Notable Sandwiches #117: Mettbrötchen

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, marching alongside my long-suffering and brilliant editor David Swanson, bring you the ups and downs of Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a German sammie: the Mettbrötchen.

We at the Sword and the Sandwich are taking a mental health break for two weeks after this column. And while I’m not saying this latest sandwich was the tipping point… I’m also not not saying that.

“Germany's Raw Pork Sandwich Isn't As Scary As You Think,” argued an article by Crawford Smith in Tasting Table, from last year. I beg to differ, CRAWFORD. Your two last names don’t intimidate me. On the other hand, this sandwich—raw, minced pork meat on a bread roll, often adorned with diced raw onion and spiced (German style!) with salt and pepper—scares the hell out of me.

Even worse, in the postwar heyday of Germany adopting the kitschy kitchen craftiness of its American and European peers, the preferred way of serving this confection was in the form of a “Mettigel”—“Mett” being the Germanic root of our word “meat” but now referring exclusively to raw, ground pork meat, and “igel” meaning “hedgehog.” In any fashionable West German cocktail party from the 1950s to the 1970s, you could expect to see one of these fuckin’ things:

Fresh from the land of Struwwelpeter and other horrors, the Mettigel is going to haunt me for some time to come.

The Germans, I’m sure, have evolved some terrifyingly efficient standards regarding raw pork consumption—for one thing, it’s illegal to sell Mett except on the day of its production. Around the world, trichinellosis, a pork-borne, parasitic worm that takes root in your body and then just hangs out until slowly killing you, has certainly dropped precipitously. That being said, there’s a whole gang of bacteria—from campylobacter to salmonella, shigella, clostridium perfringens, and the pig-friendly yersinia enterocolitis that makes the prospect of eating raw-pork on a bread roll seem decidedly not worth it. (Our brave counterparts at Sandwich Tribunal did take the plunge and seem to have survived it OK. Which I’m grateful for, because Jim Behymer is a treasure.)

There aren’t a ton of sources concerning the Mettbrötchen’s origins (read: lazy Google trawls produced little fruit and I still don’t read German), but the word itself is quite old; in Old Saxon, spoken circa the 8th to 12th centuries, meti just means “food.” And maybe this is apt! Not all food is appealing, or safe. Not all food is created equal.

My unremitting hostility to the Mettbrötchen may seem uncalled for. Ungenerous, even. What care I if Swabians and Bavarians feast on their raw-pork hedgehogs in between swigs of gluhwein and weissbier? For now I’m trapped in America, for several complicated reasons (mostly: as a disabled person, I need a support system, and no one wants disabled, unemployed immigrants), so why not just let people enjoy their adorable lean mince critters and stop being such a snoot about it?

Well, partially it’s because all those links to food-safety articles I posted above come from government sources. The FDA, foodsafety.gov, the CDC. And the guy who’s just been appointed by our incoming monster president to head these agencies is none other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose face, incidentally, resembles nothing so much as a slab of uncooked pork. And whose brain has famously harbored worms.

I’m pissed off, and I’m scared. It’s good to know what’s in your food, from bacteria to additives. It’s good not to drink water that’s full of lead (and to know there’s some recourse if you do), or to drink milk with reasonable confidence that it’s been pasteurized, and therefore isn’t chock-full of tuberculosis (and chalk, formaldehyde, and plaster of paris, and pus). It’s good not to eat confectionaries tinged with arsenic. It’s good to eat meat with the modest assurance that it won’t contain human limbs, debilitating disease, or embalming chemicals (cf the “embalmed beef” scandal following the Spanish-American war). It’s been good, most of my life. And I never even realized it—because a basic sense of safety, of met needs, is the platform from which we can do things like write, and create art, and love, and live fully.

Last week, in anticipation of this precise moment, I read Deborah Blum’s electrifying The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, about the political and scientific crusade to pass the Pure Food Law of 1906, which eventually led to the creation of the FDA. It’s an excellent book, and part of its excellence—beyond exploring the life of pioneering and eccentric food chemist Harvey Washington Wiley—is its detailed chronicle of the ways untethered capitalism is fundamentally indifferent to human life. It puts paid to the idea that the “invisible hand of the market” will magically solve problems like poisoned milk so widespread it gave rise to the diagnosis of “cholera infantum,” a term which is now obsolete because people worked very hard to make lives matter more than profits. But for a very long time it was profitable to put formaldehyde in milk, and profitability mattered more than infant deaths. Left to their own devices, the creators of this sort of product would never have stopped for a second. Making pure and unpoisoned food a niche for the rich is an atrocity, from which unfettered capitalism is uniquely ill-equipped to save us.

Or, as Upton Sinclair put it in The Jungle, a didactic socialist novel outlining the terrible fate of immigrant meat-packing workers almost solely referred to now for the absolute gross-out it delivered to American readers, and the aid it gave in the push for the Pure Food Act of 1906:

“There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”

And to this grim state of being we shall return, most likely, with corporations running even more rampant than they already are. Given Kennedy’s priorities, the new administration’s first act will most likely be an attack on vaccinations, another world-historically beneficial fin-de-siecle innovation victimized by its own success. Bring Back Cholera Infantum. Measles For All.

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Maybe I’m just jealous of the Germans, whose pork is safe enough to consume raw, free from borax or ratflesh. Maybe I’m just scared of any bacterium that starts with yersinia. Maybe I’m already overwhelmed by the absolute firehose of shitty information coming my way, with the precise intent to confuse and demoralize opponents, and the belly-up rollover presented by the current one. I should be used to this by now. I lived through it once already! But it’s really not any nicer the second time. In fact, all evidence points to the notion that it’s going to be significantly worse. I’m a listless blowfly in a dying beast, getting sick off the effluvia of its rotting flesh.

So forgive me if I find Mettbrötchen distasteful. I haven’t eaten raw pork (although I’ve sampled steak tartare in Paris, in sunnier times), and maybe it’s delicious. I wish the best to the Mett-eaters across the Atlantic, to the hygienic practices within the Schengen line, to the idea that somewhere there are still places where kids can drink milk and water and eat bread and meat with relative safety, and even insouciance. There should always be such places. I hope someday to return to living in one.

In conclusion, given that my state right now is like so,

I need to chill out until I’m at this level:

Now I’m going to retreat and play ungodly amounts of Stardew Valley while telling everyone I’m writing my novel. Sometimes you need to put yourself on hold to survive. But I’ll be back soon, and I’m with you for as long as I last on this long and shitty road. I love you all!

Until soon,

Talia