National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day
Today is National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day, and this is the photograph I chose to mark it.
I’ve photographed classic pastrami sandwiches before, the kind wrapped in paper, stacked high, and eaten leaning forward so nothing ends up on your shirt. This time I wanted to look at something I see more and more often: the pastrami cheeseburger.
Pastrami began as a method of preservation, rooted in Eastern European Jewish traditions, before becoming a defining part of American food culture. In delicatessens, especially in New York and later Los Angeles, it settled into a familiar form: sliced hot, piled high, and served with little interference. The meat was the point.
The pastrami cheeseburger feels like a distinctly American evolution of that idea.
This photograph features pastrami cheeseburgers from P&G Burgers in Colton, California, a long-running Southern California fast-food restaurant with indoor seating, outdoor tables, and a drive-thru. You order at the counter beneath a wall of menu boards and pick up your food when your number is called. It’s not a deli and not just a roadside shack. It’s a full-scale fast-food operation built around burgers, fries, shakes, and pastrami.
Their claim, “Home of the Best Pastrami Cheeseburgers in the World,” is printed right on the building. Whether taken literally or as confident fast-food bravado, it suits what they’re serving. These burgers are large, heavy, and unapologetically loaded. Thick beef patties stacked with grilled pastrami, cheese, and a soft sesame seed bun, wrapped tight and meant to be eaten with commitment.
The cheeseburger version shifts pastrami away from its deli roots and places it squarely in American fast-food culture. Beef layered onto beef. Cheese added. Rye replaced by a burger bun. It’s less about tradition and more about appetite. Less about restraint and more about scale.
That’s what drew me to photograph it.
This image shows the burgers exactly as they’re served, straight from the counter, still wrapped, still spilling out. No styling, no cleanup. Just weight, texture, and excess. In that way, it still respects pastrami’s history, even as it pushes it into something louder and distinctly American.
On National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day, that evolution feels worth acknowledging.
More of my fast food photographs on my website in the gallery “Food From Bag To Background” at https://www.secondfocus.com/index/G0000wQ3fbeEezF0
National Bacon Day!
There are few foods people agree on as readily as bacon. Across generations and cultures, it holds a rare position as something almost universally liked, often described as the ingredient that makes everything better. If you asked people to name their ideal sandwich, many would quietly admit this would be it: bread, bacon, and nothing else getting in the way.
Bacon’s appeal is deeply rooted in history. Salt-cured pork dates back thousands of years, used as a practical method of preservation long before refrigeration. Variations appeared across Europe and Asia, but bacon as we recognize it today became firmly embedded in American food culture during the 20th century. By the mid-1900s, it had moved beyond breakfast and into sandwiches, burgers, and fast food, where its smoky, fatty richness became shorthand for indulgence.
Culturally, bacon has taken on a role larger than the ingredient itself. It represents abundance, comfort, and excess, often acknowledged without apology. Entire menus have been built around it, and marketing has leaned heavily into its reputation as something people crave even when they know they shouldn’t. It’s one of the few foods that can be both nostalgic and provocative at the same time.
This photograph leans into that idea by stripping the sandwich down to its core. No lettuce, no tomato, no attempt at balance. Just bacon, stacked high, presented without distraction. It’s easy to imagine this being wildly popular as a fast-food option, ordered impulsively and remembered vividly. Of course, it isn’t something you’ll actually find on a menu. And that absence is part of the point.
My fast food photography project can be found in “Food From Bag to Background” on my website at https://www.secondfocus.com/index/G0000wQ3fbeEezF0
A Monument to Cheese Pizza
Another entry from the calendar of invented holidays: National Cheese Pizza Day. As if anyone needed a reminder to eat melted cheese on bread. Still, here it is — and so is my monument to it. Two frozen Red Baron cheese pizzas sliced and stacked into a tower of excess, photographed against a black background.
Cheese pizza is the baseline of the whole idea. From Naples in the 1800s with mozzarella and tomato on flatbread, to Lombardi’s in New York serving it to immigrants in the early 1900s, it’s the foundation on which every other topping variation was built. Frozen in the 1950s, it became the fallback dinner most of us know.
So if today calls for honoring cheese pizza, this is mine.
See more in my Commercial Food Photography gallery:
👉 https://www.secondfocus.com/index/G0000WFAqDJQOgKU
National Bacon Lovers Day
Today is National Bacon Lovers Day, the unofficial holiday where logic takes a back seat and bacon worship takes center stage. People put it on donuts, add it to milkshakes, and even buy bacon-scented candles just to keep the smell lingering. Entire restaurant menus have been built on the premise that if you slap bacon on it, people will line up. If aliens tuned into Earth’s food culture, they’d probably assume bacon was our national currency.
This photograph presents a generous pile of bacon arranged in a metal pan against my signature black background. Each strip, glossy and rippled, catches the light in a way that emphasizes both texture and indulgence. It’s less about restraint and more about the abundance that makes bacon an enduring favorite.
From diners and drive-thrus to fast food chains with signature creations like the Wendy’s Baconator or the Jack in the Box Ultimate Bacon Cheeseburger, bacon continues to hold its own as a cultural staple. National Bacon Lovers Day is the moment to acknowledge that popularity — and perhaps to ask whether there can ever be too much bacon.
You can see this and more in my Commercial Food Photography gallery:
https://www.secondfocus.com/index/G0000WFAqDJQOgKU
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