Revenge of the Wrap

The Atlantic

3 days ago

Wraps are awful. At best, they ruin perfectly serviceable fillings by bundling them up in a gummy, cold tortilla. At worst, they do this with less-than-serviceable fillings. They're like a salad, but less refreshing, or like a sandwich, but less filling—a worst-of-all-worlds Frankenstein's monster, an indistinguishable food slurry wrapped in edible cardboard, like the world's rudest present. They're desperation food—'the stuff,' Lesley Suter wrote a few years ago in the food publication Eater, 'of refrigerated airport deli cases, conference center lunch trays, and the dark side of a Subway menu.' Every single part of them is the wrong texture.
And yet: This month, McDonald's announced that it would be bringing back its chicken Snack Wrap, after nearly 19,000 people signed a Change.org petition arguing that it was ' easily the best thing' on the chain's menu. The announcement came a day after Popeyes introduced three new chicken wraps. TikTok is now filled with wrap-recipe cook-alongs and clips of attractive young people hunting for the best chicken-Caesar wrap in their given city.
If you are over 40, this might sound a bit familiar. Wraps were one of the biggest eating fads of the 1990s, after a group of enterprising friends decided to put Peking duck inside a tortilla and see if San Franciscans would buy it. They would, and they did, and then so did the rest of the country. Soon enough, the nation's leading newspapers were running careful, anthropological explainers about wraps, as though a sandwich were a newly discovered animal species. (The Washington Post, 1996: 'They're called wraps—big, fat, tortilla-wrapped bundles similar to burritos but with a wild choice of international fillings.' The Post again, six months later: 'It looks like a giant egg roll.') Tavern on the Green, which had at that point been selling down-the-middle American classics in New York City's Central Park for two generations, introduced a pork-and-potato wrap. Around the country, as The New York Times wrote in 1998, 'tiny stores selling wraps sprang up like weeds.'
Wraps, like garbage cans, can hold anything; for this reason, they aligned perfectly with the '90s fascination with so-called fusion food, which combines dishes from different culinary traditions. But more important, they were a vessel for the era's body anxieties. Extreme thinness was trending; Dr. Richard Atkins had recently reissued his diet guide, one of the best-selling books in history. Wraps were—in marketing, if not always in reality —lower-calorie and lower-carb than normal sandwiches, all that pillowy, delicious bread having been replaced with a utilitarian tortilla forgery that tasted and looked virtuous, especially when it was flecked with spinach or tomato. If traditional sandwiches were greasy and chaotic, the province of children and cartoon slobs, wraps were tidy and sensible, the province of working women with slim hips and pin-straight hair. They were fuel more than food, practicality more than pleasure. The fact that they didn't taste good was maybe even part of the point. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a woman about this story at a party, and she mentioned that she used to eat a lot of wraps. I was incredulous—until she explained, breezily, that she had had an eating disorder for many years.
Trends are pendulums. Wraps and extreme thinness eventually became less fashionable, but not because they were a terrible waste of time and imagination—they became less fashionable simply because new orthodoxy about how to eat and how to look replaced them. Bowls became the dominant healthy-ish working lunch, and a curvier silhouette—less ruler, more Jessica Rabbit; less Kate Moss, more Kim Kardashian—became the aspirational female body type. Third-wave feminism and its attendant media turned dieting (or at least talking about it) into something archaic and deeply uncool. But America's golden age of body positivity had its limitations: People were still expected to fall within a narrow band of acceptable sizes and shapes, and they were expected to have a particular body by accident, without effort or deprivation or shame or depressing sandwiches. For a while, the feminine ideal was a beautiful woman with a tiny waist, a giant butt, and a hamburger in hand, meat juice spilling down her forearm.
But recently, the mood has shifted again. Hip bones are jutting out once more from above low-rise jeans. The Kardashian sisters have been talking about their ' weight-loss journeys.' Estimates suggest that up to one in eight American adults have taken Ozempic or similar drugs since they were introduced. In the extreme, influencers are building social-media empires by bullying women into cutting calories and exercising for hours a day. Everywhere I look, the aesthetic values of the '90s have returned, even if the vocabulary has changed: Low-carb has been replaced with high-protein; dieting has been replaced with wellness; starvation has been replaced with fasting. Diet culture is being revived, repackaged, and resold for a new era, and so are the foods that fed it.
Two decades ago, when Subway launched a new line of wraps, they were advertised as a 'carb-controlled' option compatible with the Atkins diet. In 2024, when Subway launched a new line of wraps, a company press release foregrounded their protein content and promised to 'fuel you up without weighing you down.' The Snack Wrap Change.org petition explicitly cites the wrap's calorie count, which is typically below 300. On TikTok, fitness bros are bragging about the 'macros' on their 'XL Grinder Salad Wraps,' and women are posting recipes for 300-calorie buffalo-chicken wraps to a chorus of comments such as 'YALL THIS IS SOOOOO FILLING. I LOVE HIGH VOLUME LOW CAL EATING 🔥🔥🔥.' A thinness-obsessed nation is turning once again toward joyless tubes of functional slop, borne back ceaselessly into the past.