The man who has never eaten a sandwich
Chris compares sandwiches to football or the opera.
Chris compares sandwiches to football or the opera. The 41-year-old from Swansea, who currently lives and teaches in Japan, has never eaten a single sandwich in his entire life. He’s never nibbled on crustless cucumber sandwich during afternoon tea, never devoured a drunken Subway after a night out, never even tasted a Pret baguette.
“I just don’t really have any interest in it, I guess,” he says. “I think of it the same way as I have friends who are very into sports, or they’re very into music, and I have other friends who have no interest in those kinds of things whatsoever.
“If you have someone who’s not interested in football, for example, and you try saying to them, ‘Well, why don’t you watch this team?’, they’re just simply not going to be interested.”
The British sandwich market is worth £8bn a year, and according to a passionate blogpost on britishsandwichweek.com, the most popular sandwich filling in 2018 was bacon. Although sandwich sales were sliced by over £1bn during lockdown, there’s no denying BSW’s claims that, “sandwiches are now the mainstay of many people’s lives.” In 2017, an unmissable Guardian long read revealed how we became a nation obsessed with packaged sandwiches over the course of 37 years:
“One of the great strengths of the sandwich over the centuries has been how naturally it grafts on to our lives, enabling us to walk, read, take the bus, work, dream and scan our devices at the same time as feeding ourselves with the aid of a few small rotational gestures of wrist and fingers,” wrote the journalist Sam Knight. Yet Chris’s lunchtimes, bus rides, walks, and dreams have remained remarkably free of bread and fillings for over 41 years.
I came across Chris when writing a piece for Observer Magazine about people who have never done extremely common things. I spoke with a man who has never been to the cinema, and a teenager who has never seen the sea. Although Chris was my favourite interviewee, my editor felt he ultimately didn’t fit in the piece. But in the madness of early lockdown, my friends and I would often talk about Chris. “I’m interviewing a man who’s never eaten a sandwich,” I’d say. “My God! My God!” they’d say.*
*Reactions may be exaggerated.
Print by Karolina Haluszczak
Chris was an extremely picky eater as a child. Though the diagnosis didn’t exist at the time, he now believes he may have been suffering from Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID); the condition is characterised by a narrow diet and an inability to eat certain foods. When he was young, Chris ate mashed potatoes, crisps, chips, “maybe a soft-boiled egg sometimes.” Aged 8, he began eating lentil soup. Unlike other children his age, he never ate pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos, baked beans, bacon, or even cheese. “The thought of eating those things made me feel physically sick,” he explains.
After he moved to Japan in his late 20s, Chris’s life was changed by a karate instructor. One evening, the instructor invited Chris out to eat and – because of communication issues – ordered the pair “a load of meat” at a BBQ restaurant. “Scared” and “dreading it”, Chris downed beer after beer to calm his nerves. When the meat arrived, he loved it.
“I asked him in mangled Japanese what it was and he told me it was cow tongue. The thought was kind of disgusting but it tasted so good,” Chris says now.
Since then, Chris has continued to expand his diet – he began eating chicken and rice and cheese, and has now even tried whale and horse meat. Today, Chris loves ramen, udon, and gyoza, but like most of us, he still can’t stand certain foods (sausages in particular turn his stomach). So with his new, varied diet, why isn’t he intrigued by the humble sandwich?
“I guess in the last 10 years or so since coming here, I’ve been eating more pizza, more meat, so I’ve put some weight on,” Chris says. “So I don’t see it would be of any big benefit for me now to start trying new types of food.” He adds that he is also, “not that fussed on lettuce to be honest.”
When asked if he’ll ever try a sandwich before he dies, Chris makes a series of protracted and pained thoughtful noises. “I don’t think so, I mean, maybe,” he muses. “Maybe I’d try a hamburger, because I like meat.”
A childhood disorder, weight gain, and an apathy towards lettuce explain how Chris has managed four sandwichless decades (though it’s worth noting he has now had cheese on toast). Yet Chris’s reasoning for his sarnie-free future is remarkable in its unremarkable simplicity. “Mainly, I’m just not interested,” he says.
“Maybe it’s like opera or something. I can understand a lot of people enjoy the opera but it’s not something that’s ever appealed to me, so I wouldn’t go out of my way to go and try that. I’m just not interested in that kind of thing.”
For more information on ARFID, visit nationaleatingdisorders.org.
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