 Hi, my name is Noah and I have a weird obsession with government memos, sort of like my favorite literary genre. I love reading them because the world is an unclassifiable place, but the people that write these memos have to try to classify it anyway, and the results get weird. You get these sort of like classification oddities, these regulatory platypuses. This comes up especially often in tax policy, so you'll get a case like a state where a Snickers bar is taxable, but a KitKat bar is tax-free because a Snickers counts as candy, but a KitKat bar has flour in it, so it counts as a baked good instead. In California, there was a case in 1950 with the Board of Equalization that's maybe the least appetizing court document you'll ever read. It's about whether a sausage casing should be considered a food or a container. Don't think about it too much. Here's another one. If your child is kidnapped, can you still claim them as a dependent on your federal tax return? It was someone's job to figure this out, and now publication 501 of the IRS has an entire section on it with a three-part test that you'd have to meet. My favorite government memo of all time is from the state of Wisconsin. It's about ice cream cake, and whether it is a cake or ice cream. This memo is 1500 words long. It contains 10 different hypothetical ice cream cake scenarios that it walks you through. But I recently learned that in my new home state of New York, there's a special tax category for sandwiches, so this meant, of course, that somewhere there was a memo defining the official New York definition of a sandwich, so I had to find it. I found it. It's tax bulletin 835, I think. It has a long list of examples, things like BLTs and club sandwiches and paninis, but also some kind of questionable inclusions like euros and hot dogs and buttered bagels. It includes open-faced sandwiches, which strikes me as really dangerously broad. We're just going to call any piece of bread with stuff on top of it, a sandwich. Should we be considering a slice of pizza and open-faced grilled cheese? It seems like a dangerous path, but the thing that actually this is not the most troubling. The other thing in there is that burritos are on the list. And I know in my heart that burritos do not belong on this list, right? But I had trouble articulating why, and it kind of led me to a lot of soul-searching about what is the essence of sandwichness? What is it that really defines a sandwich? Is it stacked layers? Is it about it being open rather than enclosed? Does it need to involve two slices of bread? For that matter, does it need to involve bread at all? If you want to get Talmudic about it, there's the Hillel sandwich that's eaten on Passover, which uses matza. There's the ice cream sandwich. Is that a sandwich in name only? I don't know if KFC still makes it, but there's also the double down, which strikes me as very sandwich-like. So I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about sandwich hypotheticals in case that wasn't clear. But for the burrito issue, we actually don't have to be hypothetical. There's some case law on this from right here in Massachusetts. So in 2006, a Panera bread signed a lease in a shopping center in Shrewsbury with a clause that basically said no competing sandwich shop would be allowed into the mall while they were there. A Qdoba Mexican grill moved in, and Panera sued their landlord and argued that they sold sandwiches. The Spirit Court judge ruled emphatically that a burrito is not a sandwich. And what I want to draw your attention to is that the defense case included testimony from three expert witnesses. There were three sandwich experts, like the Boston chef, who said, I know of no chef or culinary historian who would call a burrito a sandwich. The notion would be absurd. There was a food writer for the Boston Herald who said, nobody would say that they are going to the burrito shop to get a sandwich, or conversely, that they were going to the sandwich shop to get a burrito. I have to agree. The star witness was the former deputy director of the food standards and labeling division of the USDA, who pointed out that while the USDA regulates burritos, it doesn't even have jurisdiction over sandwiches. So there are actually two separate regulatory frameworks. The FDA handles sandwiches. So it seems like there's an emerging expert consensus, and that New York may be sort of out of step with it. I filed a freedom of information request for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, and I hope to get some more clarity on this, but it's still pending. So in the meantime, I will leave you with an argument that I find oddly persuasive, which is the torta defense. And the torta defense states that if a burrito were a sandwich, it would be a torta. And a burrito is not a torta. Ergo, a burrito cannot be a sandwich. Thanks.