McDonald’s made the single greatest contribution to world peace when they announced earlier this year that they were finally bringing back the chicken Snack Wrap. The wraps have been missing from their menu since 2016 (the number of things that went wrong that year, my gosh…) after enjoying a very popular 10-year run. So the legions of Snack Wrap fans were surely thrilled, particularly the nearly 19,000 who signed a Change.org petition to make this happen, including one who commented, “Life hasn’t been the same without McDonald’s snack wraps.” While many suspected the triumphant return would occur on June 14 — the initial announcement merely said “0x.14.2025,” and the 14th of June is, after all, the birthday of McD’s biggest fan — the actual date has now been confirmed for July 10. Still, what’s a few more weeks after a nine-year wait. But not all are pleased with this development! The Atlantic’s Ellen Cushing just cooked up 946 impassioned words against the return of wraps writ-large, decrying the quality of tortillas used as “edible cardboard.” Please enjoy this excerpt:
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, and indistinguishable food slurry wrapped in edible cardboard, like the 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.”)
First of all, as a native San Franciscan I feel compelled to apologize for (apparently) being the city that foisted the wrap phenomenon upon us. Because independent of the existential question of whether the wrap should exist in this world, I agree with Cushing that what passes for tortillas is a stale, corporatized imitation of what ought to be a light and airy delicacy. Is it possible to have a really good, appetizing wrap? Of course, it all comes down to the ingredients used and how it’s made. But most commercial preparations are more of the “refrigerated airport deli cases” variety, and those are just plain sad! I highly recommend reading the rest of Cushing’s piece, titled “Revenge of the Wrap.” Aside from the fact that her writing is sumptuous — she also calls wraps “joyless tubes of functional slop,” and notes, “wraps, like garbage cans, can hold anything,” — Cushing makes an interesting case (wrap pun!) for wrap popularity coinciding with moments when thinness was especially idealized. I guess I missed the window when thinness was out of fashion, sigh. I was probably otherwise occupied with my favorite meal: a thick, pork-filled burrito cradled in my hands while the juices ran down my fingers, then wrists, then arms.
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