The Hill I Will Die On: A Sandwich Always Tastes Better When Somebody Else Makes It

The hill I will die on sandwiches is one I will plant a flag on with a butter knife in one hand and somebody else’s plate in the other: a sandwich ALWAYS tastes better when somebody else makes it. Same bread. Same turkey. Same exact mayo out of the same exact jar in my own refrigerator. Hand it to me instead of letting me build it and it becomes a completely different sandwich, and I have never been able to explain why. I said in my post that I do not know the science behind it. Well. I went and found the science behind it, y’all, and it is better than I had any right to expect.

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First, let me make sure we are talking about the same feeling, because I know I am not alone up here. You are standing at the counter. You get out the bread, you get out the mustard, you slice the tomato, you find the good pickles, you put the whole thing together exactly the way you like it — nobody on this earth knows how you like your sandwich better than you do — and then you sit down and take a bite and it is just fine. It is a sandwich. Meanwhile somebody hands you a sandwich they slapped together in forty-five seconds with the wrong cheese, and it is the best thing you have eaten all week. Every mother reading this knows exactly what I am talking about, because we make forty sandwiches a summer and eat approximately none of them with any joy.

Now here is where it gets good, because y’all know by now that I do not plant a flag without going looking for backup first. I went looking for a scientist and I came back with a man who has a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Daniel Kahneman — the psychologist who wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow, the man who won a Nobel for understanding how people actually make decisions — was asked this exact question in the New York Times Magazine food issue back in 2011. Not a question like it. This one. Why does a sandwich taste better when somebody else makes it. And he answered it.

His answer, in plain English: when you make your own sandwich, you are already eating it in your head the whole time you are building it. You taste it while you spread the mayo. You taste it while you lay on the turkey. And thinking hard about a food for a while makes you less hungry for that food later on. He called it a kind of specific satiation — the same reason you can be too full to take one more bite of steak and somehow still have an entire dessert stomach available. The word he used for it was preconsumption. The sandwich somebody else hands you has not been preconsumed. Nobody ate it in their head first. It arrives at your mouth brand new.

And there is a real study underneath that, out of Carnegie Mellon and published in the journal Science, where researchers ran five separate experiments having people simply imagine eating a food over and over — cheese, M&Ms — and then handed them the real thing. The people who had imagined eating it the most ate the least of it. Here is the part I cannot get over: the researchers were clear that those folks did not think the food tasted worse. They just did not want it as much anymore. They had used up their wanting before the food ever showed up.

That is it. That is the whole thing. When I build my own sandwich, I spend two full minutes using up my wanting, and then I sit down and eat a sandwich I am already halfway finished with. When Jason hands me one, I still have all of my wanting left. It is not that I am a bad sandwich maker. It is that I ate it before I ate it. I have been right about this for thirty-plus years and there is a Nobel laureate standing on this hill with me, and I would like everyone who has ever told me it is all in my head to know that yes, it is — that is precisely and scientifically where it is.

Hill I Will Die On Sandwiches — The Ones I Hand People at My House

Since I now have documentation on my side, this is what actually comes off my counter. My Iowa Pork Tenderloin Sandwich is Jason’s hometown sandwich and the one people ask me about the most — it hangs off the bun on purpose. The knockoff Monte Cristo sandwich reads wrong on paper and tastes like the best thing you ever made. When I need to feed a houseful without standing at the stove, it is crockpot BBQ pulled pork piled on buns with a bowl of homemade coleslaw right on top. And for a lunch that feels fancy for no extra work, my curried chicken salad goes on bread, on crackers, or straight onto a spoon. If I have a loaf of sourdough sandwich bread out of the oven, all of the above improve by about forty percent — and I will note for the record that I am always the one who baked the bread, which is a whole other layer of preconsumption I did not ask for.

Hill I Will Die On — Sandwiches FAQ

Is the hill I will die on sandwiches just you admitting you are bad at making sandwiches?

Absolutely not, and the science is on my side about this specific part. The Carnegie Mellon folks found that people who had imagined a food to death did not rate it as tasting any worse — they simply wanted it less. My sandwich is a good sandwich. My appetite for it is what got spent. Those are two entirely different problems and only one of them is my fault.

I read somewhere that people like food better when they cook it themselves. Which is it?

You did read that, and I am going to be honest with you about it instead of pretending it is not out there. A 2014 study had people make their own milkshakes and they rated them higher than the identical ones handed to them. But a milkshake is thirty seconds in a blender, not two minutes of standing there thinking about lunch, and when those same researchers ran it again a couple of years later the effect showed up for the healthy shake and not the indulgent one. So the research is genuinely split. I am simply choosing the side with the Nobel Prize on it.

Does this work even when somebody makes you a bad sandwich?

There is a floor, y’all. If one of my children hands me white bread with a single cold slice of American cheese and nothing else on it, no amount of preconsumption theory is going to save that. But I will tell you that it still tastes better than the identical sad sandwich would have if I had built it myself, and I have tested this more than once.

Okay, so how do I make my own sandwich taste better?

Trade. That is the actual answer and it costs nothing. You make one for somebody else, they make one for you, and you both get a sandwich nobody ate in their head first. Short of that, build it and then go do something else for ten minutes before you sit down — stop standing over it thinking about it. Getting your mind off the sandwich is apparently a legitimate culinary technique and I intend to keep saying that in exactly those words.

Fine — but is a hot dog a sandwich?

No, and do not start. I have already been down to the hot dog hill and the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council issued an official ruling on this in 2015 saying a hot dog is not a sandwich, which is the one and only thing that council and I have ever agreed on. It does, however, taste dramatically better when Jason grills it, which I consider further evidence for everything I have said here.

So that is the hill I will die on sandwiches, and I am standing on it with documentation now: somebody else’s sandwich is better, it has always been better, and the reason is that you ate your own sandwich in your imagination before you ever picked it up. Tell me where you land in the comments. Are you up here with me? Is there one person in your house whose sandwiches are simply superior for no reason you can name — and have you told them lately? Or are you one of those people who insists nobody makes it right but you? Bring it. I will make you one and prove it.

One last confession before I climb down off this hill. My own kids will not eat a sandwich at all, which means the easiest thing in the world to put in a lunchbox is off the table at my house. That is a whole separate problem, and I wrote out how I solve it in my school lunch ideas kids will eat — no sandwiches anywhere in sight.

More Hills Worth Dying On — Strong Food Opinions from Stephanie

• The Hill I Will Die On: Bread Is Life and Life Without Bread Is No Life — none of this sandwich business would exist without it, and archaeologists say we were baking it before we invented farming.
• The Hill I Will Die On: A Bologna Sandwich Is the Best Beach Lunch — the sandwich hill that came first, and the one this whole theory explains: somebody else packed that cooler.
• The Hill I Will Die On: Hot Dogs Only Want Ketchup and Mustard — where I first started arguing with official organizations, and where a council told me a hot dog is not a sandwich.
• The Hill I Will Die On: Breakfast for Dinner Beats Breakfast at Breakfast Time — the last time I went looking for backup and came home with the federal government.
• The Hill I Will Die On: Foods Made for Each Other Belong Together — because a sandwich is really just a pile of foods that agreed to get along.
• The Hill I Will Die On: My Top 5 Chips, and I Have Put a Lot of Thought Into This — the bag that goes beside the sandwich, ranked all five and defended in order.
• Every hill, sorted by the kind of argument — all my strong food opinions in one place, or browse them newest first.

The Hill I Will Die On — About Stephanie Longstreth

Stephanie Longstreth is the home cook, mom, and storyteller behind StephanieCooksForACrowd.com. She cooks for a family of seven in Florida — five kids, two cats, and one husband who appreciates a good meal. Four of her children came home through adoption, and family stories are woven into everything she makes and shares. Find her crowd-friendly recipes, weekly meal plans, and real family life on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest @stephaniecooksforacrowd.