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The Los Angeles Review of Cups. Chipotle is featuring new short works by authors on their cups and bags. The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews them.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’s new Cultivating Thought: Author Series at Chipotle has a slightly uncomfortable name. It suggests that we Chipotle patrons had just kind of been sitting here, mowing down our lunches, blankly existing, uncultivated, thought-less, until Foer came along with his “brainchild”: to provide us all with short works from famous writers printed right on our soda cups and burrito bags. But so many literary lions participated that I was instantly wild to read Chipotle’s whole catalog.

And:

Reading this first Chipotle cup brought to mind the long-ago delight of reading cereal boxes. Though cereal boxes are unlikely to have ever been curated by any novelist, it must be admitted that some of them were pretty spectacular, with graphics, stories, puzzles, mazes, all sorts of interesting stuff. [Toni] Morrison’s Chipotle story, however, is markedly superior to any Cap’n Crunch maze that I can remember. I submit that this tiny fiction is far superior, even, to a Dr. Bronner label.

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Invoking the Dr. Bronner label is seriously upping the stakes here. If that's the standard, these things had better be good. And in two-point type.

Well, I'm not about to go to Chipotle to find out when I've got perfectly good Freebird's franchises nearby!

Thanks for the link. The review is hilarious. I can't decide if my favorite part was the musing on Sarah Silverman's first draft or this:

It is impressive that the Gladwellian house style of infuriatingly lazy reasoning can manifest itself in full on a Chipotle cup. “Approval and agreement and acceptance” means that we approve and agree and accept that others should be free to live in the way that they choose, not that we should agree to live as they do. For heaven’s sake. Let us hope that the many Gladwell cups that are bound to be hurled in a rage across Chipotle dining rooms all over this great nation will have at least been emptied first.

Yes. "The author is a natural fit for the cup genre..."

Years ago I sold several short shorts to a company that printed fiction on coffee cans. So my first thought is to wonder if they'd be open to genre. :-)

Depends on what the guy in charge, excuse me, "curator" thinks of genre! I wouldn't be too optimistic as he thinks that the mass of Chipotle readers don't have access to libraries. (Also, he says he wouldn't do this for McDonalds, and I was under the impression that McDonalds owned Chipotle...)

edit: Ah, I see: Mickey D's divested themselves of Chipotle in 2006. So totally different, then!

Edited 2014-05-22 18:47 (UTC)

Well, now I have the self-knowledge that I would totally write for McDonalds cups.