"Naturally and humanely raised."
"In the U.S.A."
From those nasty, dusty feed lots? No way. This stuff is "from small, family-run farms."
Well, welcome to the East Coast edition, at least.
Back in 1948, the same year that the McDonald brothers automated fast food in California, a far smaller, far more conscientious burger chain opened the country's first drive-through: It was called In-N-Out Burger, and it has remained on the West Coast something of the anti-McDonald's - the road not taken on the way to Fast Food Nation and its multitude of well-plowed sins.
Eric Schlosser, who wrote the book, literally, on those sins cataloged In-N-Out's other way: top wages and benefits; no microwaves, heat lamps or even freezers; the ground beef is fresh; the potatoes are peeled every day; the food-quality ranked at the top of the fast-food chain (in consumer surveys that ranked McDonald's quality at the bottom).
The burger wars have ebbed and flowed since. The McLean bombed in the '90s. Restraint gave way to extra bacon and cheese. Fried chicken came on strong, perceived as healthier, though its obscene calorie counts in some cases outstripped beef's.
Michael Pollan's writings hammered at the environmental toll of assembly-line beef production. Your average burger's carbon footprint, it turned out, was as unsightly as the working conditions in your average abattoir.
Among a cohort of males from 18 to 35, none of that mattered: They've long accounted for 20 percent of the traffic, but up to a whopping 50 percent of the sales.
But there's another market out there, carnivorous, but looking for cover, tuned to a more-contemporary, defensible frequency.
