There’s a billboard on Congress Street, positioned strategically at express-lunch ground zero, that depicts a national chain’s chicken sandwich. The towering portrait brings passersby up close and personal with some corporate food stylist’s airbrushed vision of takeout perfection. Symmetrical cubes of grill-marked poultry as white (and bland) as ivory! Controversial veggies, begone! A shmear of aioli to moisten that parched desert of flatbread? Oooh . . . best not offend the mayo-phobes.
Though extreme in its focus-grouped rigor, the ad points up a disturbing shift in the Hub’s handheld-meal terrain: the sandwich as generic commodity. Indeed, local grinder-mongers seem less intent on knocking brown-baggers’ socks off than providing the edible answer to Muzak. Colorful nicknames (Steak Tip O’Neill, anyone?) do little to mask the phoned-in dullness of preshredded iceberg, heat-lamped cutlets, and bread that thanks to the black magic of calcium propionate tastes just as eerily wan and cottony as the day it left the factory. Here’s your module of sustenance, sir. May I help whoever’s next in line?
To which we utter a resounding: No, thank you! There’s better stuff to be had.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: The Boston Globe.