We almost didn’t send The Disgusting Sandwich to schools.
The premise is that a sandwich gets dropped, found, dropped, found, and progressively filthier as various animals pass it around. By the end a child eats it. Yes, the child. The filthy sandwich. The reader is braced for the animals to do something, and the book pulls back to a playground where a very hungry child picks up what looks like a normal sandwich and has a bite. That is the joke. That is the whole book.
Our concern was that the ending might be a step too far. Gross-out humour is easy to get wrong, and picture books that play with disgust can read as cheap. So before putting The Disgusting Sandwich into a class set we asked a Year 1 teacher whose judgment we trust. She had been reading the book to her class for four years and said they asked for it at every carpet-time.
We went ahead. Gareth Edwards writes and Hannah Shaw illustrates. The joke lands because the book commits to it. The moment a picture book gets coy about its premise you can feel children stop paying attention, and this one never does.