"The art of the sandwich"

is apparently a book title - not that I have read the book.
Someone I know was talking about making cut lunches for school and the perennial problem of what to put in the sandwiches.
I remember school lunches and the sandwiches. My mother would stand there and say, "Vegemite (Marmite is the British equivalent), cheese or peanut paste?" (It was peanut paste back then, now it is "peanut butter".)  There were only ever the three choices and sometimes we were not even given that choice. A sandwich would appear in our lunch box and it would be Vegemite.
When that happened I suspect there was no cheese or peanut paste to be had - or Mum was simply not in a mood to ask us what we wanted. 
There would be two biscuits or a "little cake" and a piece of fruit. Our lunches never varied from that. They were simple. They were quick to make. They were cheap. Those things mattered. We ate the same thing all the way through primary school unless we went home to lunch.
We went home to lunch if my maternal grandmother was staying with us in one of the rural areas my parents taught in. She would provide a hot meal in the middle of the day. It gave her something to do while we were at school. Ungrateful children that we were we resented having to sit there and eat a hot meal when we could have been doing other things.
When we reached secondary school, before boarding school, we were expected to get our own lunch. As we always lived next door to the school we would go home and make ourselves a sandwich.
The fillings became more interesting then. Mum was not around to supervise the art of sandwich construction. My brother and I would make ourselves cheese sandwiches but add layers of tomato, lettuce, cucumber, grated carrot and celery. In winter we would sometimes boil an egg and have hot egg sandwiches with plenty of salt and pepper. We had to be careful about how much butter we used because buying it usually meant a journey in the car but nobody was worried about cholesterol. We had never heard of cholesterol. Like everyone else we kept hens because, without them, we would not have had eggs in rural areas.
Mum would put some things off limits. They were for the evening meal.  I don't think we ever dared to touch them. Raiding the biscuit tin was off limits too. Mum left the day's supply on the kitchen bench - if she remembered. Somehow she always remembered the fruit but sometimes forgot the biscuits.
Very occasionally we made honey sandwiches, something we had never been allowed to have in primary school. Jam was almost unknown in our family but there was usually someone on a local farm who kept bees so there would be honey. We could get away with it if we did not use too much - and the bread had to be fresh for a honey sandwich.
We ate because we were active. We were hungry because we were active. We did not expect food to be exciting or different. The only problem we had was deciding between Vegemite, cheese or peanut paste. It was usually Vegemite.