Mornings Are a Rough Time for Bad Sandwiches and Failure
Mornings Are a Rough Time for Bad Sandwiches and Failure
Sandwiches in Chile
My Chilean host family goes daily to the store for small, white rounds of hallula bread to make sandwiches for breakfast. These sandwiches—pronounced sandwish with a Chilean accent—always contains a slice of processed cheese and a slice of deli meat, probably reconstituted ham or chicken.
It’s not simply my host family’s eating habits. Sandwiches are sold off the counter in corner stores as well as from the snack bar of the school where I work. My colleagues almost all bring sandwiches to eat after the first lesson of the day. Hotels serve them with yogurt for breakfast.
They generally follow that exact formula: white bread, cheese, and ham. If the maker is feeling louche it might have butter or mayo. Once, at a party, I had one with lettuce.
During my time here, I’ve eaten a sandwich twice a day, except for days when I was traveling away from my host family, or on occasions where we had a special treat like hotdogs. I guess I’ve eaten something like 170 in three months. By the time I leave it’ll be 200.
The tally of sandwiches is etched into the walls of my brain like a prisoner’s days in his cell. A month or so into my stint here, the culinary cabin fever overtook me. I spent more time thinking about why people eat sandwiches than about my students. Sandwiches were my obsession.
Money seemed an obvious answer. Bread is cheap. Chile may be the most developed Latin American country, but it is also the most unequal, with rampant poverty. Yet my host family lets leftovers go rotten in the fridge in order to enjoy sandwiches.
I read in one of Isabel Allende’s memoirs that Chilean cuisine doesn’t bother with the complex flavors of Indian or Mexican food because its natural resources are already delicious. I doubt she was including processed cheese slices in that claim.
I was isolated in a suburb of an industrial fishing town, in a teaching job I hated and which I also resented myself for failing at. Of course, my sandwich obsession was a projection of that unhappiness.
Or maybe I’m overthinking this. Sometimes a bad sandwich is just a bad sandwich.