"If you have been eating a packaged sandwich while reading this, you will have probably finished it by now. One industry estimate says that, on average, they take 3.5 minutes to consume. But no one really knows, because no one pays attention. One of the great strengths of the sandwich over the centuries has been how naturally it grafts on to our lives, enabling us to walk, read, take the bus, work, dream and scan our devices at the same time as feeding ourselves with the aid of a few small rotational gestures of wrist and fingers. The pinch at the corner. The sweep of the crumbs...
“It is sometimes hard to tell how much has changed with our sandwich consumption, because we feel really nostalgic towards them,” Bee Wilson, the food writer, told me. “But actually, eating sandwiches five days a week, as lots of people do now, or even seven days a week – that is what has changed. They have invaded every area of our lives.”...
The most obvious – and ambitious – plot of the sandwich industry is to make us eat them throughout the day. People in the trade, I noticed, rarely talk about breakfast, lunch or dinner. They speak instead about “day parts”, “occasions” and “missions”, and any and all of these is good for a sandwich. In 2016, the British public carried out an estimated 5bn food-to-go “missions”, and these are spread ever more evenly across the day parts. In recent years, the biggest development in the sandwich business has been its successful targeting of breakfast. (The best-selling filling of the last 12 months has been bacon.) And the next frontier, logic dictates, is dinner – or, as it was described to me at Adelie Foods, “the fragmentation of the evening occasion”...
Large-scale sandwich making is fearsomely complicated and operates on tiny profit margins. As a result, it is secretive. “It’s totally crazy,” Rachel Collinson, the former commercial director of a plant in Northampton that was acquired by Greencore in 2011, told me. Collinson helped push through the introduction of the cardboard skillet, which was designed for Pret in 1999, and became widespread throughout the industry in the 2000s. On any given morning, her factory would receive 800 different ingredients, which it would turn into 250,000 sandwiches by the early afternoon. “I have worked in nearly every single food category,” she told me. “There is nothing like sandwiches. It’s super-fast, super-fresh. It’s the leading edge.”"
Some days it's nice to just read a whole long thing about sandwiches.
FB: "Boltman has been round the block a few times. He had a McDonald’s franchise for a while. He observed that, even as sandwiches function as an accelerant of our harried, grinding lives, they also offer a moment of precious, private escape. “People want to eat,” he said, leaning close. “They want comfort. They want solace. I’ve had a shit morning. I’ve fallen out with my boss. I’ve had a fucking horrible journey in. A poxy lettuce-and-whatever concoction in a plastic bowl is not going to do it for me. I want a cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit and I actually want to cry. I am going out for a fucking sandwich.”"
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