Why Does a Sandwich Taste Better When Someone Else Makes It?

You are standing in your own kitchen. You used your own bread, your own butter and your own cheese, and you did the whole thing carefully. Then somebody else stands in the same kitchen, uses the same four items in the same order, and hands you a sandwich that is unmistakably, irritatingly better. Nothing in the ingredients accounts for it. So where is the difference actually being stored?

Part of the answer is that you ate it before you ate it. Making a sandwich means smelling the bread, handling the cheese and looking at the whole arrangement for two full minutes, and appetite is worn down by exactly that kind of exposure. The effect has a name — sensory-specific satiety — and it is the same reason the third slice of anything is never the first. There is also nothing left to find out. You know where the thick bit of butter went and which corner got all the cheese. A sandwich somebody else made still has a first bite you cannot predict, and prediction is most of what boredom is made of.

The rest of the answer cannot be weighed on anything. A sandwich made for you is a small piece of evidence that someone spent two minutes thinking about your lunch, and that thought appears to be edible. It also explains the saddest sandwich in the world, which is the one you made for somebody who then left the house, and which you now have to eat yourself.