What a Bunch of Bologna

There’s a reason I hire an editor.

In one of the short stories featured in our upcoming release, The Ding Dong Altar Boy, Donald mentions a memorable fried baloney sandwich he once ate.

Our editor texted me:

“Do you really not know how to spell bologna?”

Apparently not.

But I couldn’t take full responsibility for my mistake like a mature, honorable person.

“Just so you know,” I texted back defensively, “I’ve had four beta readers, and none of them pointed it out. Spellcheck didn’t flag it either.”

I shared the exchange with my 13-year-old daughter.

“Well, duh,” she said. “Baloney is a word, but it’s spelled differently than the lunch meat.”

“My 13-year-old is smarter than me,” I lamented to my editor.

“I mean, she’s usually smarter than me too,” my editor responded. “But baloney means false. Bologna is a food.”

“By that definition, lunch meat is also false,” I said. “’Cause there ain’t nothing real about bologna. I stand by my spelling.”

(I changed the spelling immediately.)

But I did continue to ponder the etymology of lunch meat and baloney.

Bologna (actually pronounced buh-LOAN-ya) is a town in northern Italy. It’s also the birthplace of mortadella, a large sausage made of finely ground pork. Small cubes of fat, taken from the neck of a pig, float suspended in the mortadella like a good ol’ Nebraskan Jell-O salad. It’s traditionally flavored with peppercorns—or sometimes pistachios—and sliced into flat, bread-sized circles.

The lunch meat we call bologna is derived from mortadella, but it’s not limited to pork. It’s traditionally made from odds and ends of chicken, turkey, beef, or pork. Basically, if it’s left on the floor of the slaughterhouse, it’s fair game for a Lunchable. Yum. Yum.

I grew up eating bologna—though it was all baloney in our house. My most memorable bologna sandwich came in a packed lunch during middle school, when I went away to 4-H Horse Camp at Fort Robinson State Park. My mom had lovingly packed my meals ahead of time.

Now, my mom wasn’t one to voice affection, and I don’t remember her ever hugging me. But her love came in many different forms. And once, it came in a bologna sandwich.

Starved after a morning of horseback riding, classes, chores, and leatherworking, I jammed half the sandwich into my mouth in one bite. The chewing slowed. Something was off. I took another, smaller bite. The bread was soft, the Miracle Whip creamy, the bologna as congealed as ever—but the texture wasn’t right.

What was that other thing in my mouth?

Gingerly, I reached in and pulled out the foreign object.

Yuck. Paper.

Wait… paper?

I opened the rest of my sandwich and there, bitten in two and half-digested, was a lunchbox note from my mom. As far as I could tell, it might have said, “I hope you’re having fun at camp.” But my stomach acids had already determined I’d never know for sure.

“Why did you put a note in my sandwich?” I asked her when I got home.

“I thought it would be a surprise,” she said.

“Oh, it was definitely a surprise. And why in the heck did you put the paper on the same side as the Miracle Whip?”

You’d better believe I opened every sandwich for the rest of that trip.               

But what about baloney? Was the word born from leftover dictionary letters?

Not exactly. There are several theories, but my favorite involves a politician—because if politics isn’t a bunch of baloney, I don’t know what is. According to at least one source, the word took off in the 1930s when Alfred E. Smith, then-governor of New York, used baloney to describe Washington bureaucracy.

It seems politics hasn’t changed much since the 1930s.

Bologna production, on the other hand, has gone through a lunch meat evolution. Back then, bologna was a cheap, protein-rich staple—usually made by local butchers from meat scraps, emulsified into a smooth texture. Basically, a meat smoothie.

Today, bologna is highly standardized and made from a blend of chicken, pork, or beef, along with additives like corn syrup, sodium nitrite, and “flavorings.” With all the sugar, preservatives, and processing, it’s debatable whether bologna is still food.

Or if, in fact, it’s just a bunch of baloney.