Recently, my bud Tim Burke came to me with a request:
That request—find me the audio of someone reading the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools lunch menu from the late 1990s—seemed like a bit of a tall order. After all, we’re talking about an era of answering machines and AOL dial-up internet. A lot of culturally significant (and insignificant) artifacts from that time ended up on long-deleted Geocities pages. But past that: Why was a lunch menu prominent or kitschy enough to end up on a random mixtape from three decades ago? What’s the joke here? What am I missing?
When it comes to North Carolina, I know a lot about a little and a little about a lot. This one was a complete blank. I had no clue.
But! Thanks to a solid tip from a helpful guy named Eric P., we got to the bottom of it and discovered the long-dormant story of the Lunch Menu Man, a 30-something guy with a wife and kids who became a ‘90s superhero of sorts. Why? Because someone told him to do something he didn’t want to do, and rather than try hard, he decided to mess around instead. The result? Nationwide fame, a book, and some very weird requests.
You can watch or listen to the rest of this week’s Rabbit Hole on YouTube or Apple Podcasts.
Extras!
Here’s a Spotify playlist and an Apple Music playlist to match the 1990s mixtape that started all of this. I tried to find as many songs as I could find! It was hard!
Listen to clips of the Lunch Menu Man here and here, and share them with your friends to see if they have true 1990s OG Charlotte Street Cred. Don’t let them tell you they’re legit because they had a teal and purple Starter jacket. Everyone had those!
Here are some of David Price’s books.