Cool or Not Cool: Jonathan Safran Foer Writing For Chipotle

Image via ChipotleThere are tons of authors in Park Slope, as we know, but Jonathan Safran Foer and his wife Nicole Krauss have been our local literary darlings for some years now. This popular pair can polarize people like any successful authors, but they’ve certainly become neighborhood fixtures (that is, until someone springs for their brownstone with its astonishing backyard and they decamp to Carroll Gardens, as their plan is rumored to be). What’s had people in the neighborhood talking over the last week is that JSF’s next addition to his literary canon will be printed on fast-food packaging. Yep, the stridently vegetarian author of Eating Animals will be writing for Chipotle, a company which serves up well north of 100 million pounds of delicious meat a year.

As a recent piece in Vanity Fair recounts, Foer was in Chipotle having a burrito and was struck with such an acute sense of boredom (no book, newspaper, or smartphone apparently) that he was inspired to contact the CEO of the company about getting a gang of prominent writers together to contribute pieces to be printed on the chain’s packaging, and in doing so providing an opportunity for customers to take in some skillful prose. For example, his first piece, The Two-Minute Personality Test, is a battery of philosophical questions including ‘What is it about death that you’re afraid of?’ (not being able to get more chips and guacamole obviously, nom nom nom). He’s actually managed to enlist nine pretty awesome other people to the cause, including writers as diverse as Toni Morrison and Judd Apatow. All of the writers were paid by the way, but Chipotle won’t tell how much. Those who like to rend clothes and gnash teeth about writers becoming corporate shills may commence doing so…now.

Some would think Foer writing for such a carnivorous chain is puzzling (Maoz or JustSalad instead maybe?), but he clearly states that the seed of the idea came from his personal experience as a customer. Also, as far as meat-consuming restaurants go, there are worse than Chipotle, which ostensibly has a serious ethical commitment to their ingredients. However, Foer’s rationale seems a little clumsy. Quoted in the VF article, he laid down disclaimers that he had weighed the fact that Chipotle served meat, he didn’t usually interact with large companies and wasn’t interested in endorsements. These quibbles aside, as Foer put it,

"I got to know quite a bit about the company, not in the process of doing this, but in the process of Eating Animals [sic]. Chipotle was pointed to quite often as a model of what scaling good practices might look like. The truth is, that’s not really why I did this. I mean, I wouldn’t have done it if it was for another company like a McDonald’s, but what interested me is 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries, or bookstores. Something felt very democratic and good about this.”

As an aside, the two chief execs at Chipotle make 50 million bucks a year between them (to the outrage of their stockholders). I’m also interested to know who eats at Chipotle and really doesn’t have access to either a public library or a bookstore, but those are tangential matters.

So: cool or not cool? Is this just a way for JSF and his friends to get some wide-scale PR and make a quick buck, or does he really feel the company’s a useful and novel means to get thought-provoking writing to the masses; a way to bring a little introspective calm to an otherwise busy and distracted day? Should material on a paper cup have the same intellectual weight as something that’s published, or does the fact that original writing will end up grease-stained and balled up in the bottom of a bin cheapen it? Let us know what you think!