“Strategically,” said Jones, “we are going to make sure we have the appropriate offer for any time of the day.”

ogether, sandwiches, wraps and baguettes accounted for more than a third of all the food we bought at lunchtime in 2016. Add burgers and the proportion rises to 40%. The only other items that came close were crisps, chips and chocolate bars. Salads made up 3.5% of our lunches. Sushi didn’t make the top 10.

You take the workforce away and the Costas of this world can’t function,” he said. “If they start closing down and retracting, that is going to have a knock-on effect.” The sandwich industry, Winship pointed out, doesn’t merely sustain hundreds of thousands of jobs, it also produces billions of pounds of added productivity throughout the economy. “It allows people to carry on working over lunch,” he said.

A person known as the “stacker” then put two sandwiches on top of each other and fed them into the Grote AC60 ultrasonic cutting machine. Chahar and I drew close.

On a grey morning

thing is assembled fresh in the shop; and the network of factories,

“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.”

It is possible to be a showman.

Boltman had nine branches of French Franks by the early 1990s, but he could not keep up with Pret a Manger. Pret will open its 500th branch next year, and is currently valued at £1.4bn. (Metcalfe sold most of his stake in 2008.) But Boltman still knows a thing or two. A small man with a husky voice and a moustache that he smooths as he talks, he won four consecutive sandwich designer of the year awards – at the BSA’s fiercely contested “Sammies” – between 2009 and 2012. How Greggs conquered Britain: ‘Nobody can quite believe how well it has done’ Read more “My idea of relaxation is to write down five new sandwiches,” he said when we met recently at his latest baby, a vaguely hipsterish place called Trade, on the Essex Road in north London. The quest of the sandwich inventor is a mostly pitiless one. The industry has its own 80:20 rule: 80% of sales come from 20% of the flavours. These are often referred to as “the core” – the egg mayonnaise, the BLT, the chicken salad – and they are as familiar as our own blood. Pret’s best-selling sandwiches (the top three are all baguettes: chicken caesar and bacon, tuna and cucumber, cheddar and pickle) have not changed for seven years. M&S’s prawn mayo has been its No 1 for 36.

selling fresh product, which is beautiful.”

The M&S

more sociable way of eating – was present at its inception.

more sociable way of eating – was present at its inception.

through a 24-hour gambling binge

The first definite sandwich sighting

In recent years, the biggest development in the sandwich business has been its successful targeting of breakfast.

Sandwiches,” he said, “never sit still.”

Sandwiches,” he said, “never sit still.”

In recent years, the biggest development in the sandwich business has been its successful targeting of breakfast.

day parts”, “occasions” and “missions”

Sandwich factories know that our New Year’s resolutions will last until the third week of January, when the BLT orders pick up again.

“In a way, they freed us from society itself.”

on’t know whether he meant to,

on’t know whether he meant to,

British sandwich-makers are sought-after across Europe, and invited to places like Russia and the Middle East to advise on everything from packaging and production lines to “mouth feel” and cress. “In Saudi Arabia they absolutely love the story of the Earl, the scoundrel,” one factory owner told me. And during weeks of reporting for this article, I didn’t come across one person who doubted that the long boom would continue for years to come. “It’s big. We all do it. And we do it a lot, is our summary of the market,” said Martin Johnson, the chief executive of Adelie Foods, a major supplier of coffee shops and universities.

We are light years ahead of the rest of the world,” Jim Winship, the head of the BSA, told me.

ccording to the British Sandwich Association, the number grows at a steady 2% – or 80 million sandwiches – each year. The sandwich remains the engine of the UK’s £20bn food-to-go industry,

Henry Mayhew calculated that 436,800 sandwiches, all of them ham, were sold on the streets of London each year. That might sound a lot, but Sainsbury’s, which currently accounts for around 4% of the UK “food to go” market, now sells that number every 36 hours.

But actually, eating sandwiches five days a week, as lots of people do now, or even seven days a week

“It is an absolute passion,” one former M&S supplier told me. “For everybody. It has to be.”

almost insanely labour-intensive achievement

few small rotational gestures of wrist and fingers

f you have been eating a packaged sandwich while reading this, you will have probably finished it by now.

He saw Pret and Starbucks and Costa and Subway coming a mile off

(Boots established the country’s first national distribution system – selling the same sandwiches in its all branches – in 1985, and pioneered the meal deal.)

At Amstrad the staff start early and finish late. Nobody takes lunches – they may get a sandwich slung on their desk,” Alan Sugar told an audience at City University in 1987. “There’s no small-talk. It’s all action.”

the packaged sandwich spoke to a new way of living and working

oh

If anything, it seemed outlandish. Who would pay for something they could just as easily make at home?

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.

Prices started at 43p

Egg and cress

so influential, so multifarious

How the sandwich consumed Britain

: a proud national narrative of a country of immigrants who come here and lift themselves up with hard work.

Forty-five blueberry companies. Thousands of workers to oversee and protect.

another camp, a better one

Noel, still drunk from the night before.

getting into the United States was more difficult than ever

"E-Verify is a joke," they said, "Everyone pretends."

ocals didn't treat you like shit

holding migrant workers in debt and chaining them inside box trucks.

family doctors, pharmacies, and twenty-four-hour urgent-care centers. But a lot of those amenities are not immediately within reach if you're a migrant worker living out of your car,

Do a taste test someday. The cultivated ones are watery and mealy compared to the tiny wild ones—intense bursts of candy-like fruit. Once you notice the difference, you will never buy the fat ones again.

a fungus clinging to their roots that allows the plant to extract nutrients from the otherwise lousy soil

state's largest crops

The bad guys make headlines, as bad guys will