Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches

Ignoring that you called your wife a sociopath for the moment... I'm one for peanut butter and pickle sandwiches, personally. I've made some danged optimal ones, too, slicing them lengthwise. Pickles are interesting because you can bend them and make a curved cut with a straight knife, and the slice lays flat. And then your packing problem has an added constraint because the slices are beveled. You need a smaller number of slices, so picking the proper thickness is actually the hardest part. Of course, I eat my mistakes, so the reinforcement phase is rather busted.

Slice 1 in your final packing typifies my complaint with slicing on the round: it will fall out of the sandwich. This is especially true with pickles. Lengthwise slices result in a more structurally resilient sandwich.

OTOH bananas do have an easy mode: smash and spread. If your wife was actually a sociopath, that's probably what she'd do. But maybe just don't badmouth your wife; our industry has a misogyny problem and that's an ugly pattern.

Despite its obvious optimality, the Homogenous Mush approach creates extra dishes. So, as a lazy undergrad, I used the circles method for a long time. Sometime in grad school I had the long-cut epiphany, and tend to do that most of the time now.

(The other downside of the circular method is that they're more likely to try to jump out of the sandwich, since they have less contact area.)

Oh, and one other solution, which is great for long bike rides: Switch out the bread for a flour tortilla, and throw some honey in the mix as well. Fits in an undersaddle bag and beats the hell out of a clif bar.