The sandwich has always been there for me.
In good times and bad. On my first day of school, it rode shotgun in my lunchbox like a little friend in a foil jacket. Between meetings, I grab one. On my lunchbreaks it waits in my bag. Or if I’ve been caught short, I can just nip across the road and find one in a chiller cabinet, waiting to be hand-picked, ‘Choose me, I am delicious and suitable for vegetarians.’ It’s always the prawn mayo, sure, but sometimes I fantasize choosing the all-day breakfast doorstep and falling off the pork wagon, which was not a sentence I foresaw using today.
But whether you plump for the cheese and pickle, the ham salad, or the spicy chicken tikka, you know where you are with a sandwich. It’s a snack you can hold in your hand, and it’s a snack you can trust.
I know that pulse-based salads are disrupting more and more of the market but sandwiches remain the go-to lunch option in the Western world, and certainly serve as the central pillar of most Meal Deals. So it was with some surprise that I only did recently discover the origin story of this ubiquitous snack and how it was named after its inventor and how it almost never happened.
But happen it did.
And it happened, as many things do, with thanks to the fortuitous meeting of character, opportunity, and circumstance.
Our inventor was an unlikely one. Headstrong. Irascible. Restless. Those observing his younger years would have seen perhaps a difficult man. A stubborn man. A man not especially interested in doing the done thing. Not necessarily a man whose name, or rather, title, would ring down the ages with his gift to the world.
John Montagu was 4th Earl of Sandwich and he loved the gaming table.
So much so, that he rarely left it. In fact, it was this that compelled him to demand beef and bread be brought to him while he played. Not an unusual request for the day. However, where others around this time, in line with the mores and conventions of polite society, would’ve eaten both separately, John, during one auspicious game, slammed his meat between two torn chunks of loaf in a diabolical combo.
You might imagine the gasps and eyebrows this raised.
But John did not give a sweet monkeys what people thought. He simply recognised a slightly better way of doing things.
Was he banished from the gaming club? Did his contemporaries shun him from their social circles? Cast him from their clubs. No, they did not. They just said,
‘He’s onto something here.’
And he was. John could now essentially, as the saying goes, have his lunch and keep one arm free at all times. It made him more productive on his breaks. He was able to do more things. Falconery. Croquet. He could assist reversing vehicles with one hand while he ate, waving in the carriages, ‘Whoa, whoa, stop. Nom nom.’
And pretty soon, this particular style of consuming bread and meat caught on.
His eponymous creation took flight.
It went viral.
Like the ice bucket challenge.
The sandwich became THE, MUST HAVE, dish of the day.
It exploded through Europe.
It captured imaginations.
It enchanted people from every walk of life
All around the world, people from Paris to Papua New Guinea began sandwiching foodstuffs between their bread. ‘Why have we never thought to do this before?’
And one of the wonderful aspects of this new snack was that everyone could put their own spin on it. The three-slice club. The croque moniseur. The grilled panini. The croque madam. Rolls got involved. Baps. Baguettes. Torpedoes. Subs. The 6-inch. 12-inch. Or, of course, Subs 15 and 30 in France due to the metric system.
Some have said that the sandwich has helped humans build the modern world, and I am inclined to agree.
‘When a good idea is ready to happen, it does,’ we think.
But maybe not.
Let us not forget that the sandwich started almost by accident.
Had John been a reasonable fellow, well accustomed to observing the mores of his time, had he not the pluck to envelop his meat, then perhaps we would not know the sandwich today.
What if this particular gentleman had died in his early twenties? Or been gluten-intolerant? Or simply fancied soup that afternoon.
The sandwich, as we know it, may have never been born.
And what would we be choosing in Tesco today?
Probably a pulse-based salad.
But that’s not the point. The point is that most of us tell history backwards.
We look at the sandwich, the paperclip, the Post-it Note, Velcro, Lego, email, the shipping container, the QR code, powerpoint … and because they exist, we subconsciously assume they were always inevitable, waiting to be invented. As if the universe was somehow nudging humanity towards them.
But that’s hindsight.
The future was, in fact, not so inevitable.
It is contingent. But every invention looks inevitable after it’s been invented.
We like to imagine that civilisation unfolds according to some grand masterplan. As though somebody, somewhere, was eventually destined to invent the sandwich. But history is considerably messier than that.
And when a thing does catch on, what then?
Something else happens.
Economists call it Path Dependence.
Once society adopts a solution … everything starts building around it. Picnics. Tupperware. Subway. Pret. Napkins. Logistics. Supply chains.
Suddenly, removing sandwiches becomes impossible. The path reinforces itself.
The sandwich isn’t remarkable because somebody put food between two pieces of bread. The sandwich wasn’t revolutionary because it was brand new.
It was revolutionary because somebody showed everyone else they could.
I know that some historians dispute parts of this story, but whether every detail is true hardly matters. The legend itself illustrates the point. Once a story catches on, it acquires a remarkable resistance to being replaced.
And besides, this is not just about sandwiches.
It’s about things that catch on.
And how the world falls in line behind them.
And how people massively overestimate invention.
And massively underestimate adoption.
QWERTY keyboards were actually designed to slow typists down, but they became ubiquitous anyway because the world learnt to type on them. Early filmmakers set up in Southern California because it had good light and varied scenery—and this led to HOLLYWOOD. The humble PDF was just another file type until we realised everyone could use it, and so now, everybody does. Most UK suburbs built up around extensions of the rail network. Cities grow around rivers for a reason.
Once you notice this, you see it everywhere. When a path forms, things start building around it. In software. Cities. Systems of measurement. In organisations. Governments. Brands.
History doesn’t always reward the best ideas.
But it has a habit of normalising workable ones.
Tomorrow lunchtime, someone somewhere will pick up a sandwich from a supermarket chiller.
They won’t think about John Montagu.
Or path dependence.
They’ll just think, ’That’ll do.’
And perhaps that’s the greatest compliment an invention can receive.
Not that we remember who created it.
But that it becomes so ordinary that we just feel like it’s always been there.