Rolling for lunch. Does that sound too absurd? A TikTok star succeeded with this, thrilling with terrible sandwiches.
Some decisions in everyday life need to be made anew every day. Like the vital question of what to put on today’s bread. What might require just a second of survival for most people is staged by some as a fateful decision – one that then gains worldwide attention.
This is what happened to Jake Pauwels. He turns his daily lunch into a real event and never really knows what he will eat today until he rolls for it.
What does Jake Pauwels do? On TikTok, Pauwels has a small recurring show called “Roll for Sandwich”. And exactly that is pretty much all you need to know. Instead of making his sandwich based on whims, he asks fate for help in the form of various dice.
Depending on how many ingredients are available in a certain category, he uses different dice. For larger categories, he uses a 20-sided die (“D20”), while for smaller categories, like the type of bread, he uses a regular 6-sided die.
Sometimes, pretty creepy creations come out, which already cause discomfort just from reading the ingredients. Or who among you would enjoy a multigrain sandwich with crab meat, cheese, pickles, salt, pepper, and a hearty chocolate sauce to top it off? You can witness the delightful sufferings of this creation on TikTok.
The idea was born from his passion for role-playing games – especially D&D (Dungeons & Dragons), a rather classic Pen&Paper role-playing game where the fate of heroes and villains often hinges on dice rolls.
Why has this become so successful? More than 880,000 people have now subscribed to Pauwels’ TikTok channel “Adventures in Aadria”. Watching him decide with which possible and impossible combinations he makes his daily lunch seems to have a special appeal.
According to Pauwels, this method teaches a lot about the taste combinations of different ingredients and leads to combinations that are much better than one would initially think. Much of the fascination also seems to come from directly witnessing Pauwels eat a sandwich whose ingredients do not harmonize at all. In response to the question from Polygon magazine whether he eats every sandwich, he explained:
Yes, that was important for the concept of the show. Simply rolling for a meal that I can then throw away if I don’t like it wouldn’t have the same weight. There are real consequences for the rolls you make in D&D. Well, at least real fantasy consequences. I hoped to incorporate that into this project too. It’s not like I have anything dangerous on the list – I can suffer for five minutes and eat a bad sandwich to uphold the integrity of the show and entertain people a bit.
Another important point for Pauwels is that he does not want to waste any ingredients.
There’s so much food waste on TikTok, where people create terrible, grotesque things and then don’t eat them. I’m not in a financial position where I can buy food every week, only to throw half of it away.
It’s clear that this approach turns virtually every lunch into an adventure – but whether one would enjoy participating oneself is another matter.
Can you understand the fascination with such a format? Or would you even take it on for your lunch if it weren’t so much effort?
