I hope your Independence Day holiday was a good one. Mine was about what you’d expect. My contribution to the general festivities was to put my flag out each day of the long weekend, and to eat hot dogs. I bought the good kind (the old fashioned, skin-on ones), and buns from my grocer’s bakery (far superior to the national brands). These provided me five meals over the course of the weekend, the only variety (variety’s overrated, after all) being my having to wrap the last two in bread slices, since the buns had run out.

Let us meditate for a moment on that strange artifact of American life, the unwritten law that hot dogs must come in packages of ten, while hot dog buns come in packages of eight. All our lives we’ve endured this.

When will the madness end?

Cecil Adams over at The Straight Dope does a manful job of trying to uncover the reasons for the conundrum. I don’t suppose anyone is going to come closer to the answer than he does.

And yet, it seems to me he misses the deeper issue here—the existential, antediluvian cultural divide expressed by this peculiar mismatch.

What we’re really dealing with here is world-views in conflict. This isn’t one of your 20th Century, Johnny-come-lately cultural brouhahas, like homosexual marriage or whether men should wear hats. This is a division that, though it remains with us today, has its roots in the very beginnings of human history.

Historically, there are two primary metaphors for food in the English language.

One is bread. Bread as a word for food of all kinds came into English (I believe) with the Bible. “Give us this day our daily bread,” in the Lord’s Prayer, is understood to comprehend all kinds of food. When a man says, “I earn my daily bread by building houses,” we know he means, “That’s how I feed myself.” Bread in this sense implies whatever he eats.

The other metaphor is meat. This isn’t really a metaphor (or it wasn’t always a metaphor, anyway), because meat is the old English word for food in general. (Norwegian, our cousin language, has the related word mat, whose sole meaning is food. Just food.) Thus, if you look into an old edition of the King James Bible, you’ll see in the very first chapter of Genesis, verse 29:

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

Here God is describing foods which definitely don’t derive from animals as “meat.” That’s because “meat” used to mean food in general in English. Only relatively recently has the word been reduced to meaning what used to be called “flesh.”

Ever since the time of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4), one of whom was a dirt farmer and the other a herdsman, there has been incessant war between those who think food should be understood as bread, and those who think it should be understood as meat.

The vegetarians, the sons of Cain, are represented by the bakers of today. They believe that since they produce bread—and bread is the true food—all other foods ought to adjust themselves to the requirements of baking. If people must eat hot dogs, they say, the hot dogs should be portioned out in conformity with the number of buns in a package.

The carnivores, the sons of Abel, are the meat packers of today. They believe that meat (flesh) is the true and proper food of humanity, and therefore the bakers should adjust to their standards.

Neither side will yield. And so the conflict rages.

Who is right?

All I can do is point out (without comment) that God took Abel’s side.

(Ducks and runs.)