Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,50
health of the country, and another that views change as a mix of sanctimonious, overreaching, price-hiking, doomed-to-fail socialist poppycock. This physical and political division and disconnection in the United States extends deeply into food. For some, the craft-coffee craze might seem ubiquitous, but over 90 percent of Americans still buy their coffee pre-ground. And while tiny craft breweries have grown in fashion, as recently as 2015, eleven brewers were still producing over 90 percent of America’s beer.*
Professor Shashi Matta researches consumer behavior at Ohio State University in Columbus, where he is also the faculty director of the school’s MBA programs. Matta’s research includes studying how parents make choices for their children in fast-food restaurants. In other words, he wants to know what influences parents’ thinking as chains begin to offer more options in their kids’ meals, such as “milk and not pop” or “fruit slices and not fries.” These decisions, he explained, are significant because they tend to have lasting impacts on the long-term habits of children. It’s also meaningful because studies suggest that many parents can’t afford to serve food to their children that they might reject.
“The important factor contributing to what parents choose is what they think others in their social networks choose,” he explained. “We actually measure choice [in our research], but they fill out information about themselves in the survey, information that asks them what others in their social group—friends, family, neighbors—how do they view fast food?” For Matta, these responses helped inform a theory of how the priorities are driven: “I would argue it’s social. People, human beings, tend to compare themselves to others, and it’s a continuum. Some of us like to compare ourselves to others a lot, and some of us do it a lesser extent, but people do compare themselves to others.”
This helps explain the wild array of responses to the fickle and shifting tides of American diets. Every company is angling to stand out by changing dramatically or by standing pat. “Fast food has now become so many different things,” Matta explained. “White Castle is different from McDonald’s is very different from Wendy’s is very different from Taco Bell.”
In the spirit of this specialization, Matta suggested a visit to Acre, a farm-to-table fast-food concept started by a former student of his on the onetime site of a KFC. The light, airy space had shiny wood tables and hanging lamps and was festooned with plants, books, and growlers. It had craft beers on tap and not one menu item that cost $10 or more. I ordered a mixed-berry smoothie, which at $4.50 cost about a dollar more than a large-sized berry smoothie at McDonald’s. It took about five minutes to make—an amount of time that might have irritated me on a normal day.
While I waited, I wandered around the space ogling the chalkboards marked up with seasonal dishes and a list of local purveyors. Mounted near the entrance was a framed crop-themed illustration, featuring a giant carrot, a plump radish, and a huge head of kale sprouting from the earth. Floating above the crops, all too perfectly, was a quote by Michael Pollan: “The wonderful thing about food is that you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world.”
12 CRISP DIGITAL NUGGETS
Let’s nugget that meat up and make some real money.
—WALLACE
Carter Wilkerson had no way of knowing how profoundly his life was going to change when the sixteen-year-old high school junior in Reno, Nevada, innocuously reached out to Wendy’s over Twitter. “Yo Wendys,” he asked in 2017, “how many retweets for a year of chicken nuggets?” Within a minute, the Wendy’s account, which has become one of the truer sages of the social media era, responded, “18 million.” It was an impossible order; after all, only one tweet had even reached 3 million retweets before. But Wilkerson quickly took a screenshot of the exchange and tweeted it out to his 150 or so followers with a plea: “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS.”
The cruel digital universe, which usually taketh, decided to giveth. By the next morning, Carter’s call for nuggs had been retweeted fifty thousand times. His campaign gained a lovable hashtag slogan, #NuggsForCarter, and an unlikely coalition including social media influencers, young pop idols, Hollywood stars, Kathy Griffin, Senator Marco Rubio, and television anchor Jake Tapper amplified Wilkerson’s tweet with their approvals. “It’s good to have dreams,” added actor Aaron Paul. Even the automatons joined in. Microsoft’s Twitter account blasted out,