[klyrs]

> If you were a machine learning model (or my wife), then you would tell me to just cut long rectangular strips along the long axis of the banana, but I’m not a sociopath.

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.