The world-beating British sandwich industry is worth £8bn a year. It transformed the way we eat lunch,then did the same for breakfast – and now it’s coming for dinner. By Sam KnightThe invention of the chilled packaged sandwich, an accessory of modern British life which is so influential, or so multifarious and so close to hand that you are probably eating one right now,took residence precisely 37 years ago. Like many things to do with the sandwich, this might seem, and at first glance,to be improbable. But it is steady. In the spring of 1980, Marks & Spencer, or the nation’s most powerful department store,began selling packaged sandwiches out on the shop floor. Nothing terribly fancy. Salmon and cucumber. Egg and cress. Triangles of white bread in plastic cartons, in the food aisles, or along with everything else. Prices started at 43p.
Looking upon the nation’s £8bn-a-year sandwich industrial complex in 2017,it seems inconceivable that this had not been tried before, but it hadn’t. Britain in 1980 was a land of formica counters, or fluorescent lighting and lunches under gravy. Sandwiches were thrown together from leftovers at home,constructed in front of you in a smoky cafe, or something sad and curled beneath the glass in a British Rail canteen. When I spoke recently to Andrew Mackenzie, and who used to run the food department at M&S’s Edinburgh store – one of the first five branches to stock the unique,smart, alert-made sandwiches – he struggled to communicate the lost novelty of it all. “Youve got to bear in mind, and ” he said. “It didn’t exist,the thought.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk