Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,48
plans to eschew palm oil from sources linked to deforestation. In 2015, the company announced that it would stop serving chicken raised on medical antibiotics, a fiat that some health observers predicted would set a model for the entire poultry industry.
Understandably, Pollan was skeptical about the sincerity of these corporate appeals to a reform-minded generation of eaters. But he also took these new assurances as concessions extracted by the food movement. I asked if he thought fast-food chains, which command the loyalty of many millions and which may someday serve millions of Americans items like their first cage-free eggs, could be the most effective agents of change. “I think they’re part of the solution, I don’t look down on those ideas,” he explained. “I think that this is how change comes in America. Basically you shift the center a little bit by staking out a position, a more radical or pure position here, and you see everybody move a little.”
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What’s particularly challenging for fast-food companies is that it’s not entirely clear its principal consumer base actually wants these changes. If you ask industry representatives about the various campaigns against fast food, they almost always tend to stress, with slight agitation, how limited the pressure for change seems to be, particularly beyond certain enclaves on the coasts.
Historically, American diners haven’t been terribly kind to healthful gestures from their breaded overlords. In 1985, Wendy’s spent $10 million on an ad campaign for a lower-calorie menu, which survived all of one year before Dave Thomas was starring in commercials for bacon cheeseburgers once again. Later, when true panic over American obesity first arose in the 1990s, it brought about a number of industry reactions. Dairy Queen introduced the Breeze, a lower-calorie version of the Blizzard that featured yogurt instead of ice cream. It bombed and was ultimately discontinued. In 1990, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s broke (and saved) the hearts of millions by opting to cook their fries in 100 percent vegetable oil instead of a mix made almost entirely of beef tallow. Around the same time, Burger King introduced the B.K. Broiler, the first grilled-chicken sandwich to go national. It took off, at one point selling a million sandwiches a day (or half the number of Whoppers sold each day), before slowly fizzling out. In a solid 1990s flourish, Pizza Hut also introduced and scrapped an ill-conceived “light” pizza, with lower-calorie meat toppings. Unpopular adjustments with consumer health in mind have carried on into present day. In 2017, General Mills had to resume its use of Red 40, Blue 1, and Yellow 6 dyes in Trix cereal after customers revolted at a new, dystopian-looking blend that featured more muted colors extracted from radishes, purple carrots, and turmeric.
It was everyone’s good fortune that Colonel Harland Sanders had long kicked the biggest chicken bucket of them all before his company, facing heat from a grilled- and rotisserie-chicken health craze, briefly started selling a skinless chicken offering called Lite ’n Crispy. In 1991, the company even took the extreme step of permanently shortening the Kentucky Fried Chicken name to KFC in an effort to limits its use of what had become an F-word in the early 1990s. That same year, McDonald’s released the fabled McLean Deluxe, which it promoted as a burger with only 9 percent fat by weight. (Most burger mixes range between 15 and 20 percent fat.)
The McLean Deluxe had many of the hallmarks of popular burgers today: it was made to order, touted as higher quality, and cost more than an average fast-food burger. By many accounts, the 91 percent fat-free burger performed extremely well in four test markets, and McDonald’s sank millions into national ads in major newspapers. The company ran an line of enthusiastic television commercials featuring NFL star Kevin Greene, who wore the jersey number 91. The McLean Deluxe also became the official sandwich of the NBA. But still, hesitation was in the air. “Securities analysts doubted whether the new sandwich would give an immediate lift to McDonald’s sales, because, they said, most fast-food customers are not overly concerned about nutrition issues,” one industry observer noted.
Once word got out that McDonald’s was using carrageenan, a popular, basic seaweed derivate, to lock in the moisture lost in the leaner mix, consumers balked at this apparent betrayal to the country’s pure-beef moral code. The McLean Deluxe spectacularly flopped.* By 1993, McDonald’s had started testing the Mega Mac, a half-pound burger, its largest and fattiest ever. “Consumers have had their