Making a cheese sandwich.

I handed my daughter a cheese sandwich the other day, and as I did so, I wondered about how it was made.  I took two slices of bread, spread butter on one side of each, sliced some cheese and put it on one of the buttered sides, and placed the other piece of bread butter side down on top.

 Job done.

But that was just my part of creating that cheese sandwich.  I still had three unanswered questions. 
Where did the bread come from?  Where did the butter come from? And where did the cheese come from?  The bread came from the supermarket, but how did it get there? By lorry, driven by Arthur, taken off the lorry by Bert and stacked on the shelf by Carl.  

But who loaded it onto the lorry?  Where was it stored before then? How did it get there?  So, we have a logistics aspect to the bread – how it moves from A to B.

Where was the bread made?  What recipe was used?  Who supplied the yeast? The salt? The water?  So we also have a multitude of other ingredients to consider, as well as their various logistics.

But ignoring all those for now, let’s concentrate on the flour that was used – where was it milled? Who milled it?  Who made the packet it’s stored in?  Who grew the grain?  

So now we have two more fundamental occupations to consider. The miller and the farmer.  Both of these people play an essential role in our bread production.  

Focussing on the farmer – did he plow his field?  With a tractor?  Who made the tractor?  Who sold it to him?  Who maintains it?  So that gives us equipment.  

Who made the lorries, the fork-lift trucks, the components of each, the tyres, engine oil, glass. Who refined the fuel?  Who drilled for the oil and where?  Who built the oven?  Who supplied the gas and electricity?  How was the electricity produced?  

The incredibly complex structure of each piece of machinery is mind-boggling, without even considering how the individual components of each machine are also produced, supplied, shipped and so on, down to where the iron ore is mined for the steel, how is it smelted and so on.

Ignoring all that, let’s go back to the farmer.  Where did he buy the grain?  Who grew it? So now you are approaching the origin of the bread – but in actual fact, you’re just entering a loop.  Where did the grain come from that grew the wheat that made the grain?  It wouldn’t be an infinite regression, but it would look at first glance like one.

How many people, then, have been involved in making our two humble slices of bread?  How many machines have been involved?  How much fuel has been consumed in its production? How many miles between growing the wheat and the bread in the supermarket?

Two slices of bread!

Now, the butter…

My daughter took the sandwich, took a big bite and with mouth full of food, mumbled “thanks Dad!” before walking off to her room to watch TV, while I stood in the kitchen, my head spinning from the hundreds, thousands of interactions and associations that occurred before those two little words.