A Personal History of the Sandwich.

I never knew that we were poor when we were.

No one ever said anything about it. We were definitely happy. We were never hungry even though we may not have always been full. And long before my dad was a diagnosed Celiac Sprue he used to teach us to pour our gravy over the slices of white bread that we ended dinner with. "It's a poor man's sandwich" he told us. We were amused by the name, and at the time I was pretty sure that we were eating it ironically. I had no idea that we were eating poor man's sandwiches because we were actually poor.

Sandwiches played a pretty significant role in the life of my natal family. Every day all three boys and our youngest sister would take a lunchbox with sandwiches to school. So in the morning, my dad would cover the counter with bread. As I got older I would sometimes be the one who would start the process. It took an entire loaf of white bread to make enough sandwiches to get us all through the day. I remember a kind of beauty and symmetry in the way that the bread covered the formica. There was a Henry-Ford-esque performative poetry, too in the process of spreading the mayo and splorping the mustard on each slice. Next came the baloney, the sandwiches all had to be closed, each one carefully smooshed into a thin plastic bag.

Afterwards you had a sense that you had participated in a logistical feat. There was a little bit of magic in the mundane process, it wasn't five thousand, but you felt like you had hallowed and blessed a crowd with the food.

Whenever I make sandwiches now, especially if they're for the whole family, I can't help but be transported to the counters of my youth. The magic of those symmetrical rows and rows of bread works on me like an ancient myth. The spirit seized me so strongly last Sunday that I had to snap a photo, I knew it would be a poor simulation of what it was like then, but it would be something.

In her engaging History of the Sandwich, Linda Stradley directs our attention to the many origins of this staple food. Most of us have heard of the Earl of Sandwich and suspect his legacy as a lurking ghost inside our sandwiches. I was intrigued, though, to realize that the sandwich became a primary food at the beginning of the last century after bakeries started pre-slicing bread (how assembly line! how modern!), because they constituted an "easy, portable meal for workers and schoolchildren alike."

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that the sandwich bears partial responsibility for the domestic arrangements of the post-industrial-revolution and then the post-war-suburban-commuter-family. I have to admit that I had never really recognized the sandwich as a reinforcement of what we now call "traditional gender roles" (a mom, at home, doing invisible-repeatable-support-labor -- enabling the dad to "support" the family in a "breadwinner" way).

I would have been even less likely to blame the sandwich for the post-industrial model of work and career (in which we clock our forty hours for a company that allows us to develop a disposable income --> whereby we can cultivate leisure-time-obsessions --> that will compensate us for the fact that our "job" is less often expression of ourselves and our work than we want it to be), but clearly the sandwich is partly culpable.

I don't want to turn this into a blame-fest for the poor defenseless sandwich though, because I do think there's a good, subversive way in which the sandwich extends the hearth of the family into the increasingly compartmentalized, rigid world of bureaucracy which defines work for so many of us.

No matter what our day brings us in terms of memos and deadlines and complaints and meetings, a good sandwich recalls for us the pre-industrial ideal when work and family and home and neighbors and product were more naturally integrated.

Suddenly the sandwich is a site of empowering ambivalence, right? Because it bestows upon us the mobility neccessary to function in a fast-paced, geographically dispersed work-world. But it simultaneously re-members our sense of home and our participation in the value and lives of those in our nuclear family.

Station Wagon Sandwiches used to provide the family of my youth the mobility we so craved to travel North to our cabin and larger family and south to our denominational conferences. My mom would pull a loaf of bread, a bag of baloney and two small tupperware containers of mayo and mustard out across her lap. Everyone in the car received a dishtowel and with the speed and acuity usually reserved for Olympic athletes, my mother would craft hundreds of sandwiches for the hungry masses. All without ever pausing in our journey.

The thought of those squishy wonderbread delights still makes me nostalgic for the cramped back-end forts we'd set up in the bed of our station wagon. We'd make elaborate walls with pillows and blankets and then read so many Sugar Creek Gang books that our eyes would hurt.

It wasn't until I first witnessed my wife making sandwiches for her family-of-origin that I started to suspect the truth-that-sandwiches-would-tell-me about my own family. We were making them together at her Farm Home counter and I was proud of my ability to calculate and spread the precise amount of bread needed to feed her own large family efficiently.

And then it happened. She started to put the meat on the sandwiches.

I thought that the first one was an accident. "Oops!" I said for her and grabbed the huge ball of meat off of the first sandwich where she had put it.

"What?" She wanted to know.

"You put all the meat on one sandwich." I said (stating the obvious). I started to redistribute the thin slices of ham individually to each sandwich.

"What are you doing?" She wanted to know.

"Putting the meat on the sandwiches." (Couldn't she see that?)

"Nobody will even taste the meat like that."

And so began our first frugality argument. Why wouldn't someone be generous with the meat on the sandwich? she wanted to know. But remember, in my defense, I didn't know that our sandwiches were evidence of our poverty. I thought that we ate sandwiches with barely-any-meat-on-them because we liked them that way. Because we were temperate, pragmatic, and contented people.

Of course after our quarrel was over I realized that Lynn was right. I was skimping too much. And when I tasted the sandwich she made?! Gourmet. You see these sandwiches that we took in the car this past Sunday? These are part of my converted heritage. We never would have even seen a sandwich so stuffed with delight in my childhood.



I announced to my siblings at the next holiday that I had discovered a dark family secret. We had been poor.

My parents only resisted the accusations for a moment. And then I pulled out the trump card -- the baloney sandwiches of our youth. At that point their arguments were exhausted. You see the baloney at the top of this post? If you're a fan of baloney you know that you can buy it sliced thick, thin, extra thick?

We were so poor, I've grown fond of recounting whenever my siblings and I (now regularly) recount the hardships of our youth that mom and dad used to slice the thin-sliced baloney horizontally before they put it on our sandwiches. It was like ghost-baloney. Was there a slice on that sandwich or not? Enh, better safe than sorry -- assume there is and close it up.

So we ate our sandwiches as we rushed from church to the soccer game wandering through the backroads of Ohio to try to find the quickest way between two points. Two weeks in a row we had missed the road and wandered back and forth trying to find the true path.

"Do you know where we're going?" Lynn asked as she passed the sandwiches backwards to Jaelyn and Addison.

"East? South? Not really." I admitted.

One of the amazing things to me was how perfect and beautiful the Station Wagon Sandwiches were when I was a kid. And how much I loved the Barely There Baloney sandwiches too. I know that my parents must have been responsible for some of that magic, a feat in many ways as remarkable as feeding 5,000, making 4 children think that their ghost baloney sandwiches were delicious.

In a sense, our poverty-struck sandwiches rooted us in the more ancient truths of sandwich:

"The first recorded sandwich was by the famous rabbi, Hillel the Elder, who lived during the 1st century B.C. He started the Passover custom of sandwiching a mixture of chopped nuts, apples, spices, and wine between two matzohs to eat with bitter herbs."

The bitter herbs, are of course, to re-member the bitterness of slavery, and, placed in sandwiches are like the mortar (between the bricks) that the slaves were forced to make.

We eat sandwiches as reminders that we are in captivity to a world that demands mobility and rewards us, too often, with enslavement to work that does not flow back into our lives nor reward us in the deepest and best ways. But our sandwiches are reminders of hope, too. They satiate our hunger, evoke a sense of home...

Can we know where we're going?

This past Sunday we wandered in a more direct way to the soccer fields. No turning around, no doubling back. The roads still held a vague sense memory of being lost, but this time the beauty of the wide corn fields, the ranch houses tucked into woodsy lots felt more comforting. We did know the way. The sandwiches tasted better when we felt this confidence of direction....this hope of arrival.

Will the warm nostalgia of sandwiches ever include for us a kind of ironic nodding about the way things used to be in our society? Remeber when people seperated home and work with miles and miles of individual communiting? Remember when People ceded the possibility of vocational work to the mass-demands of industry and school? Remember when...?

Someday will Jaelyn and Addison be able to eat their sandwiches without the bitter taste of post-industrial gender-roles and work-structures inflecting the taste? Will there be a time when, after all the bigs get as big as we can imagine, that somehow the local will become a site of meaning, and the mobility required of the upwardly mobile classes will yield concerted communal efforts to make public transport a viable option? The sandwich re-members for us the brokenness of our world and also the contours of a better more integrated world.

Can we know where we're going?