'A Double New Guinea Peaberry'
By Shashi Tharoor
Newsweek International
March 29, 2004

As a vegetarian in carnivorous America, I've gotten into the habit of making myself a pain in the neck at restaurants. "Could I have that Caesar salad without the anchovies?" "Would you ask the chef to leave off the bacon bits in the soup?" "Could I substitute vegetables for the chicken in this pasta

Once upon a time the waiter would simply grunt "That's the way it's made," and I'd have to content myself with a green salad and (if the chef had a heart) an omelet. Perhaps because waiters - and chefs - have lately become more obliging, I've grown correspondingly more demanding. Nor am I alone. Walk into any Starbucks these days and you will see the increasingly picky American in action.

The cafe chain offers a mind-boggling array of ways to order your coffee. There's not only regular or decaf, of course, but also five kinds of milk you can pour into it - half and half, whole, skim, soy and organic. Then there are the sweeteners - sugar, Equal and Sweet'n Low, with a fourth, Splenda, on the way. You can order almost any flavor imaginable, from Arabian Mocha to New Guinea Peaberry, in any of four sizes-short, tall, grande or venti, whatever that means.

And it isn't just Starbucks. Foreigners have long thought of America as the country offering more choices than any other place on earth, and that gets truer with every passing year. Remember Baskin-Robbins's "31derful flavors"? That slogan amazed me when I arrived in America a quarter century ago, misguided enough to think that vanilla, chocolate and strawberry covered the spectrum. Now Baskin-Robbins has more than a hundred flavors. A competitor, Dreyer's, offers 250, including gluten-free ice cream, kosher ice cream and (a seeming contradiction) dairy-free ice cream.

Americans clearly love freedom of choice. If one purveyor doesn't cater to it, they simply shop elsewhere. So companies outdo one another in coming up with alternatives to their basic product lines. Want to start your morning with orange juice? Tropicana makes 24 kinds, including with pulp and without, not to mention your choice of high, medium or low pulp. You can get your OJ with a third less sugar and calories than your parents used to place on the breakfast table. Or you can have it laced with vitamins and minerals, such as calcium, just in case Mother Nature didn't shine brightly enough on the fruits themselves. According to USA Today's Bruce Horovitz, the Whole Foods grocery chain sells 40 kinds of lettuce and 15 varieties of mushrooms - and calls it survival of the fittest. Consider the evolution of Frito-Lay. Three decades ago, the company boldly introduced corn chips to supplement its standard potato chips. Today it sells 60 varieties, including 24 types of potato chips. Eat them wavy or flat, baked, low-fat or barbecue-flavored.

I like to think of this as America's traditional rugged individualism, transplanted to the supermarket. After all, this is still a society where no one likes being told what to do or what they can have - not by their parents, and certainly not by restaurant waiters. No wonder the National Restaurant Association reports that 70 percent (yes, 70 percent) of American diners routinely departed from the choices offered on menus in 2003, treating chefs' picks as no more than mere recommendations and customizing their orders to suit themselves. No wonder restaurants oblige me so readily these days. They've given up trying to buck a trend. No doubt the next time I go out for dinner, a "water sommelier" will offer four kinds of fizzy to go with my tofu.