Life

This Is The World's Saddest Sandwich

by Eliza Castile

July 5, 2015

Airport food has a well-deserved reputation for being unpalatable, to say the least, but even the most jetlagged of travelers have their limits. Nothing illustrates that better than Reddit user Spambox's pitiful sandwich from Scotland's Edinburgh Airport, which is a serious contender for the dubious honor of "World's Saddest Sandwich." Congratulations, I guess? Spambox posted a picture of his incredibly depressing sandwich on Reddit last week. "This is what a £3.20 bacon and egg roll from Edinburgh airport looks like," he wrote in the description. Judging from the image, £3.20 will get you a comparatively giant, untoasted roll, two floppy slices of bacon (folded up into a little ball of meat for maximum sadness, of course), and an egg approximately the size of a thimble.

"How do you even get an egg that small?" one Redditor wondered. Theories range from the use of hummingbird eggs to the microscopic end slice of a hardboiled egg, but personally, my money is on some sort of Ratatouille-style shenanigans in the kitchen that resulted in the sandwich being sent out before the chef could save the day. Either way, the world may never know the real truth. Perhaps it's better this way.

But enough talk. What does the world's saddest sandwich look like?

Oh boy. I may have an unsophisticated palate, but even I would have trouble forcing myself to eat that.

According to Spambox, the pitiful sandwich could have been the result of a conspiracy. "I'm not sure if this one was specially selected for me," he wrote in a comment on Reddit. "As I'd waited 15mins and still not got it I walked passed [sic] everyone to the front of the queue and was fairly short with them that I was still waiting on my food."

If it was deliberately chosen, the sandwich was certainly an effective punishment. Spambox wrote online that he never asked for a refund because he assumed it was normal, which says quite a bit about the standards for airport food. The image eventually made it over to Twitter, where users had a field day speculating about the origins of the sandwich.

The story was soon picked up by news outlets, including TIME and The Independent.

"Clearly this is not the service we should be providing and we will be addressing this complaint with [the cafe chain responsible]," a spokesperson for Edinburgh Airport told The Scotsman. So far, EAT hasn't made a statement regarding the monstrosity masquerading as a sandwich, but I get the feeling there will be quite a bit of apologizing involved.

Images: Molly Elliot/Flickr, Giphy (2)