A judge ruled that tacos and burritos are 'Mexican-style sandwiches,' fuelling the fire of a long-debated classification
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Laura Brehaut
Published May 16, 2024 • Last updated 5days ago • 2 minute read
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If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that people will never tire of arguing about what does and doesn’t constitute a sandwich. A judge in Fort Wayne, Indiana, contributed to the ongoing debate on May 13 by ruling that tacos and burritos are indeed sandwiches after a years-long court case, WISH-TV reports.
“Tacos and burritos are Mexican-style sandwiches,” Allen County Superior Court Judge Craig J. Bobay wrote in his ruling.
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The legal case started in 2022 when restaurateur Martin Quintana announced plans to open The Famous Taco Mexican Grill in a Fort Wayne strip mall. The local planning commission rejected Quintana’s bid, citing a prior agreement that only restaurants selling “made-to-order or subway-style sandwiches” without outdoor seating or alcohol would be permitted, CBS 4 reports.
Judge Bobay ruled in Quintana’s favour, saying that “the original Written Commitment does not restrict potential restaurants to only American cuisine-style sandwiches.” The judge added that made-to-order gyros, naan wraps or banh mi would also be allowed, provided the restaurants complied with the other conditions.
Canadian regulators seem to be on Team Sandwich regarding this classification. The Canada Revenue Agency, for instance, considers sandwiches as “consisting of one or more pieces of bread, with meat, cheese, savoury or other topping or filling, all of which are suitable for immediate consumption.” As for the absence of bread in tacos and burritos, the CRA puts flour and corn tortillas in the bread basket, as it were, along with pita, naan, rolls, flatbread, focaccia, croissants and bagels.
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As the Washington Post reports, the Indiana court is far from the first to wade into sandwich categorization.
Everyone from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Martha Stewart and Padma Lakshmi has given opinions on whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich. (Ginsburg said it was, Stewart said it wasn’t, and Lakshmi said, “It’s a poor excuse for a sandwich, but it’s technically a sandwich,” if you’re keeping score.)
“It’s actually a surprisingly complicated jurisdiction scheme,” Neal Fortin, a professor of food law at Michigan State University, told Great Big Story. For example, one government agency may regulate the hot dog, while another may regulate a hot dog on a bun.
In 2006, a superior court in Massachusetts reached the opposite conclusion as Indiana’s. Judge Jeffrey Locke ruled that tacos, burritos and quesadillas were not sandwiches, which inspired scholar Marjorie Florestal to explore the topic in the 2008 issue of the Michigan Journal of Race and Law.
This contradiction suggests that court rulings may come and go, but the answer is far from definitive. As Florestal concluded in her 59-page paper, “So, is a burrito a sandwich? I don’t know — it’s ambiguous.”
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Whether you agree with Judge Bobay or Locke, the words “sandwich,” “taco” and “burrito” share one important trait. They’re all verbs encompassing limitless possibilities. As Mexican chef, TV host and cookbook author Pati Jinich said in a 2022 interview with the National Post, “You can end up taco-ing or burrito-ing everything.”
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