The organisers of a Tehran food festival were licking their wounds today after spending two days building the world's longest sandwich - only to see it devoured by the crowd before anyone had a chance to measure it.

More than 1,000 volunteers worked from early this morning to make the 1,500-metre sandwich, using a whole tonne of ostrich meat and hundreds of loaves.

The meat was supplied by local ostrich farmers eager to promote their produce as a tasty and healthy alternative to traditional Iranian offerings. The festival had also hoped to book a place in the Guinness Book of World Records by beating the previous mark of 1,378 metres set in Italy in May.

In the event, however, the waiting got too much for thousands of spectators waiting in Tehran's Mellat park - or there is an untapped demand for ostrich in the Iranian market. The crowd started attacking the sandwich before any of the three Guinness representatives present had the chance to confirm its length.

A Reuters reporter said that the sandwich, all 1,500 metres of it, was polished off in just a few minutes.

A festival organiser said that video footage and photographs of the sandwich would be sent to Guinness officials to show that it had measured up. “We still think the sandwich will be recorded in the Guinness book because of all the evidence and footage that we will send them,” Parvin Shariati said.

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