Life might be like a box of chocolates, but the economy? It's more like a sandwich.
Whether we're talking about a club, a Reuben, or a hoagie, every sandwich is the result of supply chains that stretch across the country and around the world. Final assembly takes place at the deli counter—or in your kitchen, if you prefer the DIY version—but those layers of meat, bread, and veggies depend on hundreds of people working to sow, irrigate, feed, reap, slaughter, knead, package, and ship. Economist Leonard Read famously observed that no one on Earth is capable of single-handedly making a pencil. A sandwich might be slightly less complex (no mining involved), but it would still take untold hours of labor on a fairly large farm to put one together entirely from scratch.
