After a deluge of record-breaking rainfall this week, citizens of the United Arab Emirates and Oman are still trying to return to regular life. The storms forced schools, offices, and businesses to close, transformed the tarmac of Dubai’s international airport into a rippling sea, and killed more than 20 people across both nations. The downpour seemed almost apocalyptic: On Tuesday, the UAE received the amount of rain that usually falls in an entire year.
Early reports of the weather event prompted some speculation that it was worsened by a controversial weather-modification technology. The practice, known as cloud seeding, involves spraying chemical compounds into the air in an effort to wring more rain out of the sky. The United Arab Emirates carries out hundreds of these operations every year in an effort to supplement its water resources in the arid landscape. Exactly how well cloud seeding actually works is an active debate among scientists, but the technique can’t produce rain clouds out of thin air—only enhance what’s already there.
The consensus, for now, seems to be thatcloud seeding is unlikely to have contributed significantly to this week’s historic inundation. (The UAE’s meteorology agency said no seeding missions were conducted before the storm.) But the event raises anew some fundamental questions about interfering with nature. Cloud seeding is a type of geoengineering, a set of technologies aimed deliberately at influencing or altering Earth’s climate systems. The warmer our planet becomes, the more attractive geoengineering seems as a way to slow or endure the effects of climate change—and the less accurately we can predict its effects. Scientists can’t be sure that playing God with the atmosphere won’t cause human suffering, even if it is intended to alleviate it.
In the case of cloud seeding, humans have been playing God for decades. The technique dates back to the 1940s, and has been deployed regularly around the world since to provide relief to regions parched by drought, clear skies ahead of Olympic Games, and give ski resorts an extra inch of snow. Scientists have been studying cloud seeding all along, but they’ve only recently managed to document how the technique might actually work, distinguishing between natural precipitation and precipitation that resulted from human intervention. Experts believe that seeding can squeeze out a small amount of additional precipitation, but it is “notoriously difficult” to determine how well it worked in any particular instance, Janette Lindesay, a climate scientist at Australian National University, told me.
The basics of cloud seeding are straightforward, Lindesay said: If you want rain, you release chemicals that encourage clouds to produce larger water droplets, which are more likely to reach the ground. If you want to suppress rain, you use chemicals that foster the creation of smaller droplets. But the simplicity belies the complicated science and high stakes of manipulating the atmosphere in the 21st century. The 2020s are becoming defined by a warmer atmosphere capable of holding more moisture, conditions that can lead to more extreme and unprecedented weather events, including intense rainfall. Add in geoengineering, and things can get risky. “We are in territory now where we can’t necessarily rely on past experience and past outcomes to inform us,” Lindesay said, of “what is likely to happen when we intervene.”
As geoengineering goes, cloud seeding is a rather limited technique, with small effects confined to small geographical areas. (That’s part of the case against seeding as a significant contributing factor to this week’s flooding in the Middle East; as Amit Katwala pointed out in Wired this week, parts of the UAE where seeding typically does not occur experienced torrential rain too.) But it can still be fraught. Scientists continue to debate whether cloud seeding in one region can have consequences for another. And at a time when droughts are becoming more common, rain is a precious commodity with geopolitical import. In recent years, Iran has accused the UAE and Israel, which has its own seeding experiments, of stealing rain away.
Reports that cloud seeding caused this week’s flooding were likely erroneous, but the reaction they inspired “represents a healthy kind of skepticism about what happens when we interfere with natural systems,” Laura Kuhl, a public-policy professor at Northeastern University who studies climate adaptation, told me. That’s particularly true, she said, when you consider forms of geoengineering premised on producing large-scale effects. Scientists have proposed injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect some sunlight back into space, preventing it from reaching Earth’s surface. The resulting aerosols could linger in the stratosphere for years, shifting at the whims of the wind. Similar concerns surround another geoengineering technique that involves spraying salt compounds into the air to brighten clouds, which would in turn bounce sunlight back into space. This month, scientists conducted a secretive test of this technology, the first of its kind in the United States. The field is “moving a lot faster than it used to,” Juan Moreno-Cruz, a climate-policy researcher at the University of Waterloo, told me.
After further research, some geoengineering techniques may well turn out to be useful ways to mitigate or adapt to climate change. But they can’t address its root cause: the burning of fossil fuels, and failure to reduce greenhouse emissions. Many climate experts see geoengineering as a last resort. As our changing atmosphere continues to dramatically drench some parts of the planet and leave others parched for too long, that last resort might start to seem like a more appealing option—even as the consequences of getting it wrong become ever more dire.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the election-reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, in beautiful downtown Austin. Several journalists discussed the question: Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign?
My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed.
Lest we need reminding, this year’s election features a candidate who incited an insurrection, called for terminating sections of the Constitution, was found liable for what a federal judge says was “rape” as it is commonly understood, faces 88 felony charges, and—I’m tempted to add “etcetera” here, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The volume and enormity of it all is impossible to take in.
The man is neither a riddle nor an enigma. He lays it all out there: his fawning over the world’s authoritarians, his threats to abandon our allies, his contempt for the rule of law, his intention to use the federal government as an instrument of retribution. Journalists must be careful not to give in to what Brian Klaas has called the “Banality of Crazy.” As I’ve written in the past, there have been so many outrages and so many assaults on decency that it’s easy to become numbed by the cascade of awfulness.
The former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer points out a recent example in his newsletter: On a radio show earlier this month, Donald Trump bizarrely suggested that Joe Biden was high on cocaine when he delivered his energetic State of the Union address. It was a startling moment, yet several major national media outlets did not cover the story.
And when Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, it didn’t have nearly the explosive effect it should have. “I had expected every website and all the cable news shows to lead with a story about Trump demanding the execution of the highest military officer in the country,” this magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told The Washington Post. “If Barack Obama or George W. Bush had done so, I’m sure [the news media] would have been all over it.” (Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic published a profile of Milley by Goldberg.)
In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome. There has, of course, been some progress. The major cable networks no longer carry Trump’s rallies live without context, but they still broadcast town-hall meetings and interviews with the former president, which boost ratings. NBC’s abortive decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a contributor, despite her role in spreading lies about the 2020 election, highlighted the disconnect between this moment and much of the national media.
And then there is the internet. It is certainly possible that richer, more insightful media will emerge from the digital revolution, but we’re obviously not there now. Back in 2016, we worried that social media had become a vector for disinformation and bigotry, but since then, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s extraordinary enshittification of X. In 2016, we worried (too late) about foreign interference and bots. In 2024, we are going to have to contend with deepfakes created by AI.
This year will see some of the best journalism of our lifetime. (You’ll find much of it here in The Atlantic.) But because both the media and their audiences are badly fractured, much of that reporting is siloed off from the voters who need it most. Because millions of Americans are locked in information bubbles, half of the country either won’t see important journalism about the dangers of a second Trump term or won’t believe it.
To put it mildly, the arc of social media does not bend toward Edward R. Murrow–style journalism.
So what’s to be done? I don’t have any easy answers, because I don’t think they exist. Getting it right this time does not mean that journalists need to pull their punches in covering Biden or become slavish defenders of his administration’s policies. In fact, that would only make matters worse. But perhaps we could start with some modest proposals.
First, we should redefine newsworthy. Klaas argues that journalists need to emphasize the magnitude rather than simply the novelty of political events. Trump’s ongoing attacks on democracy may not be new, but they define the stakes of 2024. So although live coverage of Trump rallies without any accompanying analysis remains a spectacularly bad idea, it’s important to neither ignore nor mute the dark message that Trump delivers at every event. As a recent headline in The Guardian put it, “Trump’s Bizarre, Vindictive Incoherence Has to Be Heard in Full to Be Believed.”
Why not relentlessly emphasize the truth, and publish more fact-checked transcripts that highlight his wilder and more unhinged rants? (Emphasizing magnitude is, of course, a tremendous challenge for journalists when the amplification mechanisms of the modern web—that is, social-media algorithms—are set by companies that have proved to be hostile to the distribution of information from reputable news outlets.)
The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal.And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.
The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses, for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries.)
In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even—as David Frum points out in The Atlantic—the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.
And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.
The Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ruled that they were unconstitutional, ending his trial before it got under way.
House Speaker Mike Johnson will proceed with a plan, backed by President Joe Biden, to vote on separate bills to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The proposed move has raised criticism from some conservative representatives.
Four Columbia University officials, including the president, Nemat Shafik, testified in a congressional committee hearing about student safety, free speech, and anti-Semitism on campus.
On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food.
We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce … Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with “CAE” on one tongue and “SAL” on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”
During Nickelodeon’s golden era, the network captivated young viewers by introducing them to an impressive roster of comedic talent—who happened to be kids, just like them. Starting in the mid-1990s, actors such as Amanda Bynes, Kenan Thompson, and Ariana Grande became household names, as popular children’s shows including All That, Drake & Josh, and Zoey 101 helped propel Nickelodeon to astronomical ratings. For nearly two decades, the network dominated not just kids’ programming, but the entire cable-TV landscape.
A new docuseries argues that at least some of this success came at a great cost. Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV explores troubling allegations of child abuse and other inappropriate on-set behavior during this run at Nickelodeon. The documentary builds on a 2022 Business Insider investigation into programs led by the prolificproducer Dan Schneider, and on details from a memoir published earlier that year by the former child star Jennette McCurdy. (McCurdy, who doesn’t identify Schneider by name in her book but describes an abusive showrunner widely believed to be him, was not involved with the documentary.) Over its five episodes, the series offers an important record of how the adults working on these shows—and Hollywood as a whole—repeatedly failed to protect young actors. But Quiet on Set also, perhaps unintentionally, ends up creating a frustratingly tidy narrative that elides some crucial complexities of abuse.
The series spends its first two episodes painting a picture of the toxic environment that Schneider allegedly cultivated for adults and children alike. Two former Amanda Show writers say that Schneider harassed female employees; former All That actors recall their discomfort performing sketches full of racial stereotypes and sexual innuendo. Several interview subjects described a culture of deference to Schneider, one in which they felt afraid to raise their concerns.
In a video response to the series, Schneider apologized for requesting massages from female staffers, said that he wished he could go back and change “how I treat people,” and conceded that he would be willing to cut any upsetting jokes from his shows that are streaming. (At the end of every Quiet on Set episode, a title card relays Nickelodeon’s response to the producers’ questions: The network said it “investigates all formal complaints as part of our commitment to fostering a safe and professional workplace … We have adopted numerous safeguards over the years to help ensure we are living up to our own high standards and the expectations of our audience.”)
Quiet on Set shows how the culture of silence created work environments that endangered young performers. The documentary covers multiple harrowing cases of child sexual abuse perpetrated by individuals who worked in close proximity to Nickelodeon’s underage actors. Jason Handy, a production assistant on All That and The Amanda Show, was arrested for lewd acts with children in 2003 and later pleaded no contest to two of the felony counts and one misdemeanor charge. He was sentenced to six years in prison and later arrested on new sex-abuse charges in 2014. In the documentary, the Business Insider journalist Kate Taylor reads stomach-churning quotes from Handy’s journal, before revealing that another Nickelodeon crew member was arrested just four months after him: Brian Peck, a dialogue coach and an occasional actor on All That, was charged with 11 counts of child sexual abuse. After pleading no contest, Peck was convicted of two of the counts against him and sentenced to 16 months in prison.
The documentary’s most shocking revelation is that the unnamed victim in Peck’s case is now an adult who wants to tell his story: The Drake & Josh star Drake Bell, speaking publicly about the abuse for the first time, explains how Peck integrated himself into Bell’s life after the two met at an Amanda Show table read. “In hindsight, I should’ve been able to see,” Bell says. “But as a kid, you have no clue.” Bell’s chronicle of the abuse is wrenching, in no small part because it underscores how adults failed to keep him and the other children in Nickelodeon’s studios safe from predators.
Quiet on Set argues that Peck’s on-set behavior fits within a larger pattern on Schneider’s shows: boundary-crossing behind the scenes and inappropriate sexual innuendo on the air. In a clip from an old All That episode, a celebrity guest complains of hunger, and Peck’s recurring character, known as “Pickle Boy,” hands him a pickle to eat through a hole in the dressing-room door. The camera zooms in to capture that visual, which clearly evokes a pornographic trope. One former All That actor recalls that, during downtime, Peck would play video games with the children; another reads an old note in which Peck thanked her for walking on his back. The former child actors repeatedly emphasize that although other grown-ups were present on set for many questionable incidents, no one from Nickelodeon ever stepped in. (In his video statement, Schneider says that he didn’t hire Peck and was devastated to hear the allegations of abuse.)
In making many of these stories public for the first time, Quiet on Set is the latest project to expose the ways in which Hollywood enables child sexual abuse—and to call for industry reforms. The former actors speaking in the new series echo many of the sentiments expressed in Dear Hollywood, an incisive podcast by the former Disney Channel ingénue Alyson Stoner. Three years ago, Stoner wrote about a phenomenon they called the “toddler-to-trainwreck pipeline,” describing it as a profitable system that has continued apace since the 19th century by “censoring the harm happening behind the scenes, manicuring aspirational lifestyles and outcomes, and then watching young lives tragically implode.” In their writing and on their podcast, Stoner presents disturbing personal testimony and discusses issues that child stars face, such as the prevalence of eating disorders, fractured family dynamics, and the psychological toll of fame. Stoner also offers concrete steps the industry should take, such as requiring a qualified, third-party mental-health professional on every set.
Last week, Quiet on Set, which was originally billed as a four-part series, released a bonus fifth episode that explores tangible solutions. Shane Lyons, a former All That cast member, said that the first place to start would be updating the law “so that no individual who is a convicted child molester can ever get on a Hollywood set again.” That may sound like an obvious fix. But the California law that details protections for children in the entertainment industry, and which mandates background checks for many professionals who work with child actors, has a major loophole: It doesn’t apply if a parent or guardian is always present with their child on set.
The show makes the limits of this provision—and the stakes of leaving it unchanged—incredibly clear. Even if the onus is on parents to protect their kids, abusers frequently conceal their predatory actions from other adults. What’s more, parents who try to advocate for their kids can end up ostracized, putting their children’s career (and self-esteem) on the line.
The docuseries creates a startling and horrifying picture of how Hollywood’s systemic flaws have long put children at risk. But Quiet on Set also has its shortcomings. The series isn’t always careful with its depictions of alleged victims or of former child stars, especially those who chose not to participate in the project. Amanda Bynes was a key part of Nickelodeon’s rise, but the documentary’s commentary about her closeness to Schneider and her latermental-health struggles sometimes registers as cursory speculation without Bynes there to speak for herself.
Parts of Bell’s story are similarly under-contextualized, despite the actor’s heavy involvement in the series: Quiet on Set publicizes the names of several industry figures who wrote letters of support for Peck after his conviction. (These letters were previously sealed, along with other court documents.) Excerpts from some of the 41 letters show just how much backing Peck had in Hollywood, but in its eagerness to implicate others, the series overlooks how Peck may have wielded authority over some of the signatories.
Throughout the series, Peck is described as a master manipulator, someone who infiltrated Bell’s life when the actor was a teenager partly by earning his mother’s trust. But the documentary never meaningfully addresses the fact that some of the performers who wrote letters of support for Peck had met the much older dialogue coach while they, too, were teens. This doesn’t necessarily absolve them of criticism. But the series could have examined how such unequal dynamics can influence young people’s behavior in an ecosystem as insular as children’s programming, and considered the possibility that Peck’s manipulation extended further. Even including the detail of the letter signers’ ages along with this commentary would have provided valuable information to viewers attempting to make sense of the case and how it was perceived at the time.
In the weeks since the documentary began airing, former Nickelodeon fans have criticized many Hollywood figures, including former child actors, for having shown support for Peck. And some of the network’s former actors have faced backlash for simply not speaking up—whether in solidarity with Bell or to publicly share their own negative experiences. In last week’s bonus fifth episode of Quiet on Set, Bell asked that fans be more compassionate toward his mom and reiterated an earlier request for fans to “take it a little easy” on his former co-star Josh Peck (who is no relation to Brian Peck).
In another unfortunate misstep, Quiet on Set avoids wrestling with the full reality of Bell’s life after Peck’s abuse. In 2021, Bell himself pleaded guilty to felony attempted child endangerment and a misdemeanor charge of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles in a case involving a 15-year-old girl, when Bell was 31. The documentary largely brushes past this, allowing Bell to obfuscate the details of these allegations by conflating the case with his other “self-destructive behavior” and suggesting that the media have spread “misinformation” about him.
These oversights undermine the docuseries’ attempts to rigorously confront the pernicious nature of abuse, and instead present viewers with clearly delineated camps of good and evil, perpetrator and victim. This flawed framing has also left Bell’s accuser vulnerable to heightened public scrutiny: After the series premiered, fans began creating TikTok videos discussing the 2021 case. There, and on other social-media platforms, some people shared the accuser’s real name or suggested that she had been lying. People also harassed Bell’s former girlfriend, who in 2020 accused the actor of physical and emotional abuse during their relationship—allegations that Bell has flatly denied as “offensive and defamatory.” Just last week, Bell insisted that he was innocent in the 2021 case (despite already having pleaded guilty) while speaking about Quiet on Set on a podcast, which further emboldened these fans.
Many of these more recent updates couldn’t possibly have been accounted for in a documentary that had already finished filming. But the bonus episode—a coda of sorts—offered a chance for Quiet on Set to reckon with the sad fact that it’s not uncommon for abuse victims to become offenders in adulthood. True intervention requires understanding abuse in ways that aren’t binary, and the show would have benefited tremendously from asking a mental-health expert to talk about these cycles. Protecting children in Hollywood and beyond is a collective effort, one that demands seriously engaging with even the most uncomfortable truths. Quiet on Set marks one important step in that direction, but there’s so much more left to do.
The winning entries of the annual World Press Photo Contest have just been announced. This year, according to organizers, 61,062 images were submitted for judging, made by 3,851 photographers from 130 different countries. World Press Photo was once again kind enough to share some of this year’s global and regional winners, gathered below.
Moments after receiving my lunch order, the robots whirred to life. A clawlike contraption lurched forward, like a bird pecking at feed, to snatch dishes holding a faux-chicken cutlet and potatoes, then inserted them on a metal track that snakes through a 650-degree-Farenheit oven. Seven minutes, some automatic food dispensers, and two conveyor belts later (with a healthy assist from human hands), my meal was sitting on a shelf of mint-green cubbies. It was a vegan fried-chicken sandwich, a cucumber salad, crispy potatoes, and a smattering of other sides.
This is Kernel, a fast-casual venture that opened its first store in Manhattan this February. Its founder, Steve Ells, kicked off the lunch-bowl boom when he started Chipotle in 1993. Now, he told me during my visit, he is betting that machines will trigger a “reinvention of how a fast-food or fast-casual restaurant can run.” Robots, he prophesied, will bring faster and more accurate service at lower overhead costs. Plenty of chains have tested out semi-automated cooking, with mixed success—including deep-frying robots at Jack in the Box and robotic bowl assembly at Sweetgreen and Chipotle. But Kernel has been built from the ground up for robots. Just three employees are needed in the restaurant at any time, compared with the dozen needed at a typical fast-casual restaurant. Soon many more people may be eating robot-prepared vegan chicken: Ells has raised $36 million and hopes to expand quickly, starting with several more locations throughout New York City this year.
But robots may represent less of a fast-food revolution than the obvious next step in its evolution. For more than a century, technology has made fast food more efficient—and, in particular, more automated. That’s what turned McDonald’s into a giant 60 years ago. Such restaurants can be considered “sort of mini-factories,” Dave Henkes, a food-industry analyst at Technomic, told me, and have always used “automation to drive speed and convenience.” And, like the simpler cooking technology before them, today’s robots are speeding up humans’ work without fully replacing them. For now, Kernel is no different.
Kernel’s entirely vegan menu is limited (Ells prefers “focused”), but everything looked and tasted like it came from fine dining. That is no coincidence: Kernel’s chief culinary officer, Andrew Black, was a sous-chef at Eleven Madison Park, a three-Michelin-star restaurant with a $365 tasting menu, located a block away from Kernel. While I ate, he and Ells gave passionate spiels about each item: The marinated beets, a surprise best seller, are topped with quinoa, green hummus, and a seed crunch to make the dish nutritionally complete. For the crispy potatoes, Black specially selected a spud variety for its sugar, starch, and water content, and they’re then cooked three times—steamed, fried, baked—to achieve a shattering crunch and pillowy interior. Black and his staff dredge and fry every piece of “chicken” by hand; as I bit into my sandwich, Ells mused that they should try swapping imitation meat for a block of tofu.
Simply put, Kernel is a group of excellent chefs equipped with the world’s most high-tech toaster oven. All the food is cooked by chefs at a central kitchen about 10 minutes away, delivered hourly by a bicycle courier, and heated by a robot. That off-site preparation, Ells told me, provides at least 80 percent of the menu’s quality. The food then has to be assembled by still three other people. Human one, the “replenisher,” loads the hourly delivery of prepared food onto a shelf that the robotic arm can reach. The “assembler” puts together every sandwich and side, and a third person, the “bundler,” bags each order and places it in a cubby.
Courtesy of Kernel
The setup is “extraordinarily fast, accurate, and predictable,” Ells told me, nothing less than a “paradigm shift.” Employees barely have to move their feet. But a robot that heats and moves around your food is just the next iteration in the pursuit of speed and standardization. The restaurant with the strongest claim to inventing fast food may be White Castle, which, in 1921, “did something that was unusual for the time—they tried to standardize their operations from restaurant to restaurant,” David Hogan, a fast-food historian at Heidelberg University, in Ohio, and the author of Selling ’em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food, told me. Cooking procedures were precise and uniform; cooking implements were manufactured in a single location; even the physical buildings came out of a central factory.
The playbook hasn’t substantively changed since. Before buying McDonald’s and launching its global success, Ray Kroc sold the chain automatic milkshake mixers. What first captivated him about the restaurant, he wrote in his 1977 memoir, was how “each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with a minimum of effort.” That year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a study noting that fast-food chains had “introduced principles of industrial engineering” to restaurants. In particular, “the off-premise preparation of foods” and improved “cooking devices,” such as microwaves and convection ovens, reduced preparation time and added uniformity. Restaurants today use specialized equipment, extensive training manuals, and various trackers to ensure speed and consistency. Sweetgreen has an app that instructs employees exactly how to heat and prepare food, and McDonald’s cooks beef patties for precisely 42 seconds. If anything, Kernel’s off-site kitchen is conceptually closer to the centrally prepared, frozen patties and fries served by fast-food burger joints of old than the chicken grilled on-site at a Chipotle.
To the extent that Kernel is a reinvention, Ells hasn’t invented a new paradigm so much as found another. Sweetgreen already acts like a tech company, and Domino’s has touted itself as one. Now Ells talks about his robot-assisted process as an “operating system.” What may one day distinguish Kernel’s automation is that the space is designed for robots from inception. So far, other chains have retrofitted human kitchens with robots, which creates confusion and disaster, Stanislav Ivanov, who studies robotics and restaurants at Bulgaria’s Varna University of Management, told me. Robots malfunction and, even when they don’t, bulky machines interfere with equipment, stations, and a floor plan designed for human movement. In 2018, an early burger-flipping robot that was tested at a CaliBurger in Pasadena was temporarily decommissioned because it couldn’t be incorporated into the human workflow.
Kernel is, at least in theory, built for “the technology that we know is coming,” Ells said. The equipment is all mobile and can be swapped or calibrated for newer gadgets (permanent counters, ovens, and stovetops, for instance, are unnecessary because robots don’t care if work stations are waist-height). Drones could bring prepared food from the central kitchen to restaurants, and robots might assemble burgers in their entirety. Efficient robots and a vegan menu, he said, will continue to reduce the restaurant’s carbon footprint. Gesturing to the “bundler” who bagged all the food, Ells said, “Instead of Carlos, imagine a robot arm” (Carlos kept bundling without so much as a flinch).
With automation, of course, comes the risk of disappearing jobs. Kernel and other restaurants are experimenting with robots not only in pursuit of efficiency, but because the industry is facing a chroniclaborshortage. The low pay doesn’t help, and the jobs are also exhausting as well as, at times, hazardous. Deep-frying, for instance, is extremely dangerous, which is why one of the most popular cooking robots in the industry simply runs the fry station. Fast-food chains pursuing automation are trying to reduce head count, especially as some states raise their minimum wages. But for now, Henkes said, robots have typically led restaurants to redeploy people to different positions. Ells claimed that Kernel’s existing employees, who are currently paid $25 an hour, will eventually be moved to more front-of-house jobs, helping guests and monitoring the robots.
But a burger prepared, cooked, and served without a human touch is still more accurately described as speculation. Faster and more automated cooking technology may well be imminent, but humans will still be involved for years to come. Automated pizzaiolos, line cooks, and salad tossers have failed; successful robots typically target a specific task, like plunging fries into boiling oil.
Just as the quality of Kernel’s food depends on human chefs, the quality of its automation will depend less on technology than on human vision and feedback. Each day, employees meet to discuss what worked and what didn’t, which will help iterate the technology: Dozens of bugs, including stalled production and locked cubbies, have been smoothed out. On the first day, the cubbies didn’t open; last month, a stray potato shut down Kernel’s production line. Kernel is building new tools, but relying on the same human logic that made White Castle, McDonald’s, and Chipotle successful. I came to the restaurant to witness fancy robots, but I would return simply for the faux-chicken sandwich and the cucumbers topped with cashews and chili jam. Kernel the restaurant is far more impressive than Kernel the tech company.
