On the way to Green Lakes Tuesday we stopped off at a local Subway for lunch,
planned to take it to go–for picnicking in the sun at the state park.

D. and Ph. ordered before me, D. getting the usual turkey simple and Ph.
something adventurous-else (ham?).  He wanted to order the dressings I
usually get, but we didn’t figure that out until later on in the car.  I’ll
say in just a second what the preferred Subway sandwich dressings are, but first
I want to be clear about a gripe I have with the sandwich shop and so
many of its franchises.

Occasionally, I order a Veggie Delight, Subway’s all vegetable fare
(foot-long, of course, so I don’t dwindle away).  When I ordered a Veggie
Delight the other day, one patent and widespread Subway sandwich-making bias was
eminent:  sandwiches require meat.  The sub I took from the store was
disappointingly light, airy; it was a sub with room to spare for meat, in this
sense.  A dressings sub; toppings as accessory rather than feature. 
But I ordered a sandwich featuring vegetables; no delight in the disconcertingly
thin toppings I found there.

I could solve this recurrent mini-crisis by ordering a sub with meat. 
I’m fond of the Spicy Italian sandwich, for example, and I get the same
dressings on it that I ask for on a Veggie Delight.  The Spicy Italian is
hearty; the Veggie Delight: like a Spicy Italian without the meat.  It’s
thin, feeble.  I’m interested in a heartier veggie sub.  How nice it
would be.

To be more solution oriented, here’s a list of precepts for veggie-sub
making.  Subway, take these to heart:

If I order a Veggie Delight, I

1.  am not necessarily a fanatic vegetarian who wants a dinky, empty
sandwich.
2.  don’t want the butts and ends of either tomatoes or jalapenos. 
Please don’t put them on my sandwich.  I’m begging you. 
3.  want reasonably fresh tomatoes and double the normal allotment of
lettuce.  The other day, for instance, one of the sandwich makers was
switching old tomatoes into a new tomato container by tonging them one at a time
into the new bucket.  The manager intervened by telling the sandwich maker
she was going too slow.  She responded: "I didn’t think we should have the
old juice on the new tomatoes."  The manager, saying nothing, grabbed the
old plastic bucket and flipped it onto the new bucket, dumping the juice and
dreg-tomatoes onto the fresh.  Sandwich maker made a face expressing eeeww!.

4. prefer fresh lettuce.

That’s it.  That’s all I’ve got.  So much to ask?

Now, about the optimal toppings (the ones Ph. was trying to simulate without
asking for help):  American cheese (or not…this is no real
difference-maker), lettuce, tomato, onion.  Green peppers, black olives,
jalapenos. Salt, pepper, vinegar, oil.  One line of yellow mustard and
two-three lines of mayo.  (Yeah, I leave the pickles, cucumbers and banana
peppers for the next person in line.  Considerate, eh?  Go ahead and
have a whole sub chocked with ’em.).

Perhaps my expectations for fast food are too high.  The
make-it-in-front-of-you-at-a-glass-counter dynamic probably contributes to my
sense that the Veggie Delight is diminishing in a worker-assembly habit clearly
conditioned by the dressing of meat-filled sandwiches.  I hope one day to
have a good Veggie Delight, and yet, as I say that, it makes good sense to me
that I might, instead, forget about getting decent vegetables at any kind of
fast food joint.  Hell, I could just as easily go to McDonald’s or Taco
Bell and order a salad to more quickly restore the Delight I’m supposed to
experience when I order a meager veggie sub from Subway.  Must be some
lesson to take from all of this.