In a huge announcement that rocked the sandwich world, Subway Sandwiches has finally decided to tessellate their cheese. Instead of stacking the triangles horizontally so that all the bases overlap (thus loading half the sandwich with more cheese than the other half), Subway finally figured out that you can interlock equilateral triangles so that they evenly spread the cheese across the sandwich.
It's long been a cruel joke to obsessive compulsives and geometry nerds. Left Handed Toons summed it up nicely in the comic "An Open Letter to Subway." If a company goes to all the trouble to create bizarrely equilateral triangle shaped cheese, why would they waste the opportunity to spread them evenly?
Personally, I have always pondered a question of a higher order. How does the cheese get to be equilateral shaped anyway? Not to point out the obvious, but you don't get an equilateral triangle by cutting a square in half. Or a rectangle. Or any other sensible shape that cheese might come in. There are only two ways to get an equilateral:
1. Form your plastic processed American cheese food in equilateral triangle shaped molds. Perhaps to make it look more hand-crafted, like you actually sliced your cheese into triangles. For those customers whose grasp of geometry is weak at best.
2. Batch create your cheese in the shape of a rhombus, and cut it in half. This makes so little sense that my brain rebels at the very thought, but I felt I must include it for completeness' sake.
Personally, I only eat at Subway under the direst of circumstances. Like when you're trying to decide where to go for lunch, and the other person chirps "Oh, let's go to Subway!" all excited, and you don't want to be the wet blanket who sneers that "your lunch choice is inferior to mine." I have two main problems with Subway:
1. The Exhausting Process of Getting the Darned Thing Made
It would be one thing if, like any other sensible deli, Subway had a stack of order forms at the head of the line. You tick the boxes for the things you want, and hand your order form to the sandwich assembler. Done and done. Proceed to checkout, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Instead you're forced to slide step by step along the cooler display as some poor unfortunate soul mumbles your choices. I can never hear what they're saying, so I have to be the jerk who keeps asking the Subway guy to repeat himself.
Since Subway doesn't trust you to hold more than three things in your mind at once, you have to go through this decision process about ten times before your sandwich is finished. By the time they hand me my sandwich, I'm already sick of it.
2.Weird Bread
I have it on good authority that the "weird Subway smell" is in fact the bread. And that the strange pervasive "weird Subway taste" is also the bread. Subway uses the cheapest flour and a weird yeast, which taste bad in a distinctive way. And they send out loaves of dough which have to rise at the store - it's the rising loaves which give their stores that awful smell.
In theory this is meant to give the store a home-y smell of freshly baked bread. In practice, it's just gross.
Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user jetalone