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 , 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 Res­tau­rant, a British trade magazine. The project—intended to be a depar- ture from the ’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 , 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. “These effects do exist,” he says. “The only question is whether and how we will use them.” According to Twilley, it does not require an enormous leap of imagination to see how these kinds of cognitive insights could be incorporated into commercial packaging design, and, gradually, this is exactly what is happening. “Of course, a food company that uses visual or sonic cues to alter consumer experience could readily be accused of manipulation,” she writes. “It’s not about cheating,” Christophe Cauvy, the former head of innovation for Europe at the advertising agency JWT, says, adding, “This is really about a superior experience.” According to Twilley, if Spence’s insights help to enhance the intensity of the eating experience, the argu- ment goes, they will provide more enjoyable and more satisfying consumption, rather than simply increase it.

Authenticity in the Balkans of Barbecue

In “In Defense of the True ’Cue” (p. 38), Calvin Trillin investigates the regional varieties of North Carolina barbecue, and speaks to the founders of a campaign to recognize the cuisine as a significant element in the culture of the South. In North Carolina, which is second only to Iowa in pork production, the single word “barbecue” on a menu is understood to mean barbecued pork. As such, pork is the only kind of barbecue that the Campaign for Real Barbecue—founded in 2013 by John Shelton Reed, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, and Dan Levine, who runs a barbecue blog—considers “regionally appropriate” for North Carolina. The name of the Campaign for Real Barbecue was inspired by the Campaign for Real Ale, in the United Kingdom, which was founded to protest the “bland processed beers” that big brewers were passing off on the British public. The pledge posted on its Web site says, “I will not eat meat cooked only with gas or electricity and mislabeled ‘barbecue,’ except when courtesy requires it.” Dan Levine tells Trillin, “We’re not fanatics. We just think there’s one right way to do things.” At this point, only fifty or sixty barbecue places in the state have been certified by the campaign as cooking exclusively with wood. “That’s more than John and Dan expected to find, but it still accounts for what they estimate is only about ten per cent of the barbecue purveyors in North Carolina,” Trillin writes. Plus: In Comment, Amy Davidson reflects on Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, where “her interrogators manifested all of Washington’s pathologies—dysfunction, partisan squabbling, insularity—in such extreme form that Clin- ton came across not only as a grownup, as her supporters had hoped, but as the most normal person in the room” (p. 29); in the Financial Page, James Surowiecki explains how a government crackdown is causing America’s for-profit-education bubble to deflate (p. 34); in Shouts & Murmurs, Ethan Kuperberg imagines how Bernie Sanders might greet a group of trick-or-treaters (p. 49); Emily Nussbaum watches the second season of HBO’s “The Leftovers” (p. 80); James Wood reads Lauren Groff ’s new novel, “Fates and Furies” (p. 83); Dan Chiasson reads new collections of poetry by John Wieners and John Updike (p. 86); Nicholas Lemann reads several books on the American South and considers how progress in civil rights has been matched by the Southernization of the nation’s politics (p. 90); Alex Ross listens to the Hungarian-born, British-based pianist András Schiff ’s revelatory study of Schubert’s final sonata (p. 94); Hua Hsu listens to an upcoming album by Will Toledo, as Car Seat Headrest: “Teens of Style” (p. 96); in a Showcase, the photographer Pari Du- kovic captures New York’s street lamps, the soft glow of which, by 2017, will be replaced by brighter, energy-saving light (p. 71); in a Sketchbook, the artist Barry Blitt depicts Halloween costumes of the New York Mets (p. 62); and new Fiction by Ariel Dorfman (p. 76).

Online: On the Political Scene podcast, Jane Mayer discusses Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi hearings with Dorothy Wickenden; on the monthly Poetry podcast, Calvin Trillin speaks with Paul Muldoon about Ogden Nash’s poem “Autres Bêtes, Autres Mœurs” and his own poem “Oh, Y2K, Yes Y2K, How Come It Has to End This Way?”; and in an interactive test, explore how the experience of food and drink is influenced by sound.

Tablet & Phone Extras: A slide show of North Carolina barbecue; poetry readings by Ange Mlinko and Gibbons Ruark; Ariel Dorf- man reads her short story; and Richard Brody picks his Movie of the Week, Brian De Palma’s “Mission to Mars,” from 2000.

The November 2, 2015, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands beginning Monday, October 26. WILLIAM HAEFELI