Sonic Boomers

By Patricia Dailey, Editor-in-Chief -- Restaurants & Institutions, 2/1/2004

Lettuce, once mainly the stuff of salad bowls and leafy garnishes, has a rather grand new role in the foodservice world—that as an Atkins-approved object of conveyance, a handy shovel for diet-obsessed consumers to steer protein-rich burgers from plate to mouth. The crunchy green sheaths suddenly are the stand-ins of choice for anything resembling sliced bread, buns or bagels as those sandwich-making staples are further relegated to culinary exile by what looks to be overzealous adherence to the nation’s diet du jour.

“Bread Is Dead” screamed a recent headline of a tabloid newspaper, a half-baked bit of sensationalism that feeds this growing notion that carbohydrates—the breads, potatoes, pastas and rices of the world—bring consumers to within just one perilous bite of groaning scales and bulging midsections.

With the bread-is-bad dogma now firmly embedded in the minds of millions, restaurants in all segments are looking for quick solutions to this massive shift in eating patterns. To that end, chain restaurant R&D teams scramble to find menu items that salvage robust sales while at the same time keeping the core brand more or less intact.

Never mind that this seems like a bad case of déjà vu, a romp back to the 1960s and ’70s when carb-rich foods last were maligned. Throughout the 1980s, though, the sensible idea that a healthy, balanced diet embraced almost all foods—some in moderation—gained momentum as well as widespread acceptance and appeal.

The reappearance of Atkins, coupled with irrefutable evidence that Americans are either clueless about or largely disinterested in working on weight management, has upended notions of balance and moderation. In their place is the don’t-hold-back-from-fat freedom that Atkins ostensibly allows its adherents.

For any restaurant operator who is busily sourcing the sturdiest and best lettuce leaves for holding and transporting a quarter-pound burger or trying to find a low-carb wrapper that does not look and taste like cardboard, it might help to think of this as a transient trend driven by the very same gigantic forces that have made cosmetic surgery, Botox injections, more capaciously sized clothing and elastic gussets sewn into the waists of men’s pants increasingly more common.

Lettuce leaves, steaks and butter all trace right back to baby boomers—the demographic cohort that continues its mighty roar. Healthily endowed with enduring vanity, a devotion to youth and a deep pool of resources as they march on to the next stage in their lives—one in which the ravages of age become harder to fend off—boomers are the main drivers in the weight-loss game. Right now, they are fixated on Atkins and all that it allows.

The fascination likely will be short-lived, a brief stop on an unstoppable trajectory toward old age. So if lettuce wraps and the pox on carbs caught you off guard and unaware, look ahead to the next life stage boomers will navigate. For it is there that the next big thing will spring to life and extend its reach over restaurant menus.