i still want the sandwich from tom & jerry

There are many great food moments in movies. I have already made my case for the glorious thermos of spaghetti in Hudson Hawk. But before that, long before food television, before Instagram, and before every chef decided to drizzle something with truffle oil, there was another culinary masterpiece.

Tom and Jerry sandwiches.

You know exactly the ones I am talking about.

Those towering cartoon sandwiches that somehow contained an entire deli.

A loaf of bread. A whole ham. Lettuce. Cheese. Tomatoes. Pickles. Maybe another loaf of bread for structural support. Then somehow Tom would slice the thing into a neat triangle and eat it in three bites.

The ham was always the star.

Not real ham.

Cartoon ham.

The kind with a perfect bone sticking out of the middle, glazed to a mirror shine, as if it had just won first place at the county fair. Every slice looked thick enough to qualify as a steak. Looking back, I am convinced Tom and Jerry consumed more ham than an entire Midwestern church potluck.

And somehow it always looked incredible.

I have spent years eating in restaurants, cooking professionally, traveling through different countries, and studying cuisine. Yet when someone says "sandwich," a small part of my brain still pictures that ridiculous Tom and Jerry creation wobbling under its own weight.

The laws of physics never seemed to apply.

The bread never collapsed.

The lettuce was always crisp.

The tomato slices were perfectly red.

Nobody worried about whether the sandwich was too tall to fit in a human mouth.

It was cartoon engineering at its finest.

The same goes for the giant wedges of Swiss cheese.

Tom and Jerry taught an entire generation that Swiss cheese naturally contains holes the size of golf balls. To this day, when I see Swiss cheese without giant holes, I feel mildly disappointed.

That's not cheese.

That's a manufacturing defect.

What fascinates me is that none of this food was real, yet it remains burned into my memory decades later.

I don't remember every meal I ate last month.

I do remember those sandwiches.

I remember those glossy hams.

I remember Jerry sneaking through a tunnel carved directly into a block of cheese.

And I remember thinking that if adulthood ever arrived, surely I would be eating sandwiches like that on a regular basis.

Instead, adulthood arrived with cholesterol numbers, portion control, and somebody saying things like, "Do you really need all that bread?"

The answer, of course, is yes.

Tom never questioned it.

Jerry never questioned it.

And neither should we.

At least not while the cartoon is on.

Because for a brief moment, sitting in front of the television with a bowl of cereal, those sandwiches represented perfection. Not realistic perfection. Cartoon perfection.

The kind where a sandwich is taller than your head, a ham can feed a family of eight, and somehow the mouse always gets the first bite.