Did You Know: Sandwiches?

 by Nathaniel G

Chip butty

Last week was British Sandwich Week.  It is celebrated in May every year.  

In 1762, John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich . It is said that he was playing cards and did not want to leave to eat. He asked for a serving of roast beef to be placed between two slices of bread so he could eat with his hands.  

Around 12 billion sandwiches are eaten in the UK every year, or 31,000,000 every day. Americans eat a bit more at 300 million sandwiches every day.

In a national survey undertaken last year, the bacon sandwich was found to be the country’s favourite. The earliest reference to a bacon sandwich listed in the Oxford English Dictionary was by George Orwell in 1931.

The world’s largest sandwich currently weighs 5,440 lbs.  In 2008, an attempt to beat this record was made in Iran.  It was filled with ostrich meat. Sadly it all went wrong when the impatient and hungry crowd ate it before it was measured.

The first ‘packaged’ sandwich was sold by Marks & Spencer in 1985.

In the UK, we spend over £8,000,000,000 a year on shop bought sandwiches.  

There are some terrible but real sandwich fillings. For example: pineapple and mayonnaise, marmalade and coleslaw, egg and mango.  

In 2015, a customer at the sandwich shop Subway in Oregon, America found a dead mouse in the sandwich he had bought.  

In the south of England, a sandwich is often called a sarnie.  In the north, it is more usually called a buttie.  

A Minnesota-based YouTuber once made a chicken sandwich from scratch. He filmed himself growing and harvesting wheat for the bread, killing a chicken, and finally travelling to the ocean to get water and boil it for salt. It took him 6 months and cost him $1,500. Apparently he didn’t think it tasted very good.

The Sandwich Islands were named after the same Earl of Sandwich who invented the snack. They are now known as Hawaii.