Separated by a Common Language

When talking with a fellow American-in-Britain and lexicographer recently (hello, Katherine!), the topic of meal deals came up. I thought: great topic for a blog post. Then I discovered this is something that this US-UK lunch-consumption difference has been discussed a lot on the web already. But that's never stopped me from (BrE) having a more linguistic go at a topic...

To quote Wikipedia (but with links to my relevant blog posts):

   In the United Kingdom, a meal deal is a sales promotion which consists of three items: a main* (often a sandwich or salad box), a drink, and a snack (commonly crisps, fruit or confectionery). Meal deals are primarily eaten at lunchtime, and more than a third of Britons buy one at least once per week. Over 7 million are sold every weekday.                                   *main is another Britishism for another day

You can get a meal deal at a (orig. AmE) supermarket or (orig. AmE) convenience store, or (BrE) petrol/(AmE) gas station, but also at Boots the (BrE) Chemist—what Americans would call a drug store. (The BrE semi-equivalent of convenience store is corner shop—but corner shops might be smaller affairs. It tends to be the [orig. AmE] chain stores that offer meal deals.) The centrality of meal deals to UK culture can be found in the sheer number of meal deal inflation trackers, reviews, and hacks available on the internet.

comparison of meal deal prices on mealdealer.uk

As hot fast food has become more and more popular in the UK, outlets like McDonald's have also taken to calling their offers meal deals.

But one doesn't hear the expression meal deal as much in AmE:

The concept of getting a sandwich (in the American sense of the word), (orig. AmE) side and drink for a bargain price is very familiar. It's just that in the US: (a) the food tends to be freshly prepared and (often) hot from fast food places, and (b) in that context, it can be called a value meal but with enough context, it's just a meal. This has come up before at the à la carte post, where I note that if you order a Big Mac, you might be asked "the sandwich or the meal?"—"the sandwich" being the Big Mac (because it's the broader American sense of sandwich) and "the meal" being the Big Mac plus (orig. AmE) fries and a drink. It is a deal, but we don't tend to call it a meal deal.

Wikipedia's illustration for Combination Meal, from the In-N-Out burger chain

That use of meal is very particular to fast-food chains. More general in AmE is combination (meal) or combo—which predates the use of meal in the 'bargain' sense. While a take-away/take-out place might offer combos, so could an eat-in restaurant. For instance, Mexican restaurants often offer combo dinners, like these ones from an Indiana restaurant menu:

La Cabana Restaurants

Personally, I get a British meal deal about once a year—and then only if there are nicer things than boxed sandwiches on offer. That's a fairly American reaction to the phenomenon. One of my bonding exercises with other Americans in Britain is to have conversations like "What's up with those sandwiches? Why would you want to eat refrigerated bread? Why does everything have mayonnaise? And all those triangular plastic boxes!" (Though the boxes have got[ten] much less plasticky as environmental awareness has grown.) I'm amused that one of the most popular sandwiches has an American origin story: the chicken club (sandwich). 

I probably get an American fast-food meal as or less often. When the fast-food places have the calories listed on the menu, the meal looks less like a bargain and more like an investment in future cardiac bypass surgery. But Mexican restaurant combos seem to less often have calories listed—ooh yeah.

And finally, if you want to see people scooping (BrE) egg mayonnaise (AmE: egg salad) with their hands, here's a five-minute video about a British sandwich factory:

So are you a meal or a meal deal person? Any refrigerated sandwiches you want to recommend?