded an awesome video that represented everything Dr. Foraker discussed with us. It captured the historic hot dog context he provided, the technical definition of a hot dog, and finally, the answer we had all been anticipating…

NO. A hot dog is not a sandwich—at least from a scientific standpoint. It has a very strict standard of identity that doesn’t lend itself to a sandwich, Dr. Foraker explained. He did leave the door open to interpretation though by remarking that a sandwich is a food product smashed between two pieces of bread and we have to decide for ourselves if that disqualifies a hot dog as a sandwich or not.

I agree with Dr. Foraker that a hot dog is not a sandwich but my reasoning is much more remedial. In fact, there isn’t much reasoning at all. A notorious story within my wife’s family is that one day Sidney asked my father-in-law What is the Alamo? He responded by saying, Well, it is the Alamo. This infuriated my wife who tried to re-phrase the question a couple different ways while still getting the same answer: the Alamo is the Alamo.

I love hot dogs and I DON’T think they qualify as a sandwich.

To put it simply, a hot dog is a hot dog (and NOT a sandwich). Happy Fourth of July, friends! Don’t Blink.