Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,49
fill of healthier fare,” Barry Gibbons, then the chairman and chief executive officer of Burger King, decreed in a 1993 interview with The Wall Street Journal. “They’re saying, ‘Thanks for the choice, thanks for the [nutrition] info. Whopper and fries, please.’”
But as diners, particularly millennials, use their growing consumer power to flock toward healthier or more sustainable options, a cautious brand of fast-food experimentation will continue. In recent years, White Castle has introduced veggie and vegan sliders, and Taco Bell has touted meatless items that would land on an official American Vegetarian Association–approved menu. Even Carl’s Jr.–Hardee’s, the brand that ran a several-year campaign with sexed-up ads and featured a burger topped with hot dogs and potato chips, was also recently seen promoting new burgers made with ground turkey and grass-fed beef.
As these chains test the progressive waters, others are still holding wholly fast to their sybaritic missions, which bank on value, speed, familiarity, and the gluttonous creativity of their menus. Beloved regional outfits like Cook Out, In-N-Out, and Freddy’s still don’t have token salads on their menus. Meanwhile, Sonic, America’s fourth-largest burger chain, saw its sales boom in the midteens by doubling down on cheap burgers, sweet drinks, and hot dogs, instead of embracing salads and wraps. (Though in 2018, it started a strategy of healthful incrementalism by briefly testing smaller, lower-calorie burgers with mixed patties made of 25 percent mushrooms.) Meanwhile, Arby’s reversed a years-long sales slump after ditching its Slicing Up Freshness slogan in favor of a more swaggering We Have the Meats mantra, voiced in commercials by a booming Ving Rhames. Its quirky ad campaigns have included a public apology to vegetarians, along with a call-in helpline for herbivores tempted by their offerings.
With some bemusement, Pollan told me even his acolytes don’t love the idea of fast food transmogrifying into some kind of bland and polite adulthood. “It’s funny, I’ve often asked audiences, ‘So how would you feel if McDonald’s announced tomorrow that they were going all organic: grass-fed beef, organic french fries, no high-fructose corn syrup in the soda?’ And everybody is like, ‘Aww…’ They don’t like that idea. ‘It’s not what we want,’” he said. “I find that very curious because that would represent a tremendous victory. If you think about all the pesticides that would not be sprayed on, all the atrazine no longer sprayed on cornfields, if you think about all the animals having much better lives, meat being much healthier.”
Something poignant hums beneath this sentiment, this begrudging acknowledgment of the place that fast food now occupies in the American imagination as part of an inviolably holy (or unholy) tradition. At least one explanation for why some don’t want fast food to change is that, as Pollan suggested, it represents a time-honored means of reward, an infrequent indulgence, a treat. “That is what fast food was for me growing up,” he said. “And I loved it. I loved going to McDonald’s. It happened once or twice a month. And we would have soda and french fries and several hamburgers. The hamburgers then cost like fifteen cents. I think that’s true with all sorts of junk food. It’s fine as a special-occasion food. I think when it becomes the default is when we get into trouble. And that’s what happened in the last couple decades. One-third of American kids are [literally] having fast food today.”
Navigating the push and pull of these two very different interpretations of purity has inspired some strange corporate behavior. In late 2015, Kraft revamped the recipe for its iconic blue-box mac and cheese, swapping out its dyes and preservatives for a combination of paprika, annatto, and turmeric. To avoid upsetting the faithful, Kraft waited three months and sold 50 million boxes before announcing what they had done. “We’d invite you to try it, but you already have,” read one of the ad taglines. Franchises such as Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s have tweaked their offerings to make them healthier by reducing portions and subbing for certain ingredients, while often avoiding publicly announcing all of the changes because of the potential affront to their fan bases. “We call it stealth health,” one Chick-fil-A nutritional consultant told Nation’s Restaurant News in 2013. “We didn’t necessarily want the customer to know we’ve tweaked their favorite product.” She added, “If customers ask, we’ll tell them, but it’s almost like you’re forcing them to notice a change if you tell them.”
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America is torn between a constituency that demands serious, progressive change for the long-term