Odd this day
Today, in what may be the most consequential moment in history this account has yet marked, Diana Duyser, a resident of Florida, put a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich up for sale on eBay. It sold for $28,000 dollars. Mind you, it did have an entirely authentic face of Mary, mother of Jesus, charred into it, and Our Lady of Sorrows had performed a special miracle by keeping the sandwich mould-free for an entire decade.
Obviously, all of this is true. We won’t be entertaining any of that scientific explanation business round these parts. Well, not until later.
Our humble, factual tale begins in or around 1994, according to Diana. (Here, I’d just like to pay tribute to the news organisations which have kept this 20-year-old story up on their websites all this time. Some have taken the easy route, and long since deleted them. Tsk.)
Anyway, according to NBC,
Duyser said she took a bite after making the sandwich 10 years ago and saw a face staring back at her. She put the sandwich in a clear plastic box with cotton balls and kept it on her night stand. She said the sandwich has never sprouted a spore of mold.
The same source also says:
The online auction site initially pulled the sale, saying it didn’t post joke items. The page was restored after the company was convinced that Duyser would deliver on the bid, said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy.
Which is lucky, or we wouldn’t have this fine example of how God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform. The $99m bid in the screenshot at the top looks to have been a joke, but thankfully, there were people and organisations treating this artefact with the reverence it deserved, and
GoldenPalace.com, an online casino, confirmed that it placed the winning bid, and company executives said they were willing to spend “as much as it took” to own the 10-year-old half-sandwich with a bite out of it.
“It’s a part of pop culture that’s immediately and widely recognizable,” spokesman Monty Kerr told The Miami Herald. “We knew right away we wanted to have it.”
I think that’s quite enough from NBC, though. They are, after all, just repeating things from the ur-text: the work of Miami Herald cub reporter (and now seasoned veteran) Evan Benn. For he it was who got the proper lowdown:
The new owners of the sandwich … didn’t want to risk it getting lost in the mail … and … flew to South Florida on Monday to meet Diana and Gregg Duyser, wine and dine them and make arrangements for a sandwich hand-over.
They further planned to
present Duyser with an oversized plastic check at a news conference … And after that? “We’d like to send Diana and the sandwich on a world tour,” Kerr said. “We think our customers around the world will really get a kick out of seeing the sandwich at the Taj Mahal, at Red Square, at the Eiffel Tower.”
Duyser told Benn:
I’ve never even been on a vacation before. I’ve always taken care of my mother, and then my father. I haven’t had anything like this happen for me.
She also told him, apparently, that the sandwich “protected” her — although that quote doesn’t appear until 2013, when Benn wrote a piece for Esquire about the saga, which also includes the splendid detail that Duyser
called the paper and got a hold of my editor, who rolled her eyes (as editors are wont to do), turned to me, and said: “Kid, this woman says she’s got a Virgin Mary in her grilled cheese sandwich. Go check it out.” Turned out to be the best story — and the best grilled cheese — of my life.
Now, you might question here the fact that he only remembered these details nine years later, but like our Lord and Saviour, human memory moves in a mysterious way, so I’m quite prepared to believe it. Benn adds:
The buyer has no plans of forcing Duyser to sign a contract vouching for the authenticity of the 10-year-old sandwich half, Kerr said. “We are talking to a couple of food-decay specialists to try and figure out how this sandwich stayed in such good shape over the years,” Kerr said. And if the experts say the sandwich is 10 weeks old, not 10 years? “We don’t think that’s the case,” Kerr said. “But if it is, it’s still a magical sandwich.”
Many, many news outlets covered the story, of course — but I think top marks go to the BBC for this headline:
…with rather fewer points awarded to mashed for saying
it looks like the face of the Virgin Mary is baked into the bread.
…when it obviously doesn’t. Although the mention of that does give me a chance to post this:
…which will clearly never, ever get old. Rather like that sandwich. SPEAKING OF WHICH… the pesky sceptics at Slate had to go and be rational, didn’t they? Yes, before the ink was even dry on Duyser’s giant cheque, they were running a piece about why, if the popular grilled cheese snack was
stored in a less-than-airtight plastic box
…had it remained intact “without divine intervention”. Outrageous. Mind you, an old Golden Palace website does have a photo of Diana posing with the sandwich with the box open, which is clearly highly irresponsible.
…or not, if Mary, Mother of God, is indeed protecting it. Remaining firmly in the heathen camp, Slate says:
The homespun favorite is usually prepared either by slathering the bread with margarine or by cooking it in a pan or press that’s been well-lubed with the fatty butter substitute. Margarine consists primarily of hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is rich in trans fats. The fungi that love bread are typically averse to trans fats — they don’t digest them well.
Cheese is fatty, too, of course, and
added calcium to the mix. Calcium is a mild mold retardant.
Plus, of course, shop-bought bread is rammed full of preservatives, and was cooked, which would have dried it out, making it
not as inviting a meal for passing mold spores.
Bloody spoilsports. Leaving their beastly cynicism aside, though, two more questions occur to me: does the casino still own the sandwich, and if so what state is it in now? I have attempted to find answers to both, but failed. However, I can tell you that, the year after acquiring the sandwich (and presumably, while living up to their promise to take it and Diana on a world tour), they… ‘invested’ a further $75,000 in a French fry “shaped like” Abraham Lincoln.
Obviously.
