Notable Sandwiches #85: The Handwich
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my editor David Swanson, trip merrily through the baffling and mercurial document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a guest column from horror-scribe (and friend-of-the-newsletter) Elie Lichtschein, on Disney's "Handwich" and what evil lurks behind the scenes of the Magic Kingdom. Again, Elie is a speculative fiction writer, and this column is not meant to represent any of the workings of the actual Walt Disney Company. Any resemblances are coincidental. Please don't sue us.
"The Hand that Eats Itself"
By Elie Lichtschein
In a recording taken early in the afternoon of May 7, 1984, a veteran Disney Imagineer, noted for her calm touch with members of the public, can be heard asking the sixteen participants to share their impressions of finger foods. “I’m talking something you can hold in the palm of your hand.” This was the fifth focus group of the day, out of a cool Disney dozen. Her voice is clear, even though the hum of the air-conditioning cloaks the words of participants further from the microphone. “Like a sandwich. But just for your hand. A handwich.”
Voices clamor, and it’s unfortunate for the aspiring podcast hosts of tomorrow that the recording ends there. The notes from the meeting, however, capture in clarity what happened next. It’s a terrifying tale set in motion a century ago with the creation of cartoon mouse. We are still contending with the ramifications.
There are many subcomponents to Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development (WDI), the company responsible for the design and construction of Disney amusement parks worldwide. Since its creation, WDI’s focus has been to study, understand, and profit from a rotating door of amusement-seeking customers whose thrills are largely confined to one of three forms of sedentary entertainment: the stationary visual experience (seated in a dark theater watching pictures move on a screen, i.e. film), the mobile visual experience (seated in a car moving through a shifting landscape, i.e. ride), and the gastronomical (seated in a refectory-type area, consuming a variety of enticing digestible products, i.e. food). The Disney Chow Shop oversees the latter of these.
When Michael Eisner and Frank Wells took over the Mouse house in 1984, they were tasked with executing a number of companywide overhauls, including the creation of the Disney Chow Shop (DCS), a food-focused subset of WDI. At its creation, the DCS had two main aims: to revitalize classic food items, and to create new “instantly essential” forms of theme-park fare. Imagineers charged with inventing food products conducted research and assessment, holding focus groups comprised of the average Disney guest (adult) and the average American (adult). In these focus groups, participants fielded questions on topics related to favorability, preference, and improvement in scenarios ranging from sit-down dining to ambulatory snacking.
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Which brings us back to the handwich, and that focus group four decades ago.
According to the notes from the session, the apparently throwaway portmanteau—“handwich”—sparked an engaged exchange among the participants, many of whom expressed, if not an interest in the name—which one participant called “ham-handed, and not in a tasty way”—then a fascination with the concept of, as another put it, “a sandwich shaped like a hand.” In turn, this led to a lively discussion of the culinary artisanship involved in crafting a bread bowl that would appear indistinguishable from a human hand. Opinions were offered concerning the length of baking time and degrees of heat necessary to achieve the hue of different-colored skins, as well as the viability of sourdough starter crossed with coarsely ground rye.
Debates ensued about what to put in the hand-shaped container, with some leaning toward chili cheese and jalapenos (taste being the main consideration here) and others toward blood sausage drenched in marinara sauce, wedged between slices of mozzarella (accuracy to physiological interiority the main here). The leader of the study took diligent notes on these debates, which today makes for an oddly cannibalistic read. One forgets, in the excitement and amusement of the back-and-forth, that the participants were engaged in a spirited discourse over consuming a facsimile of a human body part, in some instances positively drooling over the prospect.
Following this unanticipated conclusion, the DCS conducted a series of independent studies into the effects on prospective eaters’ salivary glands of food items shaped like body parts. The results were fascinating and unsettling. Study after study reinforced the lead’s hypothesis, a slant on Masahiro’s uncanny valley, where the salivary effect of the food item was heightened in proportion to its resemblance to part of the human anatomy. More specifically, part of the anatomy of the human being considering eating the item. The first four studies shared the results sans comment. The findings of the fifth, however, included a theory for this relationship, what it called “draw[ing the subject] closer with the illusion of his own flesh.” It posited that the main psychological thrust of the lead theory, a fear of something familiar-seeming but ultimately distressingly other consuming one whole, was reversed with food, where consumption became the main target. Turn fear into a pretzel and discover how tasty it is.
Studies concluded, the DCS led a second focus group composed of a random assortment of participants unconnected to those earlier tests. The discussion proceeded along the same lines. Ninety percent expressed an eagerness bordering on mania when presented with the prospect of eating a sandwich shaped like their hand. Heightened yumminess in accuracy. The conversation took on a distant tone.
Volunteers offered other body parts they’d like to turn edible, what they’d put in them, how they’d eat them. One woman said she’d kill for a cruller shaped like her kneecaps, the dry thirst cracking her voice. A young-sounding girl confessed that she never thought about it before, but she would absolutely love to suck on a jawbreaker painted like her eyeball, down to the distinctive freckle in her conjunctiva. Between wheezes, an elderly man rhapsodized on how powerless he would find himself before an undercooked steak shaped and colored like his own heart (he also offered a way to make the steak vacillate slightly, as if beating, with the aid of a kitchen-ware pace-keeper). And so on. A strange reality, proven and then proven again and then underlined; the nearer the verisimilitude of the food to the eater’s anatomy, the greater the desire to self-consume. The study leads proposed further studies to answer the dozens of questions each round generated, but the DCS first demanded updates on the studies already funded.
The Imagineers delivered their findings in the form of a paper entitled “The Hand That Eats Itself: Imagineering The Eerie Food of the Future”. Silence prevailed for a week, and then Disney Legal stepped in. All three hard copies of the paper were destroyed, save for a few photographs of the notes (which this writer reviewed in advance of this piece). A watered-down wafered-up version of the original idea—the Handwich—was introduced a short while later at select Disney properties to limited fanfare. They were discontinued a few years later. Few noticed their coming or going.
There are many subcomponents to the body of Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development. Some push with eagerness out the throat; others they keep locked in the stomach.
