I just want to make a few things clear to begin with. I’m not about to start blogging, and I’m definitely not about to start blogging about food. Plenty of people already do that, and they do it much better than I could. I also can’t see my friends, readers and followers interested in a food blog by yours truly.
I do, however, have to eat every day, in fact several times a day, like the rest of the human population. The western world in particular seems to be obsessed with sandwiches. Let’s face it: we have sandwiches for breakfast, for lunch and even for dinner. If you’re on the go or in a hurry, you’ll tell your friends or workmates that you’ll just grab a quick sandwich.
All of this is fine. What I have problem with is having a sandwich every single day, sometimes more than once a day, because it’s the easiest, quickest, cheapest or only option. It really is. I often travel with my sister, who is a coeliac, and for her, grabbing a quick sandwich is almost never an option because she can’t have those ordinary sandwiches sold at every petrol station containing such lovely fillings as ham cheese, chicken and stuffing or cheese ploughman’s. The thing is, because I can eat sandwiches, I feel like I should eat them when I'm travelling.
After 36 years on this earth, I must have had hundreds if not thousands of sandwiches. I’m sick of them. It’s time to do something about it. I have looked up alternatives to sandwiches, and they are still very bread based. I don’t really care if I put the same stuff between two slices of bread or inside a wrap; it’s more or less the same thing.
I’m not saying that I have a problem with sandwiches in particular. I love pizza, but if I had to eat pizza every single day of my life, I’d get pretty sick of that too. Likewise, I enjoy Chinese food and Mexican food, but I don’t want to eat them all the time either. Variety is the spice of life.
For the next week, I’m going to go breadless. I will have no bread products or nothing resembling bread. That includes pizza, biscuits, pastries, buns and bread rolls - you get the idea. There are no hard and fast rules in this, but if it contains flour, some raising against and has been baked, I probably won’t eat it during the week.
I'm not doing this for health reasons or as a diet. I have no special dietary requirements. I have no food allergies or intolerances. I’m not vegan or vegetarian, and I mostly eat anything and everything. Eating is just something that I get on with. The only factor that limits my eating is my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which is fairly easy to live with, if occasionally a pain in the bowels. The main thing with my IBS is to eat regularly, so I snack a lot and try to eat something approximately every three hours.
This week happens to be one where I’m primarily at home and by myself while my partner – a fierce defender of sandwiches – is away. This gives me the freedom to experiment with meals that aren’t sandwiches. I’m sure there will be lots of salads – at the end of the day, a sandwich without bread is a salad, isn’t it? – but I’ll try to mix it up. I want to find those alternatives so that after this experiment, I will be in a better position to avoid sandwiches.
I will keep track right here of what I eat every day so that anybody else interested in giving up on or reducing the number of sandwiches can get some ideas.
For all you sandwich lovers out there – do not be insulted. There is still a place for sandwiches in this world. It’s just not on my plate – not every single day.
Finally, if anybody out there is in a band that’s still looking for a name, I think The Anti-Sandwich Experiment would be a pretty cool name. Just let me know when you’re playing at a venue near me…