In summer 2020, when much of the country was in lockdown, Natasha Pickowicz ’06 and Alison Leiby ’06 escaped their respective apartments in Brooklyn to meet at the beach, where they swam hard and worked up an appetite.
They then shared their favorite lunch: a simple sandwich of soft deli bread smeared with avocado, topped with a thin layer of turkey and cheese, and piled high with fresh greens like arugula, spinach, and sprouts.
They call this creation the “Friendship Sandwich”—and they’ve been enjoying it, together and separately, for nearly 20 years. Fittingly, it was a fellow Cornellian (food writer G. Daniela Galarza ’04) who featured the friends’ favorite comestible in her “Eat Voraciously” newsletter in the Washington Post. In July 2022, the simple-but-tasty meal reached a global audience when it was featured in a Washington Postfood column.
“It’s a salad in sandwich form,” the paper observed, “and it’s a signature of their long-lasting friendship."
Back in fall 2002, Pickowicz and Leiby were newly matriculated Cornellians who met during Orientation Week and immediately hit it off. They’d both go on to major in English in Arts & Sciences; get cut from the Big Red crew team on the same day; and share similar tastes in food, especially when it comes to sandwiches.
Dan Rosenberg/Provided
From left, MFA students Gerardo Iglesias, Sarah Iqbal and Aishvarya Arora listen to observations by two young poets at the Ithaca Children’s Garden.
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Semiconductors are at the core of the economy and national security. Their importance makes them a target. Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, discusses how Cornell is helping to keep the semiconductor supply chain safe.
Doug Nealy/Unsplash
The Peace Arch, situated near the westernmost point of the Canada–United States border in the contiguous United States, between Blaine, Washington and Surrey, British Columbia.
