Looking for a new way of consuming protein inside some carbohydrates? You are definitely in the minority. The sandwich continues to dominate British lunch life, and now PR and research company Ginger Comms has come up with some pretty astonishing figures. First, that the average British person will eat 18,304 sandwiches, at the cost of £48,339, over the course of a lifetime. Second, 56% of Brits consume a sandwich every day. In Leeds – the city with the highest sandwich-dependency rates – researchers found that the average citizen munches through 20 sandwiches a month. In other words, they only get weekends off.
When polled, the public named the BLT as its favourite sandwich, followed closely by the chicken mayo, the bacon, and the ham and cheese. Perhaps more revealing is the section where Ginger Comms lists the sandwich fillings that had made the pollsters wince. These included cream cheese and jam, Marmite and banana, leftover Chinese takeaway, leftover curry takeaway, mayonnaise and crisps, and mashed potato and sweetcorn. It’s more proof – if it were needed – that we will put anything inside bread.
Since it was invented by Marks & Spencer in 1980, the packaged sandwich has come to dominate British lunch, but it has never been much loved. M&S’s top seller is still the ultimate retro flavour of prawn. And this is despite constant attempts by supermarkets to offer us novelty feasts, hoping we will forget the cold dry limpness of the main event. In 2010, for instance, Asda released the “crispwich”. A limited edition, its flaw was that, for reasons of sogginess, customers had to put the crisps on themselves – stored in a little baggie beside two heartbreakingly empty slices of bread. Similarly, in the depths of the financial crisis, M&S decided to market a 75p strawberry jam sandwich, cannily styling it as “a childhood favourite”. Unfortunately, the company ended up being taken to task by various health charities for the sandwiches’ sugar content, and the range was quietly shelved.
The worst excesses, though, are not just wacky hubris; instead, they are bullheaded cultural imperialism – as when the packaged sandwich market gets completely ahead of itself and decides it can colonise an entire foreign cuisine. Tesco’s paella sandwich was a case in point, followed closely by its infamous lasagne sandwich, which, at 594 calories, was the equivalent of two McDonald’s cheeseburgers.
As the lasagne-wich illustrates, our two slices of bread aren’t there to complement the food so much as to containerise it – to allow us to shovel it gobwards whether we are walking to catch a bus or sitting desk grazing blankly at a computer screen.
The truth is, our “love affair” with the sandwich is a marriage based largely on convenience – and is often just as toxic and resentful as that implies.
