‘Objects and words also have hollow places in which a
past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating,
going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber’
Michel de Certeau1
If much of our lunch hour is eaten up by routine tasks like queuing, how much time do we actually have to eat? Each year, surveys of British workers map an apparently inexorable trend: the incredible shrinking lunch break. The average lunch ‘hour’ fell from 36 minutes in 2000 to 19 minutes and 42 seconds in 2006. Seven out of ten workers practise ‘desk-dining’, the average time taken to eat their lunch in front of the computer being 3.5 minutes. One in four claims never to take a lunch break at all.2 With a bathetic nod to Continental pavement cafés, lunching in the office has been given a name, ‘dining al desko’, which captures both our puritanical attitude to work and a vague sense that we are missing out on a better life elsewhere. Desk-dining is the ultimate symbol of our workaholism and indispensability to the firm. But feeling too busy and harassed to have a proper lunch is a state of mind. No one is telling us we can’t have a lunch break; most employers are rather more generous than the 1998 EU Working Time Regulations, which entitle workers to a twenty-minute meal break if they work for more than six hours. The reasons for the decline of lunch are not so much economic and rational as psychological and historical.
Britons have been worrying about the paucity of their midday meal for decades, particularly for those lower-middle-class office workers who could not rely on expense accounts or the subsidised staff canteens found in factories. Complaints about unappetising white-collar lunches date from just after the Second World War, when food was on everyone’s mind in an era of rationing and scarcity, and a hot lunch was seen as vital preparation for the rest of the day. During the war many people went out for lunch, so they could be guaranteed at least one substantial meal, particularly in the winter when air raids interrupted the dark evenings. The growth of industrial canteens in wartime led people to expect a hot lunch. But canteens and restaurants were also rationed, and their customers soon learned to arrive before the food ran out. This helped to push back the traditional time of lunch from a 1 p.m. start to 12 noon, or even 11.45 a.m. by the end of the Second World War. As rationing continued after the war, the hegemony of lunch, and its earlier starting time, continued.3 People tried to eat as big a meal as possible at midday, making do with a lighter evening meal in their homes.
Getting hold of a big meal was not always easy, however. In 1947, a querulous leader appeared in the Daily Mail headed ‘Four jam sandwiches’. It told the heartrending tale of the respectable-looking, middle-aged man who travelled each morning on the commuter train to London. He had such an air of quiet distinction that his fellow passengers began wondering about the contents of his rather smart briefcase. Then, one morning, the train suddenly jolted and the briefcase fell open, spilling on to the floor of the carriage, wrapped up in brown paper, four jam sandwiches – the gentleman’s sorry excuse for a lunch. The tale of this unfortunate fellow was meant to illustrate the descent of the middle classes into genteel poverty, a fate that particularly agitated newspapers like the Daily Mail in the late 1940s (not to mention today).4
Even after rationing ended, there was still the question of how to feed the growing number of white-collar workers in city centres, particularly London. In the 1950s and 1960s, many new office blocks were built on former bombsites as the economy boomed and the capital emerged as the centre of the world’s financial markets. The clerks and secretaries who serviced this new economy could not always afford the prices for a sit-down meal at traditional eating places like the Lyons Corner Houses, and such formality was becoming outmoded anyway. To fill the gap in the market, hundreds of cheap and cheerful sandwich bars sprang up all over London, many run by Italians who had emigrated there after the Second World War.
The luncheon voucher, introduced just after rationing came to an end in 1954, was a godsend for this emergent sandwich business. Luncheon vouchers, which firms liked because they were tax-deductible, were supposed to guarantee a hot meal for young office workers on modest salaries. Ubiquitous press adverts promoted their virtues: ‘“Good afternoon” she said – and it was! Thanks to Luncheon Vouchers, she’d eaten well that lunch-time. So she was attentive, looked alive, felt active. A good hot lunch had made all the difference between afternoon apathy and afternoon efficiency.’5 But in some parts of the country, particularly pricey London, the luncheon voucher could only buy a couple of rolls and a drink at a sandwich bar.6 A letter to The Times in 1960 blamed the luncheon voucher’s meagre ration for ‘the listlessness and, indeed, exhausted look of the average office junior’.7
Why was the sandwich so frowned upon? It is the perfect lunch on the hoof, and can be as nourishing as a hot meal. It is a proudly British invention (if such a simple, imitable thing can be said to be ‘invented’ at all), attributed to John Montagu (1718–92), the fourth Earl of Sandwich. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, he ‘once spent twenty-four hours at the gaming-table without other refreshment than some slices of cold beef placed between slices of toast’ – thus acquiring an unjustified reputation as an idler and libertine (and a pedant might insist that he invented the toastie rather than the sandwich). The sandwich initially had an upmarket reputation – its purist incarnation being the cucumber sandwich, the thin, crustless, unappetising morsel which, in the novelist Compton Mackenzie’s words, felt and tasted ‘like a damp handkerchief’.8 The cucumber sandwich was a genteel anti-food eaten at cricket matches and tea parties, its nearest modern-day equivalent being the breadless sandwich.
With the arrival of mass-produced bread in the inter-war period, the sandwich went rapidly downmarket. In 1944, H. D. Renner argued in The Origin of Food Habits that ‘the sandwich is a poor substitute for a single slice of bread, spread with something one can both see and anticipate in advance’, without ‘the coffin-lid which spells death to the flavour’.9 In the post-war era, the shop-bought sandwich came to stand for all that was wrong with our national cuisine and lifestyles. It was often a wretched affair of spongy, pre-sliced bread stuffed with preservatives, coated with margarine and filled with processed cheese, fish paste or luncheon meat. For something so simple to make, a lot could go wrong with a sandwich, mainly in the interval between manufacture and consumption. Even a well-made sandwich could be ruined if it was left out for too long in those glass bell covers found in cafés and railway buffets, the last resting place for sandwiches with leathery ham, rubbery egg, limp lettuce and curled corners.
While the luncheon voucher threatened to kill off the hot midday meal for lowly office workers, the lunching tradition survived for those higher up the food chain. In London, the ‘city lunch’ had been an institution since the early years of the twentieth century. Businessmen would entertain their associates at their club on the Mall or in long-established restaurants like Simpson’s Tavern and Sweetings. These restaurants, open only for weekday lunchtimes, served a posh version of school dinners or nursery food – steak and kidney pudding or fish and chips, followed by plum duff or treacle tart and custard. The city gents would linger over cigars and brandy, finally stumbling out, a little unsteady on their feet, around three o’clock in the afternoon. In the 1965 Finance Act, the new Labour government abolished the expense allowance tax relief on most of these business lunches. Such was the chorus of outrage against this flagrant act of class war – Egon Ronay’s Good Food Guide lamented the ensuing ‘acres of white untenanted tables’10 – anyone would have thought the government had made lunch illegal, rather than simply abolishing a tax break. Of course, the business lunch survived. The writer and journalist Godfrey Smith wrote in 1982:
If the left is serious in its aim to make us one nation, it could do worse than start by abolishing lunch. For lunch is a social divider of infinite power. It distances husbands from their wives and bosses from their workers. It is a gauge of the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the inner temple of the expense-account cult and the last bastion of the male chauvinist. It is a perk of privilege and a symptom of decadence. Down with lunch! Death to all noonday noshers!11
If the left did not kill off the leisurely city lunch, then Thatcherism and the less clubbable American business culture it embraced dealt it a significant (but not fatal) blow. The executive dining room, which had been endangered since the 1970s, finally bit the dust in the 1980s in favour of single-status dining at staff canteens. Doing away with such executive perks was a way for firms both to cut costs and to present themselves as informal and nonhierarchical. ‘Big Bang’ of October 1986, a classic Thatch erite reform that ended restrictive practices in the City’s dealing rooms and computerised the Stock Exchange, was also an important event in the history of lunch. Rather than meeting on trading floors, brokers now moved bonds and shares around using computers and telephones. The new-era traders were too busy making deals with Hong Kong to break off for a leisurely three-course meal. They needed something that was portable, filling and amenable to multitasking. Fortunately, something like this had already been invented.
In order to rid itself of its painful associations with British naffness, though, the sandwich needed to posh up drastically. In 1980, in the words of the deskbound narrator of Michael Bracewell’s office-life novel, Perfect Tense, ‘the world of takeaway sandwiches was still a cold and benighted place, enduring its darkest hour before the dawn of new fillings. And how those fillings would stand for an epoch!’ Then, in the early 1980s, ‘a long low band of light began to shine across the far horizon of this dark world’.12 The first rumblings of this bourgeoisification occurred within London’s Square Mile, where Robin Birley opened a sandwich bar in Fenchurch Street in September 1979. Birley was a well-connected old Etonian with sufficient social cachet to begin the high-class rehabilitation of the sandwich. His chain of shops soon spread all over the City, and spawned many imitators. By 1985 there were at least a hundred other sandwich bars in the Square Mile.13
These upmarket establishments were different from their more plebeian antecedents. They used natural ingre-dients: real mayonnaise instead of salad cream, unprocessed cheese, and freshly baked bread from baguettes to bagels. The striking combos offered as fillings – mashed avocado and bacon, pastrami and aged parmesan – overcompensated for the formerly humble status of the sandwich. The posh sandwich bars took orders over the phone and delivered all over London. One of the familiar mid-morning sights in the capital in these years was the burly young men, many of them Antipodean, carrying baskets of sandwiches on foot or bike to beat the traffic, or stalking office corridors like old-fashioned hawkers, yelling, ‘Sandwiches!’ As the city dealers munched on their lunches at their VDUs, the power sandwich came to stand for a new work ethic. In the famous opinion of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, lunch was for wimps.
The new-style sandwich bar was partly modelled on the New York deli, where the customer was king and the motto was ‘have it your way’. New York delis sold pile-it-high, doorstop sandwiches with layers of cold cuts, cheese and salad, nicknamed ‘Dagwoods’ after an American comic-strip character who often made this kind of oversized snack. In a cartoon, a foot-high sandwich can fit inside a human jaw; in real life, the deli sandwich often had to be artificially supported by giant cocktail sticks (which, some might say, rather defeats the point of a sandwich). Queues at delis were long, as customers ordered complicated, tailor-made sandwiches like ‘a triple-decker pastrami on rye, with mustard on one side, and hold the mayo’. London’s posh sandwich bars began exporting this philosophy of consumer choice to Britain, but it would take a much bigger operation to change the British sandwich for ever – and it needed to break into the ready-made rather than the smaller made-to-order market.
At around the time that Birley opened his first sandwich bar, the ready-made sandwich also underwent a transformation. Before about 1980, the template for the pre-packed butty was the British Rail sandwich, a metaphor for national decline since it became a running joke on The Goon Show. Until pub food started to improve in the 1970s, many leftover BR sandwiches were also sold in public houses.14 But when, in May 1997, the Wall Street Journal launched an unprovoked broadside on our nation’s sand wiches, invoking the spectre of the ‘infamous British Rail sandwich’ and claiming that ‘barely edible sandwiches dominate the dietary landscape of Britain like nowhere else’,15 this newspaper was surely behind the times. The British Rail sandwich had died with the privatisation of the railways, and in fact it had been surprisingly edible (if ruinously expensive) in its twilight years. In any case, the Journal was evoking an era BMS – before Marks & Spencer.
The Marks & Spencer sandwich was born in the late 1970s, when one of the firm’s managers, Henry Lewis, was involved in an abortive scheme to run cafés in stores. The first café was earmarked for the Croydon branch, but the shop refit was behind schedule, so Lewis had staff trained to prepare sandwiches but no café to sell them in. Instead of wasting their expertise, he put them to work making sandwiches for the food hall.16 They sold like hot cakes – or rather, like cold sandwiches. So M&S began to sell sandwiches properly in 1980, using its stores in Croydon, Kilburn and Oxford Circus to test the market.
The M&S sandwich benefited from a kudos that the store had accumulated over many years. After the Second World War, in the words of one historian, M&S had ‘burst from its somewhat dull chrysalis to emerge as the classless, efficient, decently functional, distributive model of the new age’, a place where ‘doctor’s wife and docker’s wife’ could ‘avail themselves of the growing range and quality of mass-produced goods the new market made available’.17 M&S stood for reliability, reasonable prices and unshowy middle-classness. Its sandwiches, produced by small catering firms under constant M&S supervision, set new standards of meticulousness and cleanliness. When the workers who made the sandwiches returned from foreign holidays, they even had to provide stool samples to show they had not acquired any dangerous bugs while abroad.18
M&S cut its sandwiches diagonally into triangular wedges and then placed them in rigid plastic containers, an improvement on the sweaty cellophane and greaseproof paper that had previously held the pre-packed sandwich together. The triangular containers could be easily stacked (two triangles made a rectangle) so the sandwiches weren’t squashed and had space to breathe. Initially, there were only four varieties of M&S sandwich, all reminiscent of tea at the vicarage: salmon and cucumber, prawn and cream cheese, egg and tomato, and ham salad.19 M&S soon carved out a niche by pioneering fillings that were slightly quirky without being too outlandish, such as prawn mayonnaise or BLT, the American favourite that crossed the Atlantic in the 1980s. Neither conservative nor revolutionary, they epitomised M&S’s knack of innovating unthreateningly. By 1990, its sandwich shop at Oxford Circus was selling two million sandwiches a year.20 Soon Boots the Chemist, supermarkets and petrol stations realised they could make big profits from cold, takeaway food and began selling the triangular sandwich wedge as well.
This new type of ‘sand-wedge’ did not entirely kill off the long business lunch. Stockbrokers might now be chained to their computer screens and too busy to go out for lunch; but the newer professions that did well out of the 1980s, like PR, marketing and advertising, entertained clients to drum up business. If Thatcherism made a fetish of longer hours, it also valued entrepreneurial networking and deal-making. Diners might opt for the ‘menu rapide’ and forgo the three brandies after pudding, but a 1980s lunch could still go on late into the afternoon. What changed in these cases was the purpose of lunch – a shift encapsulated by the term ‘power lunch’, which originated in New York’s eateries in the late 1970s. Books appeared about how to schmooze successfully in restaurants, with titles like Power Lunch: How You Can Profit from a More Effective Business Lunch Strategy and Do Lunch or Be Lunch. Lunch had to have an ulterior motive, like fishing for a contract or closing a deal. In his 1986 book The Theory and Practice of Lunch, Keith Waterhouse deplored this soulless, utilitarian attitude. Lunch, he argued, should be purely pleasurable and leisurely (‘three hours is about right’), and should certainly not be confused with business, particularly if this involved ‘overseas persons you have never clapped eyes on before’ and ‘briefcases stuffed with printouts or samples’.21 Waterhouse’s book was a kind of valediction for a dying tradition – specifically, for the journalist’s boozy lunch. It was published in the year that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers moved from Fleet Street to Wapping and undermined this tradition for ever.
The final death of the long business lunch came not in the wheeler-dealing 1980s but in its aftermath, the recession of the early 1990s. Even in a recession, of course, people still have to eat. (Historically, sandwich consumption has risen in times of economic difficulty, such as the depression of the 1930s, because the sandwich is a cheap meal.) Firms began to cut back on their staff restaurants and expense accounts, and sandwich bars took more boardroom deliveries for ‘business platters’, those little plastic trays of tiny triangular sandwiches, with a few chocolate marshmallows thrown in if you were lucky. In a sense, the business platter was a classic form of outsourcing, a popular strategy of the post-Thatcher era which allowed firms to farm out their routine operations (in this case, providing lunch) and concentrate on their core business. When the recession lifted in the mid-1990s, the long business lunch never really returned. The new trend was for what Americans called ‘fast-casual’ dining, which offered fresher, nicer food than a fast-food joint but was quicker and cheaper than a restaurant. When Pret a Manger opened in London in 1986, it provided a model for the gourmet sandwich chains which spread across the capital and then the country in the 1990s. These chains sold a hybrid of the posh, made-to-order sandwich and the mass-produced wedge. Their sandwiches were readymade and wrapped, but prepared in store each day, with only a few hours’ shelf life.
Thanks to Pret a Manger and its imitators, the sandwich shop is now a cornucopia of exotic fillings and bread types, with lots of organic, free-range, low-carb options for middle-class metropolitans, and even the most ordinary ingredients rendered interesting with the aid of redundant adjectives: ‘peppery watercress’, ‘crunchy iceberg lettuce’, ‘ripe tomato’, ‘shredded cucumber’, ‘dolphin-friendly tuna’. The way of attracting custom in an increasingly crowded market is to emphasise both quality and diversity. Assailing the customer with choice undermines the last selling point of the independent sandwich shops: that they can make any sandwich to order, just like the New York delis. M&S now offers over eighty varieties of sandwich, surely enough to satiate even the most cosmopolitan consumer. Some chains, like Subway, will make up any sandwich filling for a customer in a few minutes. This diversifying strategy seems to work: the market for sandwiches has levelled out in recent years, but the number of chain-owned sandwich shops continues to grow at the expense of the independents.22
Despite the increase in choice, however, the top five sandwich fillings chosen by British consumers actually seem quite mundane. These five fillings – BLT (with a 14 per cent market share), prawn mayo (11 per cent), egg mayo (10 per cent), tuna mayo (10 per cent) and ham and cheese (7 per cent) – make up over half the market. The choices are fairly consistent across class, region and gender; only with the more unusual options do real variations emerge. Conservative supporters, for example, are nearly twice as likely as the average consumer to buy a smoked salmon sandwich, while Labour supporters generally opt for more prosaic fillings. Londoners, who buy the most sandwiches, are also the most exploratory in their tastes.23
The prawn mayonnaise sandwich, the second most purchased variety and the most popular among women, has become a sort of cultural metaphor for the lunchtime revolution. In 1991, the jeweller Gerald Ratner made a famously ill-advised joke that his firm’s 99p earrings cost the same as a prawn sandwich but ‘maybe the prawn sandwich would last longer’.24 Nine years later, the Manchester United footballer Roy Keane, furious with the poor atmosphere at a midweek game at Old Trafford, complained about supporters who ‘have had a few drinks and their prawn sandwiches and do not realise what is going on out on the pitch’.25 Ratner saw the prawn sandwich as cheap and disposable; Keane saw it as food for snobs on executive freebies, not ‘real’ football fans. The prawn sandwich is successful because it is neither: it is a bit nicer than something we would make ourselves, but not too intimidatingly different. It is food for what Barry Schwartz calls ‘satisficers’, people who simply look for a product that is ‘good enough’ and do not worry about all the alternatives.26 The ‘paradox of choice’, as identified by Schwartz, is that endless variety is not necessarily a liberation for the consumer – there comes a point at which too much choice causes self-doubt, confusion and even misery. When it comes to buying sandwiches, though, we seem to be creatures of habit: life is too short to waste any existential despair on a cheap lunch. In any case, the exoticising of fillings is offset by the now universal practice of refrigerating sandwiches, which gives them all a slightly wet, insipid taste. Unlike revenge, the sandwich is not a dish best served cold.
The gourmet sandwich, pioneered in London by M&S and Pret a Manger, has now conquered the whole of Britain. It has done so partly at the expense of northern-style rolls and baps, which now seem rather staid and stodgy compared with the trendier varieties of bread pioneered in the capital, such as paninis, ciabattas, pittas and wraps. With these kinds of promiscuous borrowings, the London sandwich has taken what it wants from global cuisine and is conquering the world. (Pret a Manger even borrowed a foreign name, ditching any confusing circumflex and grave accents in the process.) When M&S’s stores first opened in Paris in the 1980s, many natives looked sniffily upon the English wedge sandwich, but soon it was the most popular item in ‘le snack shop’.27 M&S has long since sold up and left France, but ‘le sandwich triangulaire’ is now giving the baguette a run for its money. Pret a Manger, meanwhile, has opened stores in America, Hong Kong and Japan. Other global food and drink chains have diversified into sandwiches, from McDonald’s to Starbucks.
The international success of the British sandwich reflects the more general dissemination of Anglo-American working practices, as globalisation irons out national differences in work schedules. In southern Europe, workers still go home in the middle of the day for what the Spanish call ‘la hora de comer’ (‘lunch hour’, which is often longer than an hour). But for how long will they resist the imperialist ambitions of the pre-packed sandwich? This sandwich has triumphed because it is (literally) handy, infinitely variable and reassuringly predictable. However busy you are at work, you can always find time to chomp on a butty. Our lunch breaks may dwindle almost to nothing, the symptom of an office culture that seems unsure where work begins and ends. But the desk-dining sandwich-eater munches on.