THE FOOD ISSUE the Quest to Make Fast Food Healthy in the November
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For Immediate Release: October 26, 2015 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 THE FOOD ISSUE The Quest to Make Fast Food Healthy In the November 2, 2015, issue of The New Yorker, in “Freedom from Fries” (p. 56), Michael Specter examines the swift, profitable rise of fast casual dining—defined by thriving chains including Chipotle, Lyfe Kitchen, and Sweetgreen—and travels to McDonald’s global head- quarters, in Oak Brook, Illinois, to see at first hand how the food giant is attempting to evolve with America’s tastes. This year, for the first time since 1970, McDonald’s will close more locations in the U.S. than it opens. “Society is shifting in a major direction, so guess what— McDonald’s is going to shift, too,” Dan Coudreaut, the company’s executive chef and vice-president of culinary innovation, tells Specter, who notes that it is “trying everything” it can to win back deserters—including the recent decisions to abandon margarine for real butter and discontinue the sale of chickens that have been raised with antibiotics—two changes that will have far-reaching effects on America’s agriculture industry. But the shift to more natural offerings doesn’t mean that McDonald’s food is getting healthier. Specter, who tried an updated version of the Egg McMuffin while at McDonald’s H.Q., writes that it “seemed more like a compromise than an innovation, with butter as its main attraction.” Coudreaut notes that it is real ingredients, not reduced calories, that the McDonald’s customer is asking for. Why, then, have sales continued to slide? “We do have a problem,’’ Coudreaut says. “Obviously. When we say one-hundred-per-cent pure beef, no fillers, no additives, people still don’t believe it. And I don’t know how to get my arms around that. It is very frustrating.” Lyfe Kitchen, which offers a large, varied selection of omnivore, vegan, and gluten-free items—at a slightly higher price than its fast-ca- sual competitors—was founded five years ago by two former McDonald’s executives. Today, there are eighteen locations nationwide, with plans to expand further. Lyfe Kitchen has raised millions of dollars from investors—something it has in common with the national, sus- tainable salad mecca Sweetgreen. “I see this place becoming the McDonald’s of the future,” Michael Donahue, the co-founder and chief brand officer, tells Specter. “The good McDonald’s. The healthy, inviting, sustainable McDonald’s.” But, Specter writes, in the United States today, because of the industrial farm system that regulates McDonald’s pricing, and the high cost of local, high-quality ingredients, you can sell meals for a dollar or you can sell nutritious meals. Doing both, on a large scale, is not yet possible. How the World’s 50 Best Restaurants are Chosen In “Who’s to Judge?” (p. 66), Lauren Collins goes behind the scenes of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and looks at how a guide that began as a stunt became an arbiter of fine food. The first World’s 50 Best Restaurants list ap- peared in 2002, in Res tau rant, a British trade magazine. The project—intended to be a depar- ture from the Michelin Guide’s gray-faced sensibility—was supposed to be a onetime thing, Chris Maillard, an editor at the time, tells Collins. Maillard says, “We put the list together by calling contacts and friends all over the world and eliciting recommendations, then added in our own suggestions, and ordered it in a rather slapdash manner.” He adds, “Which all sounds a bit loose and random, but, in its first year, the list wasn’t intended to be at all definitive.” The honored chefs, however, paid attention, and they loyally joined for the awards ceremony—a trea- sured annual debauch. “Because the chefs came, the list mattered, and because the list mattered the chefs came,” Collins writes. “It was a question of reputation, but also of profit.” For the most ambitious restaurants, inclusion can be the difference between obscurity and renown. Today, chefs play to the list—now a behemoth, sponsored by San Pellegrino and Acqua Panna—mind- ful of its aesthetic preferences and its methodological weaknesses. “I have friends who are smart, interesting guys who lose their shit over getting No. 1,” the chef David Chang tells Collins, later adding, “I can criticize it all I want, but it’s so powerful.” Unlike Michelin, which employs a brigade of full-time inspectors, the 50 Best relies on volun- teers, a group of “restaurant-industry experts.” As Collins details, aside from how their duties are divided, and an eighteen-month time frame for visiting eligible restaurants prior to voting, there are few other rules. However, voters can’t select restaurants in which they have a financial BRUNETTI IVAN stake, and, for the most part, they are supposed to remain anonymous. The organization does not reimburse jurors for their meals, nor does it insist that the jurors themselves pay. Freebies, therefore, are O.K. Collins asks William Drew, the group editor of the World’s 50 Best, if he had considered giving the jurors a budget, if only to eliminate the impression that they were susceptible to being bought. “It doesn’t make economic sense,” he says. “We’re not about sending a small group of élite inspectors around the world. It’s about people’s existing views.” Helen Rosner, of the Web site Eater, tells Collins, “Even if you set out to do this with absolutely impeccable integrity, it is aston- ishingly unrealistic, given the scale of humanity and our life span and our gastronomic limitations, for anyone to make any kind of in- formed objective linear ranking in a certain time frame of the best restaurants in the world.” Collins notes that the list might more accu- rately be called The World’s Hottest 50 Restaurants, or 50 Restaurants We Enjoyed During the Past Eighteen Months. Seaweed Could Be a Miracle Food—If We Can Figure Out How to Make It Taste Good In “A New Leaf ” (p. 42), Dana Goodyear explores the emerging market for seaweed—which could be on its way to replacing kale as the most culturally ubiquitous green. “The ocean covers seventy per cent of the earth and produces less than two per cent of our food,” Good- year writes. “To grow the rest, we use almost forty per cent of the world’s land and nearly three-quarters of our fresh water.” Seaweed, which requires neither fresh water nor fertilizer, is one of the world’s most sustainable and nutritious crops. “It absorbs dissolved nitrogen, phos- phorous, and carbon dioxide directly from the sea—its footprint is negative—and proliferates at a terrific rate,” Goodyear writes, noting that it is the culinary equivalent of an electric car. “You’re not just gaining nutrition, you’re also gaining absolution from guilt,” Mark Bom- ford, the director of the Yale Sustainable Food Program, tells Goodyear. “This is your get-out-of-anxiety-free card.” As industrial land- based agriculture becomes increasingly untenable—environmentally destructive and at the same time vulnerable to drought and chang- ing weather—we are being pushed out to sea. “We’re picking one of the toughest food types to convince Americans to eat,” Bren Smith, a Connecticut-based kelp farmer, tells Goodyear. “But we have no choice.” For the U.S. market, seaweed snacks may prove to be the point of entry—and the first battleground with kale. Mike Shim, a Korean-American former Yahoo employee, and Robert Mock, a Texan who thought his young son’s nori sheets lacked a certain crunch, started Ocean’s Halo seaweed products, which today are sold at Whole Foods, in the chips section. Shim thinks the seaweed-snack business can develop along the lines of coconut water, which is now a billion-dollar industry. “We’re only two years old and we’re selling millions of dollars’ worth of seaweed snacks a year,” he tells Goodyear. “We’re really focussing on mainstreaming seaweed for the American consumer.” How Packaging Can Make Food More Flavorful In “Accounting for Taste” (p. 50), Nicola Twilley looks at the work of Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University who is changing our understanding of how the five human senses together influence the perception of taste. Spence runs Ox- ford’s Crossmodal Research Lab. In 2004, he became the first person to successfully demonstrate how the taste of food can be influenced by the addition or subtraction of sound, with what he calls his “sonic chip” experiment, which found that the crunch of a Pringles potato chip had an effect on flavor. “To understand how the brain perceives food, he says, we need to map out the dozens of unconscious rules according to which it combines information from the mouth with that coming from the hand, the nose, the eyes, and the ears,” Twilley writes. “Over the past decade, Spence has conducted a series of experiments that do exactly that.” According to Spence, consumers are constantly, if unwittingly, proving his point that taste can be altered through color, shape, or sound alone. Spence has discovered that a strawberry-flavored mousse tastes ten per cent sweeter when served from a white container rather than a black one; that coffee tastes nearly twice as intense but only two-thirds as sweet when it is drunk from a white mug rather than a clear glass one; and that bittersweet toffee tastes ten per cent more bitter if it is eaten while listening to low-pitched music.