American gullets have yet another reason to open and rejoice. I was driving around, working actually, when I came across this sign at a friendly neighborhood burger restaurant.
Nothing promises a better eating experience than flavor.
Hard not to notice an advert like that.
Here’s how it went down: It was about 11:35:49 am. I’d gotten an early start to the day. In my lunch cooler – See, I pack my lunch in a cooler, a lunchbox really, if I’m to be completely honest, one that’s covered in pictures of other coolers. In my lunch cooler I only had half a cucumber and a baggie of shaved ham (water added) along with a serving of pearl-shaped mozzarella pearls, because I’m kind of weird. That was it! Not even close to a full caloric and nutritional profile for a healthy shrinking boy such as myself.
Oh, and half a bag of sunflower seeds, original, but I like to dole those out as treats for a job well done or when I sit without too much protest.
I knew I might not make it through the day if I didn’t supplement the day’s intake with extra food so spotting a trusted font I pulled into the parking lot of this eatery. It’s a quaint little family place known for quality meals, fresh ingredients and friendly service, as well as individualized ketchup available in easy-open foil pouches. As well as their trademark trend-bucking yellow napkins. Happily obeying the signs instructing me toward the Drive Thru I rounded the building and came upon the sign.
Brakes? Slammed. Eyes? Aghast. Groin? A little sore from doing squat lunges the other day. At first I didn’t know what to think. Were my eyes deceiving me? I read the sign again. Will I ever get to that pile of mail on my kitchen counter? I read it again. Was I hallucinating? Still there. The sign was real. Could it be? Had someone finally figured out how to improve the air of food? And all they had to was dip it in flavor!?
I used to think the impossible wasn’t possible. Now I know I was wrong. Oh, the possibilities!
Unassailably, the innovators at Wendy’s have achieved one of the great challenges of society. Mass sanitation, rural electrification, the Moon landing, no lick stamps– these are a pauper’s achievements. A planet’s progress is measured in greater steps, small and large, and greater bites, mostly large. This is one of the biggest. I can only imagine the cheers of elation and the rivers of champagne the flowed across the lips of the lab-coated culinary research engineers at the Wendy’s test kitchen upon the discovery that it was indeed possible to make perfect perfecter.
And to think, all this time, all these years, all that was needed was to take chicken and dip it in flavor. An achieve — hold on, I just noticed a piece of fried rice in my keyboard … ok, got it out. I hate it when that happens and you end up just pushing it in and it disappears beneath the keys — where was I?
Why don’t they just sell the flavor? If flavor is the reason to eat, then lets cut out the middleman. Or middlechicken, as it were. I’d order a cup of flavor. Not a big one, of course, that’s ridiculous. A medium would do. Heck, even a small would be enough if I’ve already had a cup at another Wendy’s. Shit, I’d stick my head out the car window and turn my mouth to the sky and then have them hold the ladle out the window and dump it into my mouth like a regurgitating mother bird.
They said they couldn’t do that. So I got something off the dollar menu. Burp.
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