This is actually an old article from last year, but someone already asked me to repost it in the meantime. Sadly, it remains one of the most popular articles here. Happily, my dutch has gotten better since this was first written. Enjoy.

I was trying to decide on what to write about next today while eating a quick lunch. Originally, I was going to write a post about the Dutch penchant for strange time-related idioms but those really aren’t that different. (don’t worry, you’re still going to hear about them later on). Still, I wanted to write about something else. Something with more meat to it. Something more substantial. Something in dire need of mustard. “Ah ha!” I exclaimed, thrusting my hand into the air and promptly losing the salami between my bread to gravity’s nimble fingers. “The dutch obsession with sandwiches! That’d be a great post!” Of course, I’m trying to practice my dutch more in the house so it came out more like: “Ah ha! Het Nederlands…whatever-the-Dutch-word-for-obsession-is…met sandwiches! Or should that be broodjes? No, broodjes are just rolls and stuff. Crap, what IS the dutch word for sandwich?”

I checked my dictionary. No listing. Odd. Interglot doesn’t have anything either. Babelfish just says sandwich still. Aisha’s off at theater group rehearsal right now, so I can’t just ask her. Maybe it is just “sandwich.” There’s plenty of other imported words here and it is an original english word, Duke of Sandwich and all that. Have I ever heard another word for it here? Ponder, ponder, ponder. Scratching my beard a bit while I think. I think it would’ve come up before if I had. Hrmph, stroking my beard makes me look too much like Freud. Shouldn’t do that. Ok, sandwiches, huh. Well, damn, I just can’t think of another word. It would’ve definitely come up if there was. I’m going with sandwiches. Okay, good, but I guess I need a different highlighted word for this post. But what then?

obsessie de (~s)

1 obsession, hangup

Ah, there we go. Funny that the dictionary doesn’t give a sample sentence like with all the other words. It’s probably because you can’t make a sentence with obsession that doesn’t sound creepy. “Brainy’s obsession with Smurfette was becoming dangerously deviant.” “Walter’s love for his palm trees was almost an obsession.” “By Calvin Klein.”

Anyways, back to work: The dutch eat a lot of sandwiches. I mean, a LOT of sandwiches.

Seriously, the heart of a stereotypical dutch lunch is the same as an entire dutch breakfast: Two pieces of bread, some sliced cheese, and if you’re feeling decadent, a small amount of paper thin meat slices. The only difference is that for lunch they eat more then one of them. That might not sound too unusual, but imagine every day? Two meals a day, sandwiches? Usually with the exact same thing? And not to mention, if you get in late and you’re too tired to cook, what about some soup…and sandwiches? Three meals of sandwiches in a day! This isn’t just the Dutch college student equivalent of ramen either, everyone here eats sandwiches, young, old, invalid, healthy, short, tall, fat, thin. If you ever want a nail in the coffin of the pop-culture interpretation of the Atkin’s diet, it’s the Dutch and their vast amounts of bread they consume while still remaining thin.

When I first started studying Dutch, my book warned me that while the dutch still tend to do three meals a day, usually only one of them is a hot meal. The other two are what the book loosely termed “bread meals.” This seems to consist of laying out a couple kinds of bread, cheese, meat, couple condiments, etc. I think you can see where I’m going with this. A better name for these might be “sandwich meals” because that’s what they always boil down to.

Now, anyone who knows my eating habits can testify to the fact that I am no stranger to the sandwich. To the contrary, the sandwich and I are old friends. College roommates. Buddies. Perhaps even lovers, on one distant, far away evening in the Caribbean, glazed with rum and sweat, on the soft silky sand of the beach with the drumbeat of our pulse muffling the far away echo of The Palm Tree Resort’s complimentary nighttime cabana band. What I’m trying to say is, I’m a busy young professional, I eat a lot of flippin’ sandwiches. I think they’re great. But the thing is, even I get tired of them after a while. Lunch pot at work is always sandwiches but I can switch to granola for breakfast for a week or two and all is good with me. But see, the Dutch don’t tire of sandwiches. Ever. EVER. It’ll be 11:00 at night and we’ll be at a friend’s house and suddenly some one will say “Willen jullie een toasti?” (Translation: “Yo homies, who up in here wants a grilled sandwich?”) and suddenly everyone in the house will be jumping up and down like a 14 year old schoolgirl at a Backstreet Boys concert in 1998.

But you’re saying to yourself: “Ross, what’s really so wrong about a delicious melted sandwich as a midnight snack, aside from all the fattening agents you shouldn’t be eating so close to bed time?” Nothing, absolutely nothing! But the dutch dedication to sandwiches is not so much a sprint of how many sandwiches can be devoured in all hours of a single rotation of the earth, but a marathon of how many rotations of the earth you can continue to eat sandwiches at all hours.

In order to aid them in this quest, true, they have diversified the art of sandwich making to a powerful level. Gone are the crude days of banging a rock of peanut butter against a rock of jelly and hoping for something delicious (for one thing, they find PB&J extremely gross. Heathens). There’s wheat bread, white bread, bread with seeds, bread with lots of seeds, bread with only a few seeds, round bread, brown bread, corn bread, bolletjes, stokbrood, baguette. The selection of lunch meat is also much expanded. Sliced chicken, for instance, is a very popular and valid lunch meat here. Very good. Lieverworst, pathe, some kind of orange paste called Filet Amerikan which I can only assume is made from less fortunate expats than myself. The downside is that it’s rude to use too much meat, but the meat is so thin it’s almost not there. You can literally see through it. I think the culmination of Dutch lunch technology, their “sandwich singularity” if you will, will be the advent of meat-flavored bread: Ultimately no real meat in there, but it tastes vaguely like it and it’ll be ten eurocents cheaper then buying the actual meat too. The counterpunch could be their good selection of spreads, however this is offset by the fact they put butter on everything too. Seriously, you could be having jelly on toast and many Dutchmen would still put cow butter on under the jelly, just to make it softer.

So, the dutch obsession with sandwiches is a mixed blessing with deep ramifications on their society. There’s another few columns to be squeezed out on various aspects of sandwich making and eating, we’ll revisit it some more later, but I’d say in terms of general knowledge, this should do you for now. So, to sum up:

Pros:

Increased selection of breads, meats, and cheeses.

Cons:

Tiring after a while. Probably not very healthy. Population oblivious to their own excessive sandwich consumption.

Verdict:

Fail