What did I read? July Edition

Last month I read a book about auto traffic and a book about memory. This revealed a quirk about my collection of unread books: I’m really intrigued by the things we take for granted every day. When so much of my mental energy goes into tackling big, abstract, messy marketing challenges, it’s strangely comforting to understand that a lot of the seemingly trivial things I take for granted tend to have scores of people behind them, studying, discussing, and improving them—often analyzing them to depths I’d never even considered. It reminds me that there’s always more to learn, and in turn always something new to apply, another dot to be connected.

 In July, as Virginia’s restaurants and markets began to evaluate how well their pivots have paid off, and either dip their toes into soft re-openings, tweak their models yet again, or fold up shop for good, I decided to continue down the path of appreciating the underappreciated—with a focus on dining.

So what did I read in July?

May We Suggest: Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion by Alison Pearlman

I remember fondly a conversation I had some years ago with an extremely talented designer who has tragically since passed away. He mentioned that his family had owned and operated a restaurant for several generations and that learning to create the menu was his first exposure to design. “What do you mean?” I pressed him.

“You know: how to create a path for the eye, how to emphasize certain dishes when you need to use up the ingredients, how to present food at different price points, how to encourage people to order more…” he explained, “making the menu work harder for the business.”

This blew my mind. Restaurant menus weren’t strategic, were they? Sure, they need to romance the food but at its core, a menu isn’t an ad; it’s utilitarian—essentially just a list, right? Can a menu work harder than simply looking good and providing information? Do people actually manipulate the menu to try and influence specific behavior?

The sheer number of hits on Amazon for “menu design” confirmed that yes, there’s a lot more that goes into menu design than information and aesthetics, and I wanted to know more. I chose Alison Pearlman’s book because it was newly released at the time (2018), and I figured it would have the most up-to-date information.

Pearlman is a professor of art history at California State Polytechnic University, and her interest in restaurant menus began when she started collecting them on a trip to Europe. The habit stuck, and she began amassing menus from restaurants all over the country, from New England to San Francisco. (The collection itself, introduced in the first few pages as the genesis of the project but barely mentioned again, would’ve been interesting to explore.) To study of the role of menu design, Pearlman spent three years recording her observations and experiences dining out at more than 60 LA-area “restaurants” (the quotation marks will make sense in a moment).

The book is divided into two sections. The first section—about the signals that menus send about the dining event and the restaurant itself—I enjoyed. Pearlman wove narratives of dining at trendy LA hot spots—which allowed my inner foodie to live vicariously through her—with overviews of various restaurant “business models.” She explained her theory of how menu sets the tone for service and therefore sets the expectations for the experience, which underscored the restaurant’s value proposition and how they intended to be profitable. For example, an assembly-line menu, like a chopped salad restaurant or a sandwich shop or a custom pizza chain, promises food precisely how you like it without the wait times of a sit-down restaurant: control plus convenience. The ordering process is intended to mirror the food assembly process, so the materializing food essentially pulls you along the menu until you get to the point of purchase and go on your way. Contrast that with a family-style menu that boasts big dishes, often with multiple menus for drinks, desserts, etc. This promotes a celebratory, communal atmosphere, with much more food than is often needed, extending the meal (and the memory) into the next day via the doggy bag.

Okay, not an astonishing analysis, but I’m tracking. And from a branding perspective, I loved hearing stories about fashionable LA restaurants I’d never been to—or aren’t around anymore. These independent eateries always do such a good job of creating a unique concept and building an experience around it. But I hadn’t really thought about what menus communicated to me about that experience beyond what’s available to order.

But Part II, which is promised to explore the sale of products, was… well, painfully tactical. What I had hoped would be a psychological analysis of how our minds perceive and respond to choice was instead a bizarrely literal inventory of menu characteristics, presented with little analysis or implications. And again, this might be interesting if Pearlman’s study focused on the creativity of niche restaurateurs and their undying pursuit of differentiation—and in her defense, there were a few sprinkled into the study—but for whatever reason, Pearlman largely reported on the fast-casuals that are in every community in America. An exposé on the secret menus at In-and-Out Burger and McDonalds. The food photography of Dave & Busters. The ingredient descriptors at Carl’s Jr. An entire section dedicated to the various thicknesses of plastic sleeves at the Cheesecake Factory and Rainforest Café. A step-by-step description of online ordering via the Domino’s app. (Trust me, Professor Pearlman, if there’s one thing that I’m confident I have mastered, it’s the Domino’s app.)

My biggest challenge with May We Suggest is that even reflecting back on it now, I can’t for the life of me figure out whom this book is written for. If it’s a study for foodies to understand the care that goes into this part of the dining experience—which admittedly is often overshadowed by the meal itself, why is so much time spent analyzing fast-casual chains? If it’s intended as inspiration or guidance for restauranteurs, why spend so much time explaining the basics of how restaurants work? If it’s a resource for designers, why include so much narrative (and without visuals: the book begged for pictures, though it included none)? If it’s for the average consumer, why explain the history of Applebee’s when the average consumer has undoubtedly been to one in the last year? The only thing that made sense to me was that it was intended to help aliens get quickly caught up on what to expect in Earth’s restaurants in the event that they arrive on the planet and find themselves able to slide into an 8:00 cancellation at California Pizza Kitchen. Too harsh? Consider this passage from the chapter on menu imagery: “The absence of images is just as significant as their presence. It might indicate a greater reliance on other descriptors, such as words.”

I tried to remind myself that much of what I’ve read this year has been from the standpoint of psychologists (often sourcing directly from their journal articles), economists, journalists, professional communicators, and evocative fiction writers. Professor Pearlman approached this project as an art historian: perhaps her goal was not to stake a claim or even to educate but to curate—to walk me through a scene of the world as she has perceived it. But even through this lens, Pearlman herself insisted that this was a “field study” going as far as to include two appendixes diagramming her restaurant visits in exquisite detail, and peppering her observations with loosely correlated third-party scientific studies. Even some of the ground-breaking economists I’ve been reading about—Amos Tversky and Dan Ariely—made cameos in the context of studies about price sensitivity. But the majority of these studies ended with language to the effect of “…but it remains to be seen how this affects restaurant sales.” Then why include them at all?

I’d hoped for some semblance of closure in Pearlman’s conclusion, but alas there was none to be found. After recapping the previous chapters, she introduced the concept in the closing paragraphs that maybe despite all this—the paper choices, the photography choices, the format choices, the adjectives, the entree order, the decision to use dollar signs in the prices or not—that diners persuade themselves by being open to persuasion as part of the restaurant experience—an idea nowhere else discussed and then abruptly abandoned at the end of the book.

Despite the systematic injustices of food disparity and the oft overinflated pomp of fine dining, at its core meals are a great unifier of the human experience. Sitting down with loved ones, whether at Nobu or Chik-fil-a, elevates food from the simple act of sustenance to a shared experience, a common ground. I was disappointed that May We Suggest seemed to neglect the soul of the menu and the story it tells us about our food. But thankfully, the next book I moved on to covered that concept in spades.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

The Omnivore’s Dilemma has been recommended by enough friends that I was confident it would not disappoint. And it did not. In fact, it was probably my most enjoyable read of the year so far.

A journalist by trade and professor of non-fiction at Harvard, Pollan’s explores the complicated history, economics, ethics, and philosophy of how we eat by following the paths of four titular meals:

1. A fast-food meal, from the cornfields to the feedlots to the chicken nuggets snacked on in the car
2. An organic meal from the seemingly idyllic farms portrayed in Whole Foods marketing
3. A meal raised on a symbiotic “grass farm” here in Virginia
4. A meal that the author insisted on hunting, growing, and foraging himself in the wilds of California

The goal of these intensive explorations was to regain a sense of perspective and respect for the food that we eat as Americans and to reconnect with the people, the heart, and the issues at their core.

As a foodie, as a marketer, and as a wannabe homesteader, I loved every page of this book. It was jam-packed with fascinating facts and provocative opinions. Pollan does a phenomenal job of making his own perspectives and experiences clear while exploring counterpoints and context. For example, a section on solutions for the ethical processing of livestock and the moral/environmental case for vegetarianism flows neatly into the philosophical differences between animal pain and animal suffering, and “the joy of the conflicted hunter.” Pollan documents his own dissonance in a way where you turn over each argument with him, feel his conflict, and understand the complexity of many deep-rooted issues, from the role of politics in big agriculture to the psychology of diet fads.

I particularly enjoyed Pollan’s experience with farmer Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia. My wife Amanda had taken me for a tour of Polyface for my birthday last year (yep, I’m that guy), and I’ve enjoyed Salatin speak on several occasions, most recently as a guest speaker at the VCU Institute for Contemporary Art here in Richmond. Opinionated and charmingly curmudgeonly, Salatin has built a small empire on the philosophy that farming can be morally and economically productive not by trying to beat nature at its own game, but by reading and recreating natural systems.

Unlike industrial agriculture, Salatin was an early champion of polyculture: rearing multiple organisms on one piece of land by intensely managing their rotation. For example, Polyface farmhands use temporary fences to rotate cows onto a new pasture to graze for about a week before moving them into a different paddock. After three days, chickens are rotated onto this pasture in contained "eggmobiles," where they pick grubs out of the cowpies and spread the manure. By doing what they were designed to do in nature, the cows have healthier and more flavorful meat, the chickens lay incredibly rich eggs, pests and disease are culled at the source, and grasses regrow stronger and healthier, ready for the next graze. (It sounds obvious, but to understand how unique this concept is, it helps to have read the preceding chapter on modern industrial livestock operations.) Polyface hogs happily turn Polyface cow bedding into compost. Polyface turkeys pick pests out of Polyface orchards. Polyface chickens neutralize the manure of Polyface rabbits. Salatin avoids the cost of buying excessive feed and the medications that make that feed palatable to livestock, which helps make his operation more profitable on less land. Everyone lives their best, most respected lives, and as Pollan noted after spending a week as a Polyface farmhand, consumers willingly pay for that assurance and promise of quality.

Pollan admittedly borrowed the title of the book from a long-standing series of discussions and research papers about a somewhat unflattering connection: humans and rats. Like us, rats are omnivores, their bodies evolving to accept a wide range of meats, seeds, fruits, vegetables, sweeteners, fungi, and even chemicals (which is what makes them so notoriously difficult to poison). This broad diet not only affected human physiology—from the evolution of our jaws and teeth to handle ever-broader kinds of foods to the growth in the problem-solving parts of our brains to help us find more of it—but may have planted the very seeds of our culture. Our preference for cooking and composed meals began as ways for us to make food safer and use food pairings to fill in nutritional gaps. Dining together helped us see the effects of new foods without the whole group bearing the risk. Unlike rats, as we have evolved humans have used science and technology to bend the natural cycles to our appetites, effectively eliminating the seasonality of plants, accelerating the life cycles of our meat, wielding politics to influence what and how we grow crops, and then turning those surplus crops into lucrative food additives to create entirely new flavors.

If what we and the rat share is the competitive advantage to be able to eat nearly everything, the omnivore’s dilemma then is the complex answer to the simple question “what should we eat?” This is the question that Pollan explored over the course of his four meals.

Critics of The Omnivore’s Dilemma have complained about the structure of the book: the “action” is often interrupted by a tangent that provides background or counterpoint to the topic at hand. But I think Pollan’s writing style was one of my favorite elements of the read, indeed the thing that helped me get through a 400-page book in about ten days. The swings in topics and perspectives, always entertaining and generally finding their way back, felt like—well, good dinner conversation.

Are you hungry yet? Let me know in the comments below.