Floor to ceiling, sandwiches are piled high. Not just sandwiches: pastas, wraps, baguettes, sushi. Brown bread, white tortillas, bacon, chicken, vegan chicken, tuna, cucumber, falafel. Smoothies and energy drinks crowd on one side, while yoghurts, crisps and cakes are heaped on the other.
The meal-deal section of a supermarket is a thing of beauty. The variety of combinations covers almost all cravings, preferences and dietary requirements, at roughly the price of a standard London coffee. I don’t understand colleagues who waste their evenings making up a large quantity of the same dish for lunch the next day. The smugness of stringent meal-preppers must turn into gloom when, by Friday, they’re faced with the prospect of defrosting the fifth frozen chilli of the week. I, meanwhile, will never have that problem.
Yet the Welsh government has announced that it is considering a meal deal ban. ‘Without meal deals, I would be lost,’ 22-year-old Connor told the BBC. You and me both, Connor. I eat at least one, sometimes two, and – once – three meal deals a day.
The meal deal was conceived by Boots but the art of the quick lunch goes back much further. The 4th Earl of Sandwich is generally credited with the invention that took his name in 1762 after demanding – during a particularly strenuous gambling session – he be served a cut of beef between two slices of bread. As Woody Allen pointed out, surely such a self-evident thing hardly counts as an invention. But to this day, its true origins, if earlier, remain a mystery.
The popularity of quick and convenient lunches shows no sign of slowing. By 1990, Britain’s sandwich industry was valued at £1 billion. In 2017, Sainsbury’s was thought to sell more than 436,000 an hour.
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