Cuban sandwiches are filled with ham, pork, salami, pickles, mustard and cheese, which is good, but not something so special that an entire day needs to be dedicated to it.
Even if you’ve heard of it, there actually isn’t a “National Cuban Sandwich Day.” That’s because it was invented out of thin air by a Tampa food writer in his bedroom. Yet, plenty of people fell for the goof anyway.
When Chris Spata of the Tampa Bay Times started looking up various food days, finding nearly 1,500 different ones in the process, he found that quite a bit of them were simply made up. So, because he’s a genius, he decided to create one himself and see how easy it would be to pass it around.
“I texted a friend who works in public relations to ask, “How do you find the email addresses for a bunch of food writers?” Five minutes later she had emailed me a list of more than 1,200 of them. I signed the email “C. Douglas Spata,” listed my own home address at the bottom, and sent it to all of them. I also sent it to more than 100 restaurants around the world that serve Cuban sandwiches.
I created a National Cuban Sandwich Day Facebook page, invited all my friends and put up a post reminding people to celebrate by using #NationalCubanSandwichDay on social media.
I submitted National Cuban Sandwich Day to several of the largest calendar sites that list food days — the ones journalists have told me they refer to when looking for content ideas. Those calendar sites, by the way, have handy submission forms for anyone who wants to make up a new day.”
So after the hoax made its way onto local news, because there clearly wasn’t anything better to cover than day than celebrating a sandwich, and after Spata learned even people in South Korea were celebrating his new fake holiday, his bosses at the Times found out about what he was doing and made him come clean.
“After a brief period of head-cradling, they told me I had to walk it back, take down the Facebook page and fess up.
I wrote back to every single person who responded with any interest in Cuban Sandwich Day. I told them my name, that I was a reporter, and explained how I’d invented the whole thing. I expected at least some of them to be angry.
None of them were.”
None of them should be, because most food holidays are incredibly silly anyway. As Spata says, by this time next year there will probably still be some people celebrating National Cuban Sandwich Day and it actually won’t even matter where it came from.
