The Sandwich Swap

Best friends Salma and Lily play together and eat lunch together but, being individuals, their tastes differ. Lily’s daily lunch is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich whereas Salma always eats humus in pita bread. Each girl is disgusted by the other’s lunch and one day as they eat together, insults are exchanged and the friends fall out. The following day things escalate and before long it’s not just insults that are flying, there’s a full scale food fight in the lunchroom. The penitent pair are subsequently chastised by the school principal and, by then ashamed of themselves, they realise that there is just one thing to do.

The message is clear: it is all too easy to condemn what we don’t know about rather than attempting to learn about difference and try to understand one another. Worthy as it is, I found the whole thing slightly bland; neither the watercolour illustrations nor the rather wordy text are in themselves sufficiently dynamic to excite.