If there is an easy way to do something, Benjamin Carle does not do it. So when the Frenchman wanted a sandwich, it was out of the question to buy one from his local boulangerie.

Instead, he set out to make one from scratch. From sowing the wheat to produce flour, to baking the bread, to building a vegetable garden on a Paris rooftop and fishing for tuna, to raising chickens for eggs.

Ten months later, Carle, 30, had his sandwich, which he insisted tasted all the better for the effort expended to make it. He also claimed the exercise revealed a modern-day existential truth: that the millennial generation is engaged in a desperate search for something to do with their hands.

“My girlfriend knits and I saw all around me more and more people who have nice day jobs but spend their evenings doing some kind of manual activity and telling the rest of us about it,” Carle said. “We are all in DIY-mode. It’s as if our intellectual jobs are too abstract and not satisfying enough. People are happier with some kind of material reality.”

It is not the first time Carle has made life difficult for himself. In 2013, he set out to live using only French-made products as part of a TV documentary. He was declared 96.9% “made in France” after judges found six Ikea forks, a Chinese-made guitar and wall paint of unknown origin in his Paris apartment.

The latest challenge is also the subject of a Canal+ documentary, called Sandwich (or How I Made My Own Snack While Questioning the Manual Capabilities of the French and While Trying to Find Some Personal Pride). In it, we see Carle breaking his back digging a plot to grow wheat, pressing olives for oil and boiling sea water for salt to make a pan bagnat, a speciality sandwich from Nice filled with garlic, olive oil, salt, tomatoes, radishes, spring onions, artichokes, green pepper, tuna, egg and basil.

Only a spell on a Basque fishing boat revealed Carle’s limits. Green-faced, he is forced to admit landing a 65kg tuna is a day job “far too complicated for me … and I feel seasick”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ingredients Benjamin Carle assembled to make his sandwich. Photograph: Benjamin Carle

Carle believes the mass-produced sandwich, two billion of which are eaten every year in France, is a “symbol of a loss of savoir faire and rampant consumerism”. His generation’s reaction to this was a quest to regain the ability to make things for themselves, he said.

In the documentary, Carle speaks to a philosopher, a survivalist, and back-to-nature enthusiasts attempting to reproduce the daily life of prehistoric mankind, including rubbing sticks to make fire.

“Work life is less and less satisfying to the point of making us unhappy. It’s almost vital to find something else to do,” Carle said, adding that the increasing distance between the consumer and the point of production had left many frustrated.

“The modern world leaves us feeling useless with our hands; we feel a need to do something with them, to get them dirty. It seemed ridiculous to me that I was proud of having planted tomatoes. It’s so much easier to go out and buy whatever we want that the real challenge becomes in actually making it ourselves. I think, in some senses, we are voluntarily going backwards.”

Was the sandwich any good? “It was excellent, great,” Carle said. “If I’m being honest, the bread was a bit dry but even if it had been disgusting, I’d have found it absolutely delicious.”