“Corporations will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so” – Wendell Berry
McDonald’s was responsible for exposing the public to the Olfactagram through their New Happy Meals, but the machine originated in upscale weight-loss spas, a fact which was not lost on the media: the day McDonald’s opened their first New Happy Meals centers across the country, the headlines screamed “McDonald’s Brings Spa Cuisine to the Masses” and “The New Happy Meals’ Fancy Roots”.
The New Happy Meals venture was risky, but something had to be done: the combination of the soaring prices of fossil fuels—a key ingredient in the chemical fertilizers and pesticides that treated the cheap crops needed to produce inexpensive food—and the Great Bovine Die-Off of 2020 was killing the fast food industry. By 2025, Taco Bell and Burger King had both declared bankruptcy. McDonald’s was suffering greatly: the company had bought out nearly all their franchises—which accepted bargain prices after being bankrupted in droves—and shut the majority, maintaining only the best locations in an effort to keep prices low and cut overhead costs. The problem was simple: scarcity of low-cost meats and crops made the fast food industry’s model unprofitable. The majority of MacDonald’s customers could no longer afford to eat there, and those who could were opting for higher-quality food.
Scrambling, McDonald’s executives seized the Olfactagram opportunity and moved quickly. The Olfactagram used a combination of olfactory triggers and leptin injections to trick dieters into eating a tasteless nutrition bar in lieu of a meal. The science behind the smell-taste interaction is complicated and best explained by author Eric Schlosser in his book Fast Food Nation:
“Taste buds offer a limited means of detection…compared with the human olfactory system, which can perceive thousands of different chemical aromas. Indeed, "flavor" is primarily the smell of gases being released by the chemicals you've just put in your mouth. The aroma of a food can be responsible for as much as 90 percent of its taste…
…Your brain combines the complex smell signals from your olfactory epithelium with the simple taste signals from your tongue, assigns a flavor to what's in your mouth, and decides if it's something you want to eat.”
In other words, dieters’ brains were tricked into thinking the cardboard-like nutrition bar, chock full of all the vitamins and nutrients the human body needs to function, was delicious. The simultaneous leptin injections—leptin being one of the hormones that signals “fullness” to the brain—satiated users hunger.
For McDonald’s, which already had all their flavors in stock, the key challenge was figuring out how to get the leptin into their customer’s systems. Fortunately, they were able to synthesize a form of leptin called Fc-leptin into all of their beverages, which they administered to customers—free of charge—before giving them their meal. The original Olfactagram involved an elaborate nose piece, akin to the gas masks used in dentist’s offices. With their still-formidable financial resources, the McDonald’s Research and Development team created a less intrusive, albeit lower quality, nose piece made of plastic that hooked behind customer’s ears and ran across their faces beneath the nostrils. They called it the McMask, eventually releasing various themed McMasks in campaigns identical to those used with the toys in the original Happy Meals.
The size of a card deck and weighing only three ounces, the nutrition bars McDonald’s used were less healthful than their spa predecessors, but leagues better for customers’ bodies than the salty, high fat burgers and fries they used to peddle. They were also incredibly cheap to make, allowing the company to return to its prices of the early 21st century: for the first time in 15 years, you could get a Big Mac for under four dollars.
The rapid weight loss of McDonald’s customers was evident weeks after the New Happy Meals debuted, and the company stock soared, allowing them to re-open their closed shops and even expand. Further, the New Happy Meals centers were completely mechanic, decimating both the McDonald’s human workforce and the company’s costs. Although the company took a public relations hit for the massive lay-offs, the societal benefit of the New Happy Meals was undeniable and they were soon forgiven.
Olfactagram use spread as the machines were heralded as the answer to world hunger. Fancy restaurants began offering Olfactagram options (dubbed “factos”) on their menus and chicer nose pieces began to appear, each one boasting more flavor options, such as “truffle” and “oyster”. Restaurants closed as people no longer needed to leave their houses—they would just key in an identification code on their machines and enjoy their pancakes/burrito/sashimi. At the height of the “facto craze”, Olfactagrams were in nearly every household—in the wealthier ones the ratio was 1:1, machine to human.
The drawbacks of the Olfactagram-use began to emerge after their first few years of widespread application. Overwhelmed by the consistent barrage of the strong, artificial aromas, people’s noses started shutting down. The worst-case scenario, only seen in about ten percent of reports, was anosmia, the complete loss of smell. The lesser, more common affliction was the loss of selective scents. Because each element of the food perfume was essential to the whole, this rendered Olfactagrams useless—the incomplete compounds either revealed the true taste of the nutrition bar to the user or applied a different, unpalatable taste to the bar.
In the months after these unpleasant discoveries, discarded Olfactagrams littered the sidewalks. The once-clean New Happy Meal centers were defaced with graffiti and surrounded by protesters pinching their noses and carrying signs that said things like “We Smell a McRat” and “McDonald’s Hates Our Noses”. The public was convinced McDonald’s had known about the dangers. Ronald McDonald effigies were burned and customers entering a New Happy Meal center were screamed at as if crossing the picket line.
While McDonald stock floundered and the company eventually closed its doors amidst endless lawsuits and government inquiries, the public returned home hungry with nowhere to eat. Tasteless nutrition bars lined pantry shelves, no longer satiating without their leptin infusion. Sad children pulled endless bars from brown paper bags at lunchtime, nibbling the edges and dreaming of flavor. On the streets, passersby’s’ bellies growled threateningly as their nostrils flared uselessly.
Hope materialized in the form of heirloom seed packets found in attics and antique shops. Community gardens began popping up on urban rooftops and in town centers as the public began to regain their senses, literally and figuratively. Distrusting of the large corporations that nearly wiped out their fondest olfactory memories, a mantra took form, at first whispered through tomato vines and eventually yelled from coconut tree tops: “be the source”.
You can still find the nutrition bars in specialty stores sold as collectibles—stock full of preservatives, they have stood the test of time quite well, though few would dare eat them. Even a few Olfactagrams still exist, mostly in museums as a relic of dark times and dry mouth. They sit behind glass, gathering dust, usually adjacent to another artifact so widely despised that extra security is required to prevent vandalism: those sunny yellow arches.
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This story was conceived during a sleepless night atop Mt. Baldy after reading Michael Pollan’s article “The Food Movement, Rising” in the latest New York Review of Books. Though I struggled to root some of the science in fact, the Olfactagram is thankfully rooted in fantasy.
6/15/10: I made the edits (in italics) to address the issue of McDonald's franchise structure, per the excellent advice of another hero, Paul Steiger
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