Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,45
a moral one. Starting in the aughts, it became the duty of public intellectuals and civic leaders to nudge, steer, and shame consumers away from their big sodas and Happy Meals toward better food choices. Anything less, as Alice Waters, the sainted cofounder of Chez Panisse and the grand doyenne of the Slow Food movement, once put it, was to cede the ground to “fast-food values.” In 2008, with food prices rising and the Great Recession underway, Waters implored economically disadvantaged consumers to “make a sacrifice on the cell phone or the third pair of Nike shoes” to find room in their budgets for more sustainable food.
The backlash against a behemoth so engirding as fast food created a huge market for an alternative way of eating. The revolution for good food arrived like a triumphant Lenin at Finland Station. Elevated cafés and high-minded gastropubs, good places, debuted with media-kindled fanfare and menus that read like album liner notes. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of listed farmers’ markets in the US Department of Agriculture’s national directory nearly doubled. Like the transition from minivans to SUVs before, consumer choices became part of an exclusive lifestyle that (wittingly or not) signified class, status, luxury, and virtue for an increasingly cloistered group of Americans.
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The Northstar Café in Columbus, Ohio, is one of many good places. It features light wood accents that soften its gray industrial vibe, an open kitchen, big hanging light fixtures and tall windows, and a mishmash of seating arrangements. It also came recommended by the entire staff of a nearby yoga studio. On the day I visited, the sunny patio was filled with diners, drinking bright juices and tending to well-coiffed and very good dogs.
It’s easy to see why Northstar wins the hearts and minds of the locals. In addition to looking like a set from a Nancy Meyers movie, it has all the rhetorical hallmarks of gastronomical-political awareness. “The clean lines and fresh colors of Northstar reflect our sincere commitment to pure and natural dining, rooted in our Ohio soil,” noted its website, which contained a “philosophy” section and promises organic-focused, locally sourced, sustainable food, and compost-ready takeaway containers. Even its name is meant to convey reassurance and responsible stewardship. Inadvertently driving the point home, the café is located directly across a small street from a well-weathered White Castle store that looks a bit like a charred marshmallow.
As I stood in the ordering line, I watched plate after glorious plate make its way out—huge cheeseburgers made from Niman Ranch brisket and chuck, enormous ricotta-topped pancakes, smoothies flecked with bits of fruit, all of which were beautiful. When I asked what the most popular items were, I was recommended one of the three salads. At $14, the Village Salad was also the cheapest salad on the menu. With tax and a tip for the counter staff, the total came out to over $16. I headed out to the patio and snagged a small table next to an Ohio State college student and her mother, who had come to town to see her off. At other tables, there were business lunches and student reunions afoot and idlers sunning in full Lululemon.
I waited for a runner to find me by my order number, which had been printed on a small laminated placard decorated with a passage from Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food, a celebrated selection from the modern foodie canon. On it, Pollan is quoting Gyorgy Scrinis’s explanation of his term nutritionism: “The most important fact about any food is not its nutrient content but its degree of processing. ‘Whole foods and industrial foods are the only two food groups I’d consider including in any useful “food pyramid.”’”
The $16-plus salad soon arrived, a profile in visual and gustatory glory. A heaping mass of greens with an array of different lettuces, thick strips of tomato, glistening almonds, dates, bits of corn, chunks of avocado, well-roasted chicken, an oversize peppered bed of goat cheese, and croutons, all with a coat of champagne vinaigrette and served with a huge wedge of bread. It tasted very good and almost certainly contained eight hundred calories.* Digging into it, I knew that I had invaded the terrain of the enlightened eater, where the accommodations felt delightful, high quality, Instagrammable, and somewhere between aspirational and inaccessible. The salad was way too big to finish.
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A few months later, in what almost certainly must have been a publicist’s mistake, I ended up having breakfast with