BUFFALO, NEW YORK — Every October, the American food industry takes food that is already good and makes it scary, and the public eats the evidence. This year the honor falls to Buffalo Wild Wings, which launched its Halloween-themed Fright Feast menu on October 5, running through November 9.
We went. We are still going, medically speaking.
1. The sauces commit crimes against color. The Fright Feast arrives in shades nature does not permit on poultry — a purple that suggests the chicken had secrets, an orange that glows like it was tested on satellites. A ten-year-old at the table next to ours described the purple wing as “cursed” and ordered a second one, which is the highest review a Halloween product can receive.
2. The equipment has changed sides. “I’ve worked the fry station for six years,” said a BWW employee in Ohio who asked to remain anonymous to his mother. “The orange sauce doesn’t come off the tongs. The tongs go home orange. My hands go home orange. I have accepted this as my life now.”
3. The medical community sighs, technically about sodium. “It is wings,” said Dr. Elaine Ruszkiewicz, a Columbus gastroenterologist who has treated Halloween since 1994. “The scare is not the sauce. The scare is the calendar. Every year, Americans voluntarily eat the purple one, and every year, the purple one remembers them.”
4. Nobody loves it. Nobody cancels it. The public’s relationship with the Fright Feast is seasonal and unconditional, like a friendship with a weird cousin. The correct sentence about a Halloween wing is not “delicious” — it is “I can’t believe they actually made this.”
5. The economics are unbeatable. The Halloween menu has the best numbers in food: it is gone in five weeks, exactly long enough for everyone to forget the purple one and agree to date it again next year.
The Fright Feast ends November 9. The tongs go home orange forever.