Epic chicken sandwich

Invocation to Sandwich: April 22, 2025

The madness creeps in for the first time as a Master’s student in my lab is telling me about her job hunt. Did you know that Epic – yes, that Epic, the electronic health records company, the maker of beloved social media app MyChart – has built an absolutely terrifying miniature town in Verona, Wisconsin? 

There’s a lot to take in here. For example: is this building supposed to be Star Trek or Lord of the Rings themed? It’s hard to say, because the answer is very likely “both,” but during my eight months of grueling research, they’ve sadly taken down some of the most brazen IP infringement I’ve ever seen. 

As I’m clicking around this fever dream of a website, it’s the recipes that really catch my eye:

Our campus is thoughtfully designed for productivity. We take pride in our food venues, offering meals crafted with locally sourced ingredients whenever available. With a variety of cafeterias, coffee shops, and even a soda fountain conveniently situated near offices, our staff can enjoy a delicious lunch or snack seamlessly during their daily routine. Check out our recipe box for a selection of recipes curated by our skilled culinary team and give them a try at home! [Emphasis added to drive home how fucking psychotic this is — ed.]

“Give them a try at home,” the author says with a wink, and a wave of vertigo washes over me. I am falling into the bowels of the Earth forever like Alice in Wonderland. My stomach churns, thinking of the undoubtedly twisted mind who came up with this copy. No sane person would interrupt their job search to casually make a 29-ingredient sandwich. No one has ever given this a “try” at “home.” 

But I am not a sane person. This is a culinary secret hidden in plain sight. It is a two thousand year old jar of ancient Greek honey, waiting to be tasted. I am going to make the Epic chicken sandwich.

Initiation: May 16, 2025

The first sign that this is going to go horribly wrong is that there are 29 ingredients, including fifteen spices and herbs. I turn to the internet for the three types of dried chilis and, for good measure, the Mexican oregano and the rice bran oil; the rest is easy to source locally. By the end of the process, I have spent over $150 on a stunt blog about a ridiculous sandwich. 

Already, this is more expensive and labor intensive than it has any right to be, but there’s no way out. Nothing can be done to stop this. I am going to make the Epic chicken sandwich.

I tidy my kitchen, and prepare to mise en place, a phrase which here means “making my place a fucking mess.” I crack my knuckles, read the recipe, and… I’ve made a mistake. There are two overnight steps: salting the chicken, and soaking the moritas. The following day is full of meetings, preventing me from giving the sandwich the time and care it will need. I’ll reschedule for another night this week.

Interlude: May 17–December 28, 2025

If you’re a scientist in America right now, everyone keeps asking you the same question: “Has your funding been affected?” I have tried giving every possible answer to this question, honest or otherwise, and can report confidently that all options will be met with an awkward grimace.

Somehow, we’ve made it to the end of 2025 without any lay-offs in my lab, but it hasn’t been easy.

We had our first termination scare in February; we hadn’t received The Email, but journalists had reported what DOGE was targeting, and our program looked as good as dead. I sent a hail Mary to every philanthropy I knew, but no one stepped in to save the project. And then…we never got the email. 

Every couple months, we’d have another scare. In April, we stayed up until midnight backing up every communication we had ever had with NSF, based on a rumor DOGE was about to delete the agency’s website. In August, we found out that we weren’t getting paid this year. The government shut down; the government turned back on. In November, we were told that we weren’t getting paid again, and we should shut our project down. At this moment in time, I honestly don’t know what will happen next. We may get paid in 2026, but if we do, it will almost certainly be the last time. Either way, it’s time to find other funding for my lab, but I came to Yale to develop a research program on climate change, pandemics, and equity. If I want to fund that work, I’ll need to look outside NSF and NIH. At best, that means gritting my teeth and nodding as I listen to people in fleece vests tell me about lab leaks and AI. At worst, it’s already meant compromising our scientific independence, and working with funders who want to have creative control over our research. None of this is sustainable; a year into this experiment, we’ve already spent more on our collaborations with foundations than we’ve gotten back in grants.

At this point, it’s universally acknowledged that all of this has been an attack not just on science as an institution, but on scientists. Basically: they want us to quit. Therefore, it stands to reason that winning means putting on a brave face and finding a way to keep going.

I wish I could tell you that I’ve managed to survive by being scrappy and creative, or that I’ve grown as a person from the experience, and found a healthier work-life balance.

Unfortunately, these freaks are absolutely kicking my ass.

In March, I decided to try to have a conversation with my project’s other leadership about my mental health. I burst into tears immediately, stumbled through the whole thing, and somehow forgot to say “I’m having multiple panic attacks a day,” which was the express purpose of the call. I took a week off, and nothing changed. In August, I gave in and started seeing a psychiatrist. Inexplicably, he insists on spending most of our sessions asking about the specifics of my funding situation. This invariably causes a panic attack. In November, when my grandmother died, I lost the ability to sleep before 5am; I haven’t gotten it back. I don’t think 2026 will be any easier. I’m not sure any of this will ever go back to normal.

The Epic fried chicken sandwich recipe does not provide any instructions on how to proceed.

Closure: December 30, 2025

One of the major selling points of this sandwich is that you can have an eight month long nervous breakdown in the middle of making it. Only eight of the ingredients were perishable, and all were easy to replace. Perhaps this was intentional, and Epic plans to continue operating in Verona through nuclear war or the next pandemic. Perhaps someday you and I will traverse an ashen wasteland, and as we make shelter under the charred roof of what was once an Arby’s, we’ll be able to sleep soundly knowing our electronic health records are also sleeping side by side in a database that will outlive us both.

After another $51.48 Instacart purchase, I am once again ready to enter the field of battle. The chilis are soaked. The chicken is salted, although I forgot that I do not own a meat tenderizer. In its place, I have cleverly applied a normal ass hammer to the problem. Nothing can stop me now.

Mess en my place.

I will do absolutely anything to avoid handling raw meat – I grew up in a family of germophobes, and have still never quite figured this one out – so I decide to work backwards: garnish first, then chipotles escabeche, then the main course. This brings me to another humbling revelation: I do not have a cheese grater. I spend 20 minutes shredding an entire ball of cheese with a small paring knife. 

The chipotles escabeche presents an easier challenge, with one notable exception: the recipe never tells you what this is or how to make it. This is a Technical Baking Challenge: I have an ingredient list, and a directive to “make escabeche.” Some quick googling suggests that the unused vinegar and the unexplained “pickle” share a common origin, and that what I am preparing is a sort of Substance. I am a big fan of the Substance category of foodstuff, so this feels manageable. I elect not to sachet the spices, both because I think this will supercharge my Substance, and because I do not own a sachet. 

Finally, the time comes to fry the chicken. Every ratio I have been given is profoundly wrong. In the end, two beautiful pieces of fried chicken survive, the rest charred or under-breaded.

I have gone where no man has gone before; I have made the Epic fried chicken sandwich.

Farewell to Sandwich

It brings me no pleasure to report that the Epic fried chicken sandwich has defied every expectation I had. Every bone in my body wants to hate this stupid $200 sandwich that took nine months to make. The chicken is greasy, dubious, and unsatisfying; the cheese refuses to melt, even after 30 seconds in the microwave; and the buns I bought were cheap; but none of these were meant to be the star of the show. This is an exercise in chilis, and both the breading and the escabeche are honestly… delightful.

If you want a sandwich, I would encourage you to make any normal option instead. But if you find yourself stuck with the intrusive thought of making Tech Conglomerate Website Food for a stunt blog, there are probably much worse options out there—for example, the Epic chicken and corn chowder.

I’ve been thinking about Epic a lot since April. I’ve been on a college campus since I was 9 years old. I’ve never worked in the private sector, and I’ve never had any desire to, even as I watched my grad school friends go to startups, start families, and “buy” a “house” (?). But for the first time in my life, the private sector is sounding pretty good. By the time I got to Yale, one of the faculty who interviewed me had already left for industry; I’m sure that more of these people, who I truly adore, will follow in the next few years. It would be nice to go to work every day at an adult Disneyworld, where I could make three times as much money and, more importantly, wouldn’t have to find it myself.

The problem is: I’ve never wanted anything other than what I have. I love this job because this is where I know I can do something useful. I’ve spent years building a research program that lets me study, and challenge, power. After the CDC shooting, I had the freedom to speak out against Kennedy and his accomplices, who continue to incite violence against my friends and colleagues. In the next few months, we’ll share some new work tracing how the pharmaceutical industry inserted itself as an expert into the WHO Pandemic Agreement negotiations. And when I teach about the risks of using AI in healthcare, I teach about how and why sepsis goes undiagnosed, especially in Black patients, and how Epic created and deployed an AI/ML diagnostic tool that looked like a game-changer, until independent evaluation revealed that it made a false diagnosis 88% of the time, and still missed two-thirds of cases.

This is the best job in the world—even in 2025.

I often feel like I have a sort of backwards impostor syndrome, especially in relationships; I’m constantly hoping no one notices that I’m an academic pretending to be a human being. This job is the first and greatest love of my life. So I’m going to keep killing myself trying to beat these bastards. I will do it until I die or they lose. I think I am incapable of anything else; I think it would kill me much faster not to try.

But for today, and just today, I managed to spend four whole hours making a psychologically loaded and texturally fraught sandwich—even though I knew the entire time that, this morning, my program officer wrote to ask if there were any updates on our budget. The federal government can wait until 2026.