In the documentary Super Size Me, director and McDonald’s-overdoser Morgan Spurlock lists innumerable alarming facts about American dietary habits (we’re fat), and one tidbit on car design. As the American appetite for sugar and fat has grown to truly epidemic proportions (and waistlines have grown to gargantuan dimensions), the size of beverages available in fast food restaurants and convenience stores has evolved to fit the demand, to the point where 7-11’s famous Big Gulp fountain drinks are now available in a convenient two liter size. These being cups, with lids and straws (as opposed to bottles), there is the clear assumption that the consumer will, well, consume all of the beverage of choice in one extended sitting (never mind that the human stomach’s volume is less two liters), which therefore means the consumer will need a place to put the cup between Big Gulps. These oversized cups, unfortunately, do not fit neatly into the cup holders found in most American cars; the cup holders are designed to fit a can (that’s twelve ounces) of soda. So car manufacturers are super-sizing their cup holders.
So it goes: as Bill Bryson writes in his book I’m A Stranger Here Myself, “Cupholders are taking over the world.” This may be a bit of an overstatement, but it is certainly true that as American culture goes, so go the cup holders. Thirty years ago, drivers and passengers had to make do with circular indentations on the dashboard or in the flip-down door of the glove compartment. Minivans, which in the mid-1980s began to replace the station wagon as the automotive symbol of the idyllic All-American life, played the central role in changing that, as their abundant and sturdy cup-holding devices proved nearly as strong a selling point for child-rearing Boomers as the handy sliding door. In any new car, open one of those little doors that used to be ashtrays — under the dashboard and in the storage area between the front seats, for example — and out pops some ingeniously-designed cup holder, at your service.
Now, in some cases, cup holders are the primary selling point of one car over another. There is a certain pragmatism involved — we want the cup holders to be conveniently placed and sturdily constructed — as well as a certain hipster lust for the cool spring-loaded origami engineering of some cup holders. But as Malcom Gladwell writes in the January 2004 issue of the New Yorker, there is even more to it — there’s also, in a way, an emotional level to the cup holder craze. Gladwell quotes French anthropologist G. Cloutaire Rapaille, speaking of women who buy SUVs:
What was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cup holders are absolutely crucial for safety. . . . If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cup holders it has.
And, indeed, Bryson writes that, in the early years of the cup holder epidemic, Volvo noticed that its car sales had slackened, and pinned the blame, in part, on their lack of cup holders. A slight redesign of the interior later, there were cup holders. Other car manufacturers, perhaps more attuned to the whims of American consumers, have gone far beyond the presumed threshold of cup holder installation: Today’s minivans, which hold seven passengers, often feature fourteen cup-containment receptacles; the Chevrolet Venture has seventeen. Some minivans also now feature rectangular cup holders in the back seat area, ideally shaped and situated for the kids’ juice boxes.
Cup holders have not just changed with the times, or changed our reasons for buying a particular car, they have also changed the way we eat. Now that we have a place to put our Slurpee, our Frappuccino and our Dasani, within reach, there is seemingly no limit on when we can consume them. And because, in general, we enjoy our beverages with food (and vice versa), the cup holder has made it vastly easier to eat while driving — whereas in the dark days of yore, eating even a fast-food meal was a two-handed endeavor — one for the burger, one for the Coke — we now have one hand free to drive. Eating, then, becomes an afterthought, something we do while engaged in the rest of our daily routine, not something that provides a break from the our other obligations and activities.
This effect is about to become even more pronounced as so-called cup holder cuisine becomes more prevalent. It was only a matter of time. The first entry in this category was the Yoplait Nouriche Smoothie, in 2002, which might be given a pass because a smoothie is basically a beverage, but soon after came more explicit prepackaged food-in-a-cup products, specifically designed to be placed in cup holders. The same year, Kellogg’s introduced cereal in a cup holder-sized container, and Campbell’s followed with a similar product, this featuring an insulated container with a sip lid. Several chip and cookie manufacturers have caught on, and now offer their foodstuffs in conveniently sized, cylindrically shaped packages.
In its definition of the term cup holder cuisine, the web site Word Spy, which documents the jargon of the zeitgeist, explains how the term fits into the broader context of our consume-everything, drive-everywhere culture:
Cup-holder cuisine is the latest salvo in the commuter food (1987) wars. In fact, drive-time dining (1997) has become so popular that the food industry now has a separate food-in-the-car (1998) category to keep an eye on the latest trends. Here, dashboard diners are often referred to, unflatteringly, as mobile stomachs (1998) and marketers fight for stomach share (1984) instead of market share. They refer to a morning meal eaten within the car as a carfast (2000) or a dashboard breakfast (1991).
The cup holder is in many ways responsible for the rise of those two-liter beverages that have, in turn, changed the design of cup holders. Did we even know it was possible to take that much soda to go, to be consumed in the directly immediate future, before we had cup holders in our car? Probably not. Though fast food has had an unquestionably greater impact on how, when and what we eat, and consequently how we live, cup holders have created a new step in this evolution.
Considering the extent of our harried consumer lifestyle, cup holders have extended our dining tables, made our living rooms mobile and made the intake of calories more immediately possible, anywhere, anytime. They have helped caffeinate the morning commute (and probably boosted Starbucks’ bottom line and proliferation) by providing space for that now-obligatory cup o’ joe, led to innovations in food packaging, and, in countless other ways, deeply affected our daily routines — an impressive feat for a piece or two of molded plastic.
Doug Mack (doug@professoryeti.com) drives a 1993 Ford Escort with just two cup holders.
