Will's First Culinary Law

As someone who's been eating for a living for more than twenty years, I've formulated a few laws concerning food, eating, and eating food. Today I'd like to share the first--and greatest--of these laws with you. It's not something to be taken lightly, or even mediumly. It should be taken as darkly as possibly.

Will's First Culinary Law: EVERY CULTURE HAS ITS OWN VERSION OF THE HOT POCKET

Whether you're American, Armenian, or Angolan, chances are your regional cuisine includes something similar to a hot pocket. Sure, you might not call it a hot pocket, but there's no mistaking a tube of pastry filled with meat and cheese of unidentified (and possibly nefarious) origins.

I know a hot pocket when I see one--and trust me, I've seen plenty. While I can't come up with an exact number, I'd guess I've eaten somewhere around 2,303 hot pockets over the course of my life.

I've been doing some extensive research on Wikipedia in order to create this list of HOT POCKETS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE:

Samosas, from India
Egg rolls, from China
Chimichangas, from Mexico
Empanadas, from Spain
Knishes, from Eastern Europe
Calzones, from Italy
Patties, from Jamaica

I had always suspected this was true, but I didn't put it into law form until this summer. After all, to be a real law a hypothesis needs to pass the most rigorous scientific testing. This was how they developed Maxwell's Laws, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and the Five-Second Law.

If I could find a ridiculously obscure culture--a culture so remote, so backward, that it still though Huey Lewis was cool, for example--that had a hot pocket-like food, then my theory would become a law.

And wouldn't you know it: this summer I visited the annual Folklife Festival in Washington DC. The Folklife Festival celebrates the cultures of three different nations every year. This year, the nations in question were Bhutan, Texas, and NASA. I'm not sure Texas counts as a nation, but that's beside the point right now.

What's right inside the point, however, is the fact that when I visited the Bhutanese snack tent I saw they were selling something called a "momo". And while "momo" sounds like some kind of ethnic slur, it is in fact a ball of dough filled with...meat and cheese. Just. Like. A hot. Pocket.

And so I upgrades Will's First Culinary Collection of Observations that Still Need Definitive Testing into the much more concise Will's First Culinary Law. I've enjoyed sharing it with you today. I only hope you enjoyed it half as much. If you enjoyed it any less then half, then I'm afraid you're time has been wasted.