Now that America has decided that pizza is to retain its status as a vegetable and everyone is noticing that food likely to cause death from blocked arteries is much cheaper to obtain than anything that humans were actually meant to run on, staying healthy on a low budget has entered the concerns of many people. Fear not, because the ever resourceful UK has come up with a suggestion - the toast sandwich. Not a toasted sandwich - literally a piece of toast between two slices of bread. It can even be buttered with salt and pepper if it's pay day.

It says at the beginning that this was just done as an experiment to see how cheaply they could make something that could loosely be described as a meal, but the undertones of "cost-conscious times" throughout the article make it seem like it's on the cusp of seriously proposing this as an actual diet for a population who are terminally short of cash. "Cost-conscious" is when you start getting your tinned tomatoes from the Tesco Value shelf - this is positively post-armageddon, for when it's a choice between toasting bread using a blowtorch in a dusty Mad Max wasteland or eating small animals found dead at the side of the road with motorcycle-track-shaped dents across them. I feel like I'm watching the collapse of Britain.

They do at least suggest that you could add an egg, doubling the cost of the meal to about 16p, though not mentioning that this would surely make it an egg sandwich and considerably less depressing. In its current state it wouldn't seem to have much nutritional value, even with the immense amount of treatment that Chorleywood-type bread gets - and I also had my doubts about the claim by Dr John Emsley that it was "surprisingly nice".

So we made one.


And there it is - toast, bread, butter, and that's it. Curiously, the texture of the toast in the middle does give the impression of a sandwich more substantial than it actually is - it tastes not unlike a breaded chicken burger, though I think that this says more about the quality and quantity of meat in a chicken burger than anything else.

They say they'll offer £200 to anyone who can come up with a cheaper alternative - I think I would prefer to just have some buttered toast, therefore saving an entire slice of bread.