Responding to a company request that she “submit any questions in writing,” Lansing author Cat Clark announced Friday that she had exactly one question for Nabisco, and began asking it.
The question, which Clark is reading from a binder, opened at 6:00 AM with the full text of a 1977 flavor-delivery patent and had by noon covered the hiring of former tobacco-industry sensory scientists in the 1980s, the invention of the term “craveability,” and the precise sodium-to-fat ratio at which a human mouth stops reporting to the brain.
“I want to be fair to them,” Clark told reporters during a water break. “If I ask a short question they’ll give a short answer. So the question has footnotes.”
Company staff, who had expected a question, assembled in the lobby with a prepared response and dispersed around 10:40 AM when it became clear the question had not yet arrived at a question mark.
“We’ve got ‘thank you for raising this’ ready to go,” said one staffer. “We just need her to stop so we can say it.”
By late afternoon the question had turned to clinical matters, including why a product engineered to defeat satiety signaling is sold next to a diet aisle designed to shame the people it worked on. Several employees reportedly took notes.
At press time Clark had reached the year 2004, the question was still in a subordinate clause, and a company spokesperson confirmed that the answer, whenever it was needed, would be “we hear you.”
