The sandwich that took 10 months to make (… sow, grow, catch and bake)
If there is an easy way to do something, Benjamin Carle does not do it. So when the Frenchman wanted a sandwich, it was out of the question to buy one from his local boulangerie.
Instead, he set out to make one from scratch. From sowing the wheat to produce flour, to baking the bread, to building a vegetable garden on a Paris rooftop and fishing for tuna, to raising chickens for eggs.
Ten months later, Carle, 30, had his sandwich, which he insisted tasted all the better for the effort expended to make it. He also claimed the exercise revealed a modern-day existential truth: that the millennial generation is engaged in a desperate search for something to do with their hands.
“My girlfriend knits and I saw all around me more and more people who have nice day jobs but spend their evenings doing some kind of manual activity and telling the rest of us about it,” Carle said. “We are all in DIY-mode. It’s as if our intellectual jobs are too abstract and not satisfying enough. People are happier with some kind of material reality.”
It is not the first time Carle has made life difficult for himself. In 2013, he set out to live using only French-made products as part of a TV documentary. He was declared 96.9% “made in France” after judges found six Ikea forks, a Chinese-made guitar and wall paint of unknown origin in his Paris apartment.
Instead, he set out to make one from scratch. From sowing the wheat to produce flour, to baking the bread, to building a vegetable garden on a Paris rooftop and fishing for tuna, to raising chickens for eggs.
Ten months later, Carle, 30, had his sandwich, which he insisted tasted all the better for the effort expended to make it. He also claimed the exercise revealed a modern-day existential truth: that the millennial generation is engaged in a desperate search for something to do with their hands.
“My girlfriend knits and I saw all around me more and more people who have nice day jobs but spend their evenings doing some kind of manual activity and telling the rest of us about it,” Carle said. “We are all in DIY-mode. It’s as if our intellectual jobs are too abstract and not satisfying enough. People are happier with some kind of material reality.”
It is not the first time Carle has made life difficult for himself. In 2013, he set out to live using only French-made products as part of a TV documentary. He was declared 96.9% “made in France” after judges found six Ikea forks, a Chinese-made guitar and wall paint of unknown origin in his Paris apartment.
Source: theguardian
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