The Washington Post reported recently on the opening of a bizarre new front in our apparently endless culture wars:
Cracker Barrel’s country tranquility was apparently shattered on Monday, when the chain announced on Facebook that customers could customize their breakfast plate with a plant-based protein as a replacement for their traditional bacon or smoked sausage.
. . .
The blowback was immediate and intense. Comments, hundreds and hundreds of them, were split along ideological, generational and political lines.
“Blowback.” “Immediate.” “Intense.” Well, yes. On Facebook. But does that mean anything in particular? Is it real? Are 100 or 500 or 1,000 or even 12,000 comments on Facebook indicative of public opinion broadly? Maybe. Pollsters are happy with a sample size of 1,200 or so. But polling, flawed as it can be, has certain standards. (The Pew Research Center is about as good as it gets, polling-wise.)
It’s possible—likely, even—those Facebook comments reflect the opinion of people who spend entirely too much time online. So I’m skeptical.
The Post frames the “dust-up” as a new culture-war skirmish and recounts some of Cracker Barrel’s past controversies, including a leaked 1991 memo and a raft of racial discrimination lawsuits that led to a five-year consent decree with the federal government.
USA Today published a similar story, headlined, “Is the Cracker Barrel menu getting 'woke'? Meat eaters rage on Facebook over addition of Impossible sausage.”
“Rage.” Rage? Over optional fake meat? I wonder how many people who posted comments even remember what they said a week later. It’s 97 percent hot gas, two percent ephemera, with the remaining one percent allowing for the possibility of something truly profound.
In any event, after the USA Today story came the aggregation dog pile.
CBS News: “Cracker Barrel's plant-based sausage patty sparks backlash.”
Insider: “People are vowing they'll never go back to Cracker Barrel after the chain added vegan sausage to its menus.”
CNN.com: “Cracker Barrel sparks uproar for plant-based sausage critics say is 'woke.’”
As any professional journalist will tell you, three makes a trend. As far as I could tell, though, the only real difference among all of those stories was the Facebook comments the reporter decided to highlight. They had more than 12,000 from which to choose, after all. Everything else—the company’s history and controversies—was repeated more or less with only small changes to avoid accusations of plagiarism or parroting.
Here are some of the ostensibly “conservative” takes Washington Post food reporter Tim Carman selected:
“All the more reason to stop eating at Cracker Barrel. This is not what Cracker Barrel was to be all about,” one person wrote.
“I just lost respect for a once great Tennessee company,” another injected.
“If I wanted a salad . . . I would in fact order a salad . . . stop with the plant based ‘meat’ crap,” wrote a third.
“Oh Noes . . . the Cracker Barrel has gone WOKE!!! It really is the end times . . . ,” another commented.
I’m not quite sure the last one is on the level. As for the rest, it’s all a bit overwrought, isn’t it? What, exactly, is Cracker Barrel supposed to “be all about”? The company was founded in 1969 in Lebanon, Tennessee by a sales representative for Shell Oil who wanted to boost gasoline sales. Dan Evins designed the place to look like the sort of country store he remembered fondly from his childhood.
In terms of Evins’ understanding of what the company is “all about,” however, I can do no better than the corporate profile of the founder on Cracker Barrel’s website: “Evins always said the mission is Pleasing People® . . .”
That’s right, Cracker Barrel got a registered trademark for the phrase “Pleasing People.” That—and only that—is what it is “all about.”
Besides, it’s not as if Cracker Barrel is substituting Impossible™ sausage for actual pork. Bacon may be getting more expensive, but it isn’t going away. At least not just yet.
Still, in a low-trust society, it’s easy to understand a vehement reaction. If Cracker Barrel is adopting plant-based fake meat, how long before cricket burgers and cockroach milkshakes are on the menu? And how long before cricket burgers are mandatory? If we can’t trust Cracker Barrel to serve up proper comfort food with proper bacon and beef, who can we trust?
Or so the thinking—characterized by the Washington Post and USA Today—seems to go.
Yet, as night follows day, the response to this restaurant chain’s decision to add an option to its menu traverses easily from the stupid to the vicious. Again, from the Washington Post story:
“Lone star tick disease is spreading and some of you yayhoos (sic) are gonna have to eat some metaphorical crow with your vegan sausages after the ticks make you allergic to meat,” one person wrote, referring to the bite of a Lone Star tick, which can cause some to become allergic to red meat.
“Imagine getting upset because a menu option exists at a restaurant. Relax, Trumpers,” another added.
Wait a minute. Why not make a perfectly legitimate point without hauling Trump into it? Why not end it with “restaurant”? Why jerk the chain? Why twist the knife? Imagine thinking every single Trump supporter is going to be exercised about a company changing its menu?
Remember, however, it was the Post reporter’s decision to include that comment in his story. Bias can be subtle, but it’s real.
And yes, the menu change is a signifier. It says to vegetarians and vegans, “Come on in, give us a try.” Will they? Probably not in droves, but I’m not privy to Cracker Barrel’s market research. Of course, the Cracker Barrel brand itself is a signifier. Which explains why so many people responded passionately online. But we’ll return to that in a moment.
Given the media interest, the company obviously had no choice but to respond.
“We appreciate the love our fans have for our all-day breakfast menu,” a Cracker Barrel spokeswoman told the Post. “At Cracker Barrel, we’re always exploring opportunities to expand how our guests experience breakfast and provide choices to satisfy every taste bud—whether people want to stick with traditional favorites like bacon and sausage or are hungry for a new, nutritious plant-based option like Impossible Sausage.”
She might have added, “Bless your heart.”
Because, if this story is not quite at the level of “fake news,” it most certainly qualifies as what the historian Daniel J. Boorstin called a “pseudo-event.” I first read The Image 30 years ago and last revisited it in 2016, but here’s a disgusting generalization: News organizations need to generate content every single day of every single goddamn week. But, as Boorstin explains, it’s not as if real news happens on a predictable schedule. It doesn’t matter. The beast must be fed. Hence the rise of pseudo-events—not quite news, really more “infotainment” (not a really term Boorstin uses; more of a Neil Postman thing)—to “fill the gap.”
Mind you, Boorstin was writing in 1962. It’s so much worse now.
If I’m Tim Carman at the Washington Post, I’ve got unforgiving daily deadlines to meet. I’ve got to be creative. Enterprising, as we like to say. But I’ve only got so many hours in a day. So if it just so happens that a corporate chain’s Facebook post about a new offering blows up with irate comments . . . that’s kind of a story, I guess? Good enough for my editor, anyway.
Gotta feed that beast.
(Wait . . . so, what is this? Am I not feeding the beast right now?
In a manner of speaking, yes.
Is this some kind of meta-commentary, then?
It would so appear.)
Digging a bit deeper, it turns out Cracker Barrel rolled out the Impossible™ (I just love that “™”. I also loooove italics) sausage option at 50 locations last year. The chain is trying to expand its market in blue states like California. Meantime, Impossible Foods is growing. The company had $4.5 billion in revenue last year.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cracker Barrel finds the Impossible™ experiment is impossibly expensive in the long run, even for a multibillion-dollar national chain. I tried an Impossible™ burger once at my friend Sam’s restaurant a couple of years ago when it was still a novelty. Sam is a terrific chef, but I didn’t think the burger was very good. He dropped it as an option after a few months.
“It's as expensive as filet mignon,” he told me, “and twice as perishable.”
Even if Cracker Barrel gets the bulk discount, don’t be surprised if the chain arrives at a similar conclusion before long. Are vegans and vegetarians really going to swerve into a Cracker Barrel for a bite on a whim to make the whole experiment profitable? It’s often smart business to try to appeal to a different demographic and expand the market, but some people you just can’t reach.
P.S. I’m making a reasonably serious effort at this Substack experiment, which means I’m doing things I would otherwise not want to do. As such, I’m on Twitter and Truth Social as @NiceThingsBen. I don’t want an empire, exactly. Like any writer, I’d merely like to be read. If any of this interests you, kindly share this newsletter far and wide. It will get better, I promise.
Great piece. I had Postman in my head from the start.
Honestly. Perhaps much of modern 'culture' really is just a storm in a teacup amongst people who have little better to do?
The question is: what do we, the exhausted people, do about it?
Ben- The last couple of paragraphs are on point. Cracker Barrel simply haven’t really catered to the “impossible” consumers. So I doubt they’ll sway into CB anytime soon. Even with the impossible menu. Great read.