It's not often that people complain about not having enough to read. In 2010, Google calculated that there were 130,000,000 books in the world. This excludes Kindles, Kindle Singles, the internet, emails, ad copy, tattoos, menus, street signs and so on. It also leaves out what’s between the lines. Excess, not scarcity, is the problem. And yet more matter keeps arriving, more ingeniously. On Thursday, the restaurant chain Chipotle unveiled a new line of literary food packaging. It’s called Cultivating Thought: brief musings, written for the purpose, adorn the surfaces of cups and bags. Their read time is two minutes and the authors are famous – writers, comedians, a Harvard neuroscientist, a Nobel laureate. “Focus on an ordinary thing,” instructs the journalist Michael Lewis in his contribution – “the faintly geological strata of the insides of a burrito, for instance”. He calls the project “delightfully bizarre.”
The idea was Jonathan Safran Foer's. The novelist, a Chipotle regular, had ordered a burrito, but found he lacked something to read while he ate it. And then it came to him. Afterward, he emailed Steve Ells, Chipotle’s CEO. “I bet shitloads of people go into your restaurants every day, and … have very similar experiences.” Ells was struck, and the two talked theory. Could Chipotle provide food and a diversion from it? Traditionally, literature doesn’t work in a supporting role. Only writing that is trying to sell us something occurs on surfaces that are not intended for it.
Ells and Safran Foer thought this was irrational. As Malcolm Gladwell, who participated in the project, says in an accompanying interview: “The goal of storytelling should be to make storytelling as ubiquitous as music.”
At 37, Safran Foer is an old hand at the paradoxes of mixed media. He has written an undergraduate thesis that became a bestselling novel (Everything is Illuminated), a memoir that was also a denunciation of carnivorousness (Eating Animals), and an homage to Bruno Schulz predicated on the mutilation of his books (Tree of Codes). Ells decided to make him the curator of an imprint of fast-food literature. This involved team-building. It also involved ontology. “Must a cup, or bag,” asks the packaging line’s website, “suffer an existence that is limited to just one humble purpose?”
Safran Foer is a vegetarian, but he has described Chipotle’s business as a “model of what scaling good practices might look like.” He maintains that corporate left him alone. He told Vanity Fair: “I selected the writers, and insofar as there was any editing, I did it.” Some of the writing seems pointedly unappetizing. Toni Morrison, who contributed a memoir, writes of “crowds slobbering” and “red froth”.
For participants, the certainty of readers outweighed the indignity of the format. As the journalist Sheri Fink, who also contributed, explains: “What writer could resist a captive audience? Reading a book is obviously a big ask, but reading a cup is a much smaller one.”
Thus the reader is the prisoner of Tex-Mex. This diminished ask is the price of storytelling on the scale envisioned by Gladwell. It transforms writing from a main event into an accompaniment. James Joyce once told an interviewer: “The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to my works.” Joyce didn’t want readers. He wanted hostages. His books aspired to replace the universe. Safran Foer and his collaborators ask only the devotion that is compatible with digestion. At the Chipotle on 42nd Street in New York, the cups and bags had yet to arrive. The public library stood a hundred feet away. Its security guard assured me I wouldn’t be able to take a burrito inside.
