The Mathematics of Meat
April 12th, 2007 by Scott
Oh my stars, these are good days in the realm of carnivorism! In a story recently published by the New York Times, some eager (and hungry) mathematicians in England have come up with a formula for what they believe to be the perfect bacon sandwich. Let me say that again, just in case you breezed over that last sentence:
There is a mathematical formula for the Perfect. Bacon. Sandwich.
For me, not just a carnivore but a sandwich lover, I find this encouraging and heartening news, the kind of thing I really want to see when I open up the Times (or, more accurately these days, browse the NYT website). How do they do it? What’s the math of meat? Well, first thing to note is that the British version of a sandwich is slightly different from what we’re used to in the States. Where we like to load up our hoagie/sub/po-boy rolls with just about everything under the sun, Dagwood style, they take a more minamalistic approach: Bread and Filling. I can get behind this sandwich simplicity. Personally, I like a few veggies on my sandwich to at least give me a small feeling that I’m eating something close to a balanced meal. But for the limeys, not so much. And really, what more do you need? After all, wasn’t that the primary impetus of the sandwich’s invention, that an inveterate gambling-adict/nobleman (John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich) needed to put his nightly meat between two slices of bread so that he could keep playing cards without having to rest enough to put food in his mouth using a fork AND knife? (Note: this story is largely considered apocryphal, but hell, it’s a great story!) Especially when it comes to the heralded bacon sandwich, or “butties” as they supposedly call them, meat is king. Those crazy Brits have kooky names for just about everything, don’t they? It’s ever so charming. The forumula looks something like this:
N = C + {fb(cm) · fb(tc)} + fb(Ts) + fc · ta
Can you dig it? According to the times:
The research combined four types of cooking, using grills, pans and ovens, three kinds of oil and four types of bacon — smoked, unsmoked, streaky and thick cut — to establish the preferences of 50 tasters in such matters as the butty’s tactile and aural crunchiness. The study also considered a broad range of condiments (like ketchup and brown sauce) and spreads.It concluded that the best bacon butties were made with crisply grilled, not-too-fat bacon between thick slices of white bread.
Eureka!
Now, I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not the science behind the ideal bacon butty is sound or not, but I for one am just happy that they decided to look into this subject in the first place. It just warms my meat-adoring heart. What really gets me thinking is: what comes next? The mathematically perfect slab of ribs? A Nobel Laureate in physics devoting his substantial cognitive prowess to discovering the secret behind the world’s best Shepherd’s Pie?
Oh, what a world we live in.
