Enjoy Every Sandwich
bradmontague.substack.com
bradmontague.substack.com
Brands matter. See if you can match the brands that your mother used; especially the mayonnaise. Bacon will be harder to match.
In 1969, my family would have made its own mayonnaise, so try that, too.
If I want a flashback to my childhood, it's peanut butter and jelly. But it has to be Skippy peanut butter on Wonder bread with Smuckers jelly, and freezing cold whole milk. Anything deviation doesn't trigger the same brain cells.
Cured meats are entire world unto themselves. I have had bacon that tasted like a salty strip of cardboard, and bacon that is a peppery, savory, chewy/crispy revelation.
In many ways the BLT is sort of the perfect example food for showing how non-commoditized ingredients actually are. It's only five ingredients: bread, bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise. But each of those ingredients can vary extremely widely.
Take some generic white bread, thin cheap bacon, old iceberg lettuce, out of season grocery store tomatoes, and Miracle Whip and you'll have a result that you wouldn't understand why anyone on Earth would eat.
Then get some good bakery sourdough, thick cut heavily peppered bacon from a small farm that treats their pigs well, fresh butter or Bibb lettuce, late summer tomatoes from your own garden (the best tomatoes simply don't ship), and whip up a batch of mayo yourself without any preservatives using good eggs and oil. It will likely be one of the best meals you've ever eaten.
I've been chasing a "white whale" bacon / egg / cheddar on grilled Texas toast sandwich I made 20-ish years ago that I've never been able to replicate. I didn't keep track of the particular bacon or cheddar I used, and I don't recall if the eggs were the farm co-op eggs we used to get or plain old grocery eggs. I should have taken notes but didn't.
It's probably a silly thing to do, but I keep fairly meticulous notes about food I make now (including weighing-out ingredients on a kitchen scale). I don't want to have another experience like my mythical sandwich.
My wife has a good point about my quest: I can't replicate my hunger level that day. That got me paying attention to how hunger effects food enjoyment. I now make a point of planning my eating ahead of special meals to maximize enjoyment. It's shocking, to me, how much a little hunger makes food better.
Food matters.
Perhaps you do want those experiences, actually. Would your memory of this sandwich be as sweet if you were able to replicate whenever you want? How much of the seasoning here comes from its rarity?
There are things in my life I carefully mete out because I don't want to "burn out" then novelty. I'd like to think I could do that in this case, but I don't know how it would change the memory.
I feel strongly that our memories are a "lossy destructive read" type of mechanism (core memory that "forgets" to write-after-read sometimes). I often think about how I'm permuting memories I recall, even as I'm enjoying recalling them.
I cured my lifelong pickiness thanks to an excessively long diet. The pickiness had tempered itself somewhat over the years, but my food choices were still quite limited compared to your average person.
On that diet, I lost about 50 pounds over 8 months and got to the leanest I've ever been, probably under 15% bodyfat. I knew better than to diet that long and the negative effects of diet fatigue, but dammit, I was determined and had to keep going!
The last few months I was constantly ravenous, tired, having trouble sleeping and absolutely obsessed with food. A few weeks later was Xmas dinner with the family, and when I arrived, I was shocked to discover that EVERYTHING on the table looked absolutely delicious to me. Foods I wouldn't have even imagined trying before. My pickiness was so severe, even attempting a bite would have previously caused a vomit response. I ate everything on that table that year and enjoyed nearly all of it. My family was stunned! It was like a dam broke, and now I am willing to try just about anything. It's been a great increase to my quality of life.
As an aside, I always hated hearing "What would you do if you were starving?" growing up. My contention was that if I were truly starving, any pickiness would disappear quite quickly. I mean people have resorted to cannibalism during times of famine! This experience completely validated my theory.
I think the difference was the context. It was a date with a relationship that was going well. There was a lot of excitement. Now that relationship deteriorated and there is no excitement, and the food isn't as good. Maybe our memories are conflating the two things.
I was just going to show them the launch, but they all demanded to stay up late, told me to stop fast forwarding, and then had to sit and watch it again with each set of grandparents.
Another thing you can do is make sure critical parts of the Artemis streams (takeoff, approach to the moon, and landing) are on when you have children around. I texted the links to everyone I know.
I remember one of my own "best steak ever" moments. It just never hit the same, even though I've had steaks 4x the price since then. I've also had a "best baguette ever" moment and I'm pretty sure it was just a regular baguette but my brain released an incredible amount of dopamine.
There is so much to be gained by slowing down, focusing on what you can be grateful for, and not striving for more.
we were desiged to want more it impossible to override that design.
Yes, wanting "More" [time, money, love, status] is pretty firmly ingrained as an advantageous trait. But you can override your instincts (e.g. declining a drink when thirsty, if you learn the glass of water contains poison). And it is possible to learn to want what you already have.
How? Practice three things: Compassion, Attention, and Gratitude. (Pick any two, and the third will follow almost automatically.)
That's the central thesis of an excellent book, "How to Want What You Have" by Dr Timothy Miller. It changed my life.
says who?
The interpretation of this I love most is the visual of a sheep, satisfied enough that they lay down instead of grazing or drinking. This posture is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible.
I imagine most religions and philosophies have similar.
This is a hard teaching and not all can accept it. Those that do will find peace, life, meaning, and rest.
Some of the days have been very, very long. The weeks, months, and years have been so short.
> There's an expression on Wall Street, often attributed to Warren Buffett, which goes, "They don't ring a bell at the top." There's tremendous wisdom in that adage, because while in retrospect it's easy to pinpoint the day that the market (or even a specific stock) reached an all-time high that looks unlikely to ever be attained again in the foreseeable future, at the moment it happened it was impossible to recognize. That's because, unlike market bottoms, which usually have a crescendo feeling to them accompanied by investor panic, a market top generally passes without fanfare, indistinguishable from the series of tops that preceded it.
> You know when else they don't ring a bell? For parents, they don't ring a bell the last time you read Goodnight Moon. They don't do it the last time you watch Sleeping Beauty and they don't do it the last time you help your daughter put on the same article of clothing she's wanted to wear every day as a toddler. Instead, a couple years after the fact, you find the book on a shelf, the DVD in a box, and the tights with the pink ballerinas on them in the back of a drawer. You can't for the life of you remember the last time you read the book, danced to "Once Upon a Dream" with your daughter on your feet, or helped put those tights on. But you do know that now she reads to herself at bedtime, she dances, alone, to Taylor Swift, and the tights—well, the tights wouldn't even make it over her knees.
On one of my walks, I had the realization that if I were blind and suddenly re-gained my vision, I would be overwhelmed with joy and gratitude to be able to see these things. And yet it is not natural for the sighted to feel overwhelmed with joy and gratitude every time they open their eyes.
I try to practice gratitude daily; at first it was difficult to come up with things, but my perspective has since broadened. I am deeply grateful that I can see the way light filters through haze in late September. I can hear beautiful music (an unlimited supply, of anything I want, at any time!). I can run (to think, I used to consider this a burden!). I could go on listing things for hours.
You can experience joy in the good things in your life before the loss. Enjoy every sandwich - even the soggy ones.
- Raging Bull or Brian Allen from Star Meats in Berkeley, CA
- Shaking Beef, Dinosaur Sandwiches in San Francisco / Daily City, CA
- Turkey Cranberry from the GBC in Berkeley, CA
- Lemongrass tofu from Lokal Sandwiches in Los Angeles, CA
- Pastrami on rye from Sarges Deli in NYC, NY
- Fried Chicken Sandwich from Bakesale Betty's in Berkeley, CA
- Dad's BLT or fried egg sandwiches
- Any sandwich from Mom paired with potato salad
- Wife's Cemita
- Turkey sandwich from "The Sandwich Shop", Dogpatch in San Francisco, CA
- Tradition Coffee Roasters, Kailua, HI
- Offset Coffee, LA, CA
- Igam Coffee, Brooklyn, NY
- City League, Brooklyn, NY
- Ozo Coffee, Boulder, CO
- Odyssey Coffee, Ocean Grove, NJ
The best coffee I've ever had was from The Library Specialty Coffee in Toronto. The location though is so minimal and uninviting that I couldn't rank it very highly as a coffeeshop.
Where I live (Austin) some of the best coffee I've had is from a trailer, so that obviously wouldn't rank either.
I'm not sure I've been to any coffeeshops I would rank very highly... Sadly, the best is probably the Starbucks near where I live. The people who work there are extraordinarily nice and the place is very clean, quiet, and comfortable. Too bad the coffee isn't better.
I never thought about it before, but I guess the place is more important to me than the drink when determining where I want to go for a cup of coffee.
"Crisp-roasted maitake mushrooms with garlicky labneh, fresh local raab, warm Middle Eastern Spices and Mama Lil's spicy pickled peppers on a toasted Ciabatta roll."
The raab and the mushrooms (sliced into sheets) were seared crisp. I substituted harissa mixed with mayo or greek yogurt for the sauce.
in addition to anything your parents make, sometimes the best sandwich is the one my wife makes for my kids and they don't finish.
To up your sandwich enjoyment game, what you want is a bread making machine, ideally by Panasonic, with plenty of flour in the cupboards and a well-rehearsed routine of putting the bread on.
Here you get delayed gratification since it takes three minutes to load the machine and four hours for it to bake a loaf. You get proper bakery smells, which is a bonus, and the freshest bread in town (the second you unload the machine).
Freshness is a hack with any bread you buy. It is usually harmless additives that keep it 'fresh', but there is no need for the 'harmless additives' when you have a Panasonic machine. You won't find yourself adding weird chemicals, but you could find yourself adding, nuts, seeds, berries and other fruit to your bakes, to suit your whims or preferences of your guests.
Sometimes some people notice your fresh bread and insist on telling you how much better their sourdough is (that they made once in lockdown) or how that their local bakery makes far nicer bread than your pathetic little Panasonic machine. So you get an extra 'last laugh' from having to endure these ad-hoc lectures on sourdough that is just not in the same league as your favourite bread made effortless by your lovely machine.
You might miss out on interactions with that sandwich store (they rob you slowly, hence the staff will know your name and preferences, if a regular), however, people outside the sourdough cult are always impressed by home made bread, even if you insist it was effortlessly made.
Making your own bread connects you to our history of making bread, plus you get a much healthier product, arguably real bread, unlike that nonsense that is commercially sold as 'bread'.
Eating a sandwich now, haven't bought one for maybe five years.
Our last phone conversation started with her telling me that she had a month left to live, and then she mentioned that she offered to watch my nephew for a family event in a month because she wouldn't be able to go. A few days after the call I arrived to telecommute from her house, only to not leave because her digestive system stopped working. It still took her a day to admit to herself that she was truly dying.
My favorite interpretation is focusing on the beauty of how even such a mundane thing as a sandwich is a unique experience. Someone made it by-hand, the ingredients have their own backstory in arriving in the present moment, and the taste is greater than the sum of its parts because of all the competing and complementary flavors.
Sandwiches hide in plain sight and even when they aren't great they are unique and will underscore how good your next great one is.
"The winters are cold... but I can't complain. My socks have holes... but again, do I complain? I do not. The oldest needs braces... the youngest once sneezed for three days straight... but who could complain? They're gifts."
"Children?"
"All of it. The cold, the holes."
For all of the complaining we can do about our hardships, it's a gift to even be able to complain. When someone says, "Life is good", they're right even if you feel like things are shitty -- because life itself, being here and alive, to be able to feel and to think, is a wonderful gift.
The blog seems to be treating it as aspirational -- a goal. A puzzle to be understood and applied to make our lives richer. It's more of a perspective shift.
When you really get it, you won't think you're supposed to like bad sandwiches -- you'll realize what a gift any sandwich is. What a gift it is to sit in any crummy airport eating a soggy sandwich. You won't have to try to like it, you'll cry with gratitude at how lucky you are to even be there.
Enjoy every sandwich is a nice, mildly flippant way of saying that one should enjoy every moment. You only get so many and you don't know how many that is. Jackson Browne's For A Dancer also addresses this.
And in the end, it's never enough.
It’s been pretty easy for me to justify allocating this to pure enjoyment. I’m otherwise a pretty strict saver and planner.
"You put more value on every minute. You do. I mean I always thought I kind of did that. I really always enjoyed myself, but it’s more valuable now. You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich and every minute of playing with the guys and being with the kids and everything."
I have a t shirt with a photo portrait of Warren with "Enjoy Every Sandwich" on it. I almost always get a comment from a fellow Zevon fan when I wear it.
Taking Mr. Zevon's advice to "enjoy every sandwich" literally is amazing. I think he'd appreciate the absurdity of the post.
After the introduction I stood there and listened to the adults speak as a child often does in that kind of situation and he was lamenting that he hadn't been feeling well for awhile and he wasn't looking it either.
So my mother did what one does in that kind of situation which was insist that he go to the doctor and he kind of hummed and hawed at it because he didn't like doctors but finally said that he should do that.
That was a few weeks before he was diagnosed with cancer and about a year before he passed away. It's just one of those little experiences that kismet gifted me and I think of it often. More so now that I've gotten into his music over the past few years.
Like the author of this blog post I sometimes come across that final Letterman interview with Zevon and reflect on it and that powerful but simple line "Enjoy Every Sandwich" that Zevon offhandedly made.
It makes me reflect on how I want to continue to live a long and healthy life so that I can continue to have those kind of neat fleeting experiences of meeting people and just... witnessing life.
That reflection also made me realize that I should aspire to enable others to have those sorts of experiences so I have started to volunteer more at organizations which I feel can make that happen. It's rewarding and encouraging. It makes me feel like the world is a little bit less of a terrible place. If only for a moment.
Warren Zevon was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and The Killers performed at that event. This video of their rehearsal for the Warren Zevon song "Lawyers Guns and Money" is fabulous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4q_K52TYsE&list=RDK4q_K52TY...
I also like to do this, only I say the words
Give us this day our daily sandwich...Welcome to HN in 2026.
There has been a visible shift in the replies on this web site since about April of this year.
If you know what to look for, you realize there are far fewer humans bothering to post than before. It's like the proverbial scales falling from your eyes once you see it.
Enjoy every hedonic pleasure. But the balance sheet doesn’t look good even if you always do. It’s either all just a raw deal or we need to look beyond the low- and high-minded enjoyments.
but I've had to explain and defend that toaster.
Hey, John Galt, make me a frickin ham sandwich! Do something useful for a change...
p.s. My previous references to this have gone totally unidentified by the real librtardtarians among us 8-/ You would think it would jump right out at them...
I swear ever since Ozempic came out, there's been this huge marketing push from everyone and their dog for anything tangentially related.
Seems unintentionally ironic that most sandwiches are so unhealthy.
It is saying that savoring a life fully means savoring all of its varied moments, even the bad ones. Enjoy the highs, but also pay attention to your suffering in the lows because those moments are also meaningful pages in your story.
There is such a thing as a bad sandwich.
Cheese and Banana Sandwich: https://youtu.be/uUzO19tgwZc
Clam and Cheese Sandwich: https://youtu.be/31bZ-ReB51U
Peanut-Butter Sandwich: https://youtu.be/1Bmw1JpNY90
So many tasty things people miss out on due to peer pressure and being afraid to give "strange" food a try.
I agree with the sentiment, but there's probably also a cultural thing. I love root beer, for instance, but from what I understand, many (most?) Europeans who've tried it think it's disgusting and tastes like medicine.
The fact that >50% of Italian sub shops default to not putting onions on their torpedoes is a testament to how far we've fallen as a culture.
Woosh.
I can't even put things like mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, ect, in my mouth without gagging.
Needless to say, for me, any sandwich with those in it is the most vile thing I can put in my mouth.
It's generally American food that has a lot of mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup, ect. Surprisingly, when I travel I don't need to be as careful. Most other cultures avoid strong flavors / textures like that.
That's obvious. Who doesn't notice that? I think if I were terminally ill I'd seek things I enjoy, and savor them, and avoid bad sandwiches. In good health, I'd ask what made that sandwich bad and think about how to improve it.
Quite the contrary. It's the difference between active eating and passive eating. It is the active eater who appreciates what he is eating at the deepest level, being capable of recreating and modifying his food. It is the same with every endeavor.