We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the sandwich is a culinary institution that needs defending. Portable, economical and incomparably satisfying, a judiciously filled sanger will knock any Buddha bowl into a cocked hat. Just don’t think we’re talking about plain old ham and cheese here
The idea that some foods possess inherent virtue - or, for that matter, lack moral worth – is culturally deep-seated. “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” wrote the French polymath Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in his 1825 treatise The Physiology Of Taste. Or, to put it another way, “You are what you eat” – a mantra enthusiastically adopted some 180 years later by Gillian McKeith in her controversial, scat-obsessed TV show of the same name.
Brillat-Savarin is thought by many to be the forebear of modern low-carb diets, having first observed a nocuous connection between obesity and the consumption of flour and starch. It should also be said, however, that he found 90 per cent of fat people to have “short faces, round eyes and snub noses”; meanwhile, his greatest gift to our collective gut was arguably in lending his name to a triple cream cheese from Burgundy. McKeith has also consistently promoted a watchful approach to refined carbs - admittedly, something few nutritionists would contend - though what she really believes we become when we add stuff such as horny goat weed and wild blue-green algae to our diets is much
