Six months – that’s apparently how long it takes to truly make a sandwich from scratch. And we know this thanks to 28-year-old Andy George, host of the YouTube series How to Make Everything. He actually spent six months and $1,500 growing and preparing every single ingredient that went into one, very regular, sandwich.

Andy recently shared a time-lapse video titled ‘How to Make a $1,500 Sandwich in Only Six Months’ on his YouTube channel. The video shows him doing all sorts of tasks that people normally take for granted when they buy stuff off store shelves. He grows vegetables, makes salt, bakes bread from scratch, and even kills a live chicken. His goal? To make everyone realise that things don’t magically appear in supermarkets.

It wasn’t an easy challenge – producing every ingredient from scratch turned out to be difficult and time-consuming. For salt, he actually traveled to the seaside to collect ocean water, and then boiled it all down until a pile of raw sea salt was left at the bottom of the pot. When he tried carrying the salt back home with him, he ran into trouble with airport security. “Security pulls me aside, opens up my bag, takes out the salt,” he said on camera. “I’m like: You’re going to jail now.” But he made it home fine, and he used the salt to pickle the cucumbers he picked off his own vines.

No sandwich is complete without cheese, and to make that from scratch, he started by learning how to milk a cow. And to make one loaf of bread, he harvested wheat, collected fresh honey from a beehive, and made butter as well. But the highlight of the video was when he killed a live chicken with his bare hands. He decapitated it, plucked its feathers, boiled it, and grilled the meat, before he was finally ready for the easiest part – assembling and eating the sandwich.

His reaction on eating the sandwich was gold: “It’s not bad,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Six months of my life for ‘not bad’. Yeah.”