The Worst Sandwich Is Back

Wraps are terrible. At greatest, they wreck completely serviceable fillings by bundling them up in a gummy, chilly tortilla. At worst, they do that with less-than-serviceable fillings. They’re like a salad, however much less refreshing, or like a sandwich, however much less filling—a worst-of-all-worlds Frankenstein’s monster, an indistinguishable meals slurry wrapped in edible cardboard, just like the world’s rudest current. They’re desperation meals—“the stuff,” Lesley Suter wrote a couple of years in the past within the meals publication Eater, “of refrigerated airport deli circumstances, convention middle lunch trays, and the darkish facet of a Subway menu.” Each single a part of them is the mistaken texture.And but: This month, McDonald’s introduced that it might be bringing again its hen Snack Wrap, after almost 19,000 individuals signed a Change.org petition arguing that it was “simply one of the best factor” on the chain’s menu. The announcement got here a day after Popeyes launched three new hen wraps. TikTok is now stuffed with wrap-recipe cook-alongs and clips of engaging younger individuals trying to find one of the best chicken-Caesar wrap of their given metropolis.Learn: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwichIf you’re over 40, this would possibly sound a bit acquainted. Wraps have been one of many greatest consuming fads of the Nineties, after a bunch of enterprising pals determined to place Peking duck inside a tortilla and see if San Franciscans would purchase it. They’d, they usually did, after which so did the remainder of the nation. Quickly sufficient, the nation’s main newspapers have been working cautious, anthropological explainers about wraps, as if a sandwich have been a newly found animal species. (The Washington Put up, 1996: “They’re referred to as wraps—huge, fats, tortilla-wrapped bundles just like burritos however with a wild alternative of worldwide fillings.” The Put up once more, six months later: “It seems to be like an enormous egg roll.”) Tavern on the Inexperienced, which had at that time been promoting down-the-middle American classics in New York Metropolis’s Central Park for 2 generations, launched a pork-and-potato wrap. Across the nation, as The New York Instances wrote in 1998, “tiny shops promoting wraps sprang up like weeds.”Wraps, like rubbish cans, can maintain something; because of this, they aligned completely with the ’90s fascination with so-called fusion meals, which mixes dishes from completely different culinary traditions. However extra essential, they have been a vessel for the period’s physique anxieties. Excessive thinness was trending; Dr. Richard Atkins had just lately reissued his eating regimen information, one of many best-selling books in historical past. Wraps have been—in advertising and marketing, if not at all times in actuality—lower-calorie and lower-carb than regular sandwiches, all that pillowy, scrumptious bread having been changed with a utilitarian tortilla forgery that tasted and seemed virtuous, particularly when it was flecked with spinach or tomato. If conventional sandwiches have been greasy and chaotic, the province of youngsters and cartoon slobs, wraps have been tidy and wise, the province of working girls with slim hips and pin-straight hair. They have been gas greater than meals, practicality greater than pleasure. The truth that they didn’t style good was perhaps even a part of the purpose. A few weeks in the past, I used to be speaking with a girl about this story at a celebration, and he or she talked about that she used to eat a whole lot of wraps. I used to be incredulous—till she defined, breezily, that she had had an consuming dysfunction for a few years.Learn: How snacks took over American lifeTrends are pendulums. Wraps and excessive thinness ultimately grew to become much less trendy, however not as a result of they have been a horrible waste of time and creativeness—they grew to become much less trendy just because new orthodoxy about easy methods to eat and easy methods to look changed them. Bowls grew to become the dominant healthy-ish working lunch, and a curvier silhouette—much less ruler, extra Jessica Rabbit; much less Kate Moss, extra Kim Kardashian—grew to become the aspirational feminine physique sort. Third-wave feminism and its attendant media turned weight-reduction plan (or at the very least speaking about it) into one thing archaic and deeply uncool. However America’s golden age of physique positivity had its limitations: Folks have been nonetheless anticipated to fall inside a slim band of acceptable dimensions and shapes, they usually have been anticipated to have a specific physique accidentally, with out effort or deprivation or disgrace or miserable sandwiches. For some time, the female excellent was a fantastic lady with a tiny waist, an enormous butt, and a hamburger in hand, meat juice spilling down her forearm.However just lately, the temper has shifted once more. Hip bones are jutting out as soon as extra from above low-rise denims. The Kardashian sisters have been speaking about their “weight-loss journeys.” Estimates counsel that as much as one in eight American adults have taken Ozempic or related medicine since they have been launched. Within the excessive, influencers are constructing social-media empires by bullying girls into reducing energy and exercising for hours a day. In every single place I look, the aesthetic values of the ’90s have returned, even when the vocabulary has modified: Low-carb has been changed with high-protein; weight-reduction plan has been changed with wellness; hunger has been changed with fasting. Weight loss program tradition is being revived, repackaged, and resold for a brand new period, and so are the meals that fed it.20 years in the past, when Subway launched a brand new line of wraps, they have been marketed as a “carb-controlled” possibility suitable with the Atkins eating regimen. In 2024, when Subway launched a brand new line of wraps, an organization press launch foregrounded their protein content material and promised to “gas you up with out weighing you down.” The Snack Wrap Change.org petition explicitly cites the wrap’s calorie depend, which is usually under 300. On TikTok, health bros are bragging in regards to the “macros” on their “XL Grinder Salad Wraps,” and ladies are posting recipes for 300-calorie buffalo-chicken wraps to a refrain of feedback corresponding to “YALL THIS IS SOOOOO FILLING. I LOVE HIGH VOLUME LOW CAL EATING 🔥🔥🔥.” A thinness-obsessed nation is popping as soon as once more towards joyless tubes of practical slop, borne again ceaselessly into the previous.