Food For Thought

Carl Ehrlich ’09 has been eating the same burger almost every night for the past four years: a double cheeseburger with pickles, two packets of mustard and two packets of ketchup. Erhlich, captain of Harvard’s football team, a blogger for Go Crimson, and an aspirant novelist with a secondary in philosophy, was also the winner of b. good’s Cousin Oliver contest. He, in other words, is entitled to free burgers from the Dunster Street joint for the rest of his life.

Four years ago, when Ehrlich was a freshman, b. good offered a lifetime supply of burgers to whoever best demonstrated that he or she would make the ideal “cousin” to the newest patty place in the Square. Ehrlich and his roommates, hanging out in their Wigglesworth common room, jokingly compiled a list of eight reasons why Ehrlich should win—“4. My blatant lack of a love life will make me a better cousin. Don’t you worry about me missing any meals because of me going on a date or studying with some girl. They hate me. I love Burgers. Period.” Ehrlich figured he might as well send in the entry, so he typed up the application and emailed it off. Four days later, b. good called to tell Ehrlich that he’d won.

“Winning the burger thing might have been the highlight of my freshman year,” Ehrlich says. “I went there every. waking. second.” He swore to the Crimson reporter covering his burger bonanza that he’d eat 1,000 by the time he left Harvard.

Four years later, Ehrlich is getting ready to graduate and, by my calculations, he’s made good on his promise. After hundreds of burgers (despite a few periods of b. good breaks), Ehrlich has gotten the routine down to a science. He has a set beverage: diet Coke topped off with real soda to trick his tongue. He has a set drink to napkin to burger ratio: “I’m a two to one or three to one drink to burger guy,” he says, laughing. His laugh is half giggle, half husky football player chuckle. And he has a set condiment routine: “I take the mustard, and I move from left to right, up and down like this,” he motions on the table, “ and make little, you know, sinusoidal curves. Then I take the ketchup, and I start at the same point I started the mustard, and I do the complete inverse. And then I turn it 90 degrees and I do the same thing.” He chuckles, “It just happened one day, and it occurred to me that it was perfect.”

But winning an unlimited supply of his favorite food wasn’t entirely the unequivocal boon it seemed it would be freshman year. Ehrlich became defined by his burgers. “People were just so fixated on it that I’d go into parties and people would be like, ‘I don’t know you, but are you the burger guy?’ I just didn’t know if that was how I wanted to be known.”

Ehrlich has fought this encroachment of burger-as-identity. “Half my time here at Harvard has been spent trying to transcend this idea of me as a burger guy... I’m not just the burger guy.”

He has become captain of the football team and has discovered a second academic life in philosophy. He segues from talking about burgers to talking about moral theory and Kantian second-order thoughts seamlessly. He tells me about the scenes and jottings in his moleskine. He is as obsessed with David Foster Wallace as I am, and plans to read Infinite Jest and DeLillo’s Underworld this summer. “You just gotta do it big,” he says.

Ehrlich stops and thinks. He takes off he glasses, rubs his face, and laughs. “Winning it was good. It’ll push you to do more things in college if you’re always running away from whatever you’re defined as.”

Isn’t this, to some degree, what we all do? We come in as freshman, undefined and searching for a passion to anchor us. We attach to that hook when we find it—the IOP, the Literature department, The Crimson—and we form our identities within and around it. But as soon as we become it, we fight desperately not to pigeonholed by it. I don’t mean to chalk everything Ehrlich did up to avoiding his burger-guy identity, but I still can’t help but see the story of Ehrlich’s relationship to b. good as a metonymy for everyone’s four-year trajectory at Harvard.

We’re both hungry by this point, so, we of course, head to b. good. There are no balloons and streamers (the little games with the clerks ended a long time ago). Cashier: “Hello.” Ehrlich: “Hey, how you doing? A double cheese, please?” Cashier: “With pickles, yea?” Ehrlich gets his diet soda, stocks up on napkins and condiments while I look at the plaque on the wall of him. We take our burgers outside to finish our chat while we eat.

He unfolds the wrapping on the burger, takes off the top bun, and applies the mustard and ketchup in the sine waves just like he had demonstrated. We chat between bites about hyper self-awareness and grueling football practice.

“You know,” he says, “I’ve always been weary of being a regular somewhere or having a regular. I think it’s the mark of a stagnant life. But I’m willing to be a regular at b. good.” He chuckles and wipes his mouth with napkin two of three.

—Columnist Rebecca A. Cooper can be reached at cooper3@fas.harvard.edu.