Since the dawn of lunch, roughly the mid-eighteenth century, when John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, too busy gambling with his friends to eat a real meal, asked his valet to bring him some meat in between two slices of bread, people have appreciated the portability of the sandwich.

The two places where I work are both nearby a Rebecca’s and an Au Bon Pain, so you can imagine that I have been eating a lot of sandwiches recently, some of them remarkably better than others. And just when I finally find a sandwich I can fall in love with, the place changes the menu, and not for the better. And even when you get the same sandwich on Friday, for example, that you also got on the previous Tuesday, the person who makes it can make all the difference. (Note to Au Bon Pain: mustard is a condiment, not a soup. The same goes for lemon aioli.)

Disappointments abound, but humans are aspirational creatures. If we weren’t, the species would have pretty much petered out by now, given how often love fails. And we can’t even blame Disney for our apparent optimism. When was the last time you heard a bunch of forest animals singing about the happy ending that was surely in the human characters’ future: to wit, a perfect sandwich? (Okay, the closest thing I can think of to this would be the animated film, Over the Hedge, where the animals go through the humans’ trash like connoisseurs.)

And I just discovered that “Club Sandwich” means that there is an extra piece of bread in the middle, a hundred needless calories where there could be Meaningful Filling of Actual Substance. Harrumph.