Are Pop Tarts Ravioli

Team Yes in the great Is A Hot Dog A Sandwich? debate was dealt a mighty blow on Saturday, when six-time world hot dog eating champion Joey Chestnut, declared that the hot dog is not a sandwich. Though this proclamation will not likely silence those on the other side of the camp, a judgment call favoring Team No from the guy who can ingest roughly five hot dogs a minute on this highly polarized matter is certainly damning to the cause of Team Yes. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Nevertheless, we believe the hot dog is a sandwich, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms further… And one fine morning… (a hot dog will be considered a sandwich).

Or something like that. But until that day comes, a new food-categorization debate has hit Twitter: Are pop tarts ravioli? Author Ellen McGrody declared them to be so, and the floodgates were opened.

okay, listen,

the sandwich discourse is played out. we need to have a new discussion.

pop tarts are a kind of ravioli.

— ellen juniper (@kadybat) July 8, 2017

McGrody’s tweet quickly prompted a thousand takes from others. As the community on Twitter achieved a sort of enlightenment where words and their definitions ceased to matter and anything could be everything, ungodly statements such as “Broccoli is a kind of toast” were brought into this world and people were forced to read them with their own two eyes.

Yes, the takes are hot and full of terrors, but this is not the first time the "Are Pop Tarts Ravioli?" debate has been posted online. The idea first appeared in a Discord server by user FeckingShite in May of 2017 before being copied by a user named elfroggo and making its way to Reddit as a copypasta. It goes like this:

Why pop tarts are ravioli. Now, the first thing you may be thinking is "what the heck is elfroggo thinking? Is he off his rocker?" Yes, this may seem bizarre, but hear me out! Ingredients do not define a type of food such as ravioli. Nobody is arguing that an ice cream sandwich isn't a sandwich, are they? Or that spaghetti with anything other than marinara sauce isn't spaghetti, right? Right! So let's take a look at a ravioli. A ravioli has a rather plain casing filled with delicious filling as well as usually a yummy sauce of some kind on top. Now, let's look at a pop tart. A pop tart consists of a rather plain casing containing some delicious filling, with a yummy topping on the top of it! The only difference is in the ingredients, and, as I've said before, ingredients don't define a ravioli. You can have all sorts of ravioli, just as you can have all sorts of sandwiches. The composition isn't what makes these foods, it's the structure. And besides a slight variation in shape, the structure of pop tart is not that different to ravioli, is it? You may say that the size is what differentiates them, if not the ingredients. To that, is a slider not a type of burger? Sub sandwiches are still sub sandwiches, whether they're 3 feet long, or 6 inches long. You'd have to be a big hypocrite to call an ice cream sandwich a sandwich and not call a pop tart a ravioli, because whatever differentiates an ice cream sandwich from a "normal" sandwich-- that is, size and ingredients-- are the exact same things that differentiate ravioli from a good ol' pop tart.

It seems that as long as there is an internet, there will be people online debating what foods qualify as other foods and there shall always be gatekeepers defending the integrity of the english language from Radical Sandwich Anarchists. To paraphrase Tyler Durden, our great war is the Is A Hot Dog A Sandwich? War. And our Great Depression is our lives.

Correction: An earlier draft of this post attributed the copypasta to DSMTuners user elfroggo. The post has been edited to credit the creator.