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Peter Frick-Wright: From ���ϳԹ��� Magazine, this is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast.

It’s hard to say when it happens, exactly, but at some point, as a journalist, on most stories, you go from someone with all sorts of questions about a topic to someone, whenever a question on that topic comes up, who sorta already knows the answer. You become an authority. Whether you mean to or not.

This is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast, I am your host Peter Frick-Wright, and recently I went through that process for a podcast about a treasure hunt. It’s called Missed Fortune, we dropped the first episode into this feed, and as part of that show, I did a bunch of research on treasure hunting, the history of it, modern versions of it, the places where treasure hunting has intersected with art and popular culture.

And if I were to boil down the major themes of most of the stories we tell about treasure hunts, it’s that 1) the only real reward you’re probably going to get is the experience of going on a hunt, and 2) the real danger of a hunt is that the treasure becomes an obsession. If you don’t recognize that obsession and correct for it, you’ll eventually be forced to reckon with the fact that money is not, in itself, useful for anything. It won’t keep you alive on a deserted island.

These conclusions are based on a thorough, if not completely comprehensive review of popular books, movies, and TV shows, the same stuff you watched. And, I gotta say, at no point in the roughly seven-year process of reporting that story did the topic of In-N-Out Hamburgers come up.

Meg Duff: I think, so, okay, so as someone who grew up in California, as someone who grew up like near a lot of freeways, In-N-Out was just this beacon, right? Like. You're driving down the freeway, every other fast food place has a sign, but In N Out also has these crossed palm trees, and it's, it's this like, it's this X marks the spot.

Peter: This idea that fast food burgers might signify treasure I didn't come up with it. Nor did science journalist Meg Duff, who you just heard from. So don't angry Tweet at her, either.

The idea that fast food and treasure should occupy the same space in your brain is a product of the movie "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," four mads, in which a group of strangers discover a treasure map and embark on a cross-country race to find a suitcase full of money, the location of which is, eventually, designated by some big crossed palm trees.

Movie clip: You know what? I know where it is! I’m the only one who knows where it is, and I wasn’t even looking!

Peter: In-N-Out founder Harry Snyder saw the movie, back in the 60s, and then took that image, and shaped his burger chain around it.

Meg: And so this guy sort of like in his happy dorky way was like, I'm going to put palm trees in my stores. And so every in and out, at least every in and out that I've always known has palm trees outside. And it's their whole shtick. There are palm trees on the cups. There are palm trees on the wallpaper. It is a palm tree kind of place, but it's also like delicious burgers. It's delicious fries. It's my childhood.

Peter: Uh, I was curious if you're going to be a fan or not, uh, but it sounds like a resounding yes.

I'm assuming that most of you have at least some passing familiarity with this California burger joint, but for those of you who don't know In-N-Out, it's a growing restaurant empire with some subtle style choices that are throwbacks to post World War II Americana. All the employees wear white, for example. The fries are made from fresh potatoes and taste like fresh potatoes. And according to the menu the only choices you have to make are hamburger or cheeseburger? And milkshake or soda?

My personal recommendation is to stick with this simple, public menu. But there's also a "secret" menu. With secret menu items that aren't listed anywhere, that you have to discover for yourself, and okay, maybe this treasure hunt thing isn't such a stretch after all.

Meg: Yeah, there's secret menus. It's super exciting and fun because everything's more fun if it's a secret. Um, specifically, the most popular thing that you can get, that it doesn't say on the sign that you can get, is like animal style fries.

Peter: Animal style fries are topped with grilled onions, melted American cheese, and "special sauce." You either love it or hate it. You can also get a rootbeer float, which is not on the menu, or a burger "protein style" with no bun. Or you can order almost any combination of meat and cheese patties. A 1x2 is one burger, two cheese, or a 3x3 is three beef patties, three cheese, you get the idea. It's been this way forever.

Meg: And I think that's actually something that In-N-Out does very well, is their menu does not change. It has not significantly changed in decades, really. Um, like, I don't know, at some point they may swap out an ingredient. But it's, it's not the kind of, it's not the kind of store where there's, like, an advertising push every other week or a special every other week. They do one thing, they do it really well.

Pete: Hmm. The fundamentals.

Meg: The fundamentals. And, uh, unfortunately from a climate perspective, their fundamental is put more beef near more freeways.

They're not trying to compete on like having an impossible burger or having a fish filet. Like they are putting, they're putting cows on your buns.

Peter: This is the ���ϳԹ��� podcast, I'm your host Peter Frick-Wright, and this week, we're talking with science writer Meg Duff about the very strange connections she found between In-N-Out and climate change. Not in a good way. Not exactly in a bad way. Definitely not in a "beef is bad for the planet" kind of way that you've heard about a thousand times, although, we’ll talk about that a little bit.

Meg got interested in In-N-Out's palm trees. The two huge, criss-crossed Mexican fan palms, "marking the spot" outside almost every store. And when I read Meg's article, I found it strange, and interesting. And I wanted to know more. You might say it sent me on my own treasure hunt, trying to figure out what it all means.

Well, when did you first get interested in the idea of In-N-Out and climate change, and like, when did you first see any connection there?

Meg Duff: Yeah, so. So I read this news article saying that In-N-Out was expanding to Nashville. Um, Nashville is in Tennessee. Tennessee is not a place that you usually associate with palm trees. And I read this and I was like, what the heck?

Peter: The first heck Meg wanted to know the what of was what was In-N-Out doing so far east?

I mean it sounds like you were, it expanded into your universe at an impressionable age. But it’s sort of been expanding for decades.

Meg: Yeah it’s been expanding for decades, and it started sort of moving up and out from the Los Angeles area, so it is endemic to Los Angeles, California, uh, and specifically the 10 freeway.

And then it kind of moved. It moved, moved out to Arizona on the 10, it moved up the 5 into the Central Valley. It moved up 80, it moved up 65, it moved up the 101, um, into Northern California, into Oregon. So it's very much like a follow the freeways sort of business,

Peter: For Meg's whole life, In-N-Out meant California burgers, made for Californians. And available wherever Californians might road-trip.

Meg: You know, like, I get, I understand Oregon. West Coast, best Coast. I understand Nevada. They deserve their burgers. But like, you're not a Nashville kind of brand.

Peter: The second problem, to Meg's eye, was the X-marks-the-spot of it all. Two crossed palm trees were an essential part of the In-N-Out brand. The In-N-Out experience. What were they going to do in Nashville?

Meg: And then, and then I was, I was like, well, do, do palm trees even grow in Nashville? Like, Nashville doesn't have palm trees, right? And so then I just started down this whole rabbit hole of like, where are they? Are they already in places with no palm trees? The answer is yes. Like, are they in very many of them? The answer is no.

But, you know, since I do a lot of reporting on climate change, my next thought was like, well, um, is this a betrayal? Or is this actually just thinking ahead? Because there are a lot more places in the U.S. that will be very palm tree friendly in the next 30 years.

Peter: In-N-Out does not require that their new stores grow palm trees. This is not a hard and fast rule. Sometimes local ordinances forbid the planting of palm trees. Sometimes they plant trees and they die. Their expansion is not limited to places where palm trees will grow. But their new locations do overwhelmingly TEND to be in places that are palm tree friendly. And their expansion to Nashville was significant, to Meg, because Nashville, is not currently a place where most palm trees grow. But at the rate that the world is warming up, in about 30 years it will be.

And it turns out that figuring out the pace at which the world warms up and cools down, palm trees can help with that.

Meg: Paleobotanists actually use palm trees, um, to help figure out like the edges of different ancient climate zones.

Peter: Most trees, when it gets cold, go dormant and shut down. Their sap stops flowing and they just hibernate and wake up when it's warmer. If palm tree sap stops moving, however, the tree dies. And that makes them useful. These X’s marked the spots, historically, that never got cold.

Meg: If you can figure out that, that temperature at which the sap will stop flowing, you can sort of model out where a palm tree will survive, um, in a pretty straightforward way. And so then that helps paleobotanists who are trying to reconstruct, like, what was the temperature in a given place millions of years ago.

Peter: Palm trees are consummate survivors. Which is a nice way of saying they are extremely invasive. They’ll outcompete the native plants almost anywhere. And coconuts, it turns out, are perfect little lifeboats for floating around on ocean currents and spreading throughout the world. So for most of our planet's history, basically anywhere that was warm enough, had palm trees.

Meg: It helps them say, okay, if palm trees were here, we know that, like, the average temperature did not get much below X, right? Or if we don't see any palm trees, pretty good chance it was too cold.

Peter: With changing temperatures throughout the historical record, palm trees appear and disappear over time. And getting a sense of their territory throughout history, and comparing that to what we know about CO2 in the atmosphere at those times, not only tells us what has happened in the past. It can help tell us what's going to happen in the future, how much CO2 we can actually put in the atmosphere before the palm trees take over everywhere.

Meg: And you can start to put together a picture of okay, we found palm tree fossils in Alberta, Canada, and we found palm tree pollen in the Arctic in this particular era when sort of climate conditions looked a certain way, in terms of everything else we know was going on.

And then you can use that to project ahead.

Peter: Do they really have palm trees in the Arctic?

Meg: They have palm pollen. So we don't know what specific species of palm tree that's from. Um, so it might have been like one of the cold hardier ones, but even, even so, that means, you know, the Arctic was looking a lot warmer than it does now.

Peter: Right. Right. Well, I bet the rest of the planet was really warm and lovely and everyone was like drinking Coronas, um, on the beach when that was happening.

Meg: Um, well, I, I don't know if anybody had opposable thumbs back then. So um, I can't confirm. Uh, but yeah, that was, that was sort of like, um, the, yes, the world looked very different and it was very warm.

Peter: So In-N-Out, which chose LA’s tall, towering palm trees as it's emblem and symbol, is expanding into places not traditionally hospitable to those palm trees, like Nashville. And Colorado. And Oregon. Places where, according to USDA models, the next couple decades of climate decisions—“worst case scenario” vs “trying our best”—is the difference between a lot of these places becoming way more palm tree friendly and just a little more palm tree friendly.

Worst case, Nashville’s In-N-Out could have full-on California-style towering palm trees outside. But if we come anywhere close to the goals of the Paris Agreement, they won’t.

It’s also likely the difference between getting palm trees in Chicago versus upper Michigan. Connecticut, or Maine. Although here we’re talking about the shrubby little cold tolerant palm trees, not the big In-N-Out ones.

And this is significant, and interesting, and I guess a little bit poetic, because In-N-Out is itself kind of a symbol of a lot of the things driving climate change—like beef, and freeways, and drive-thrus. And more of all those things will make all these new places more friendly to palm trees, which are themselves, historically, one of our best tools for figuring out what the climate has looked like in the past, and what it will look like in the future.

But there’s actually still one more layer of unexpectedly meaningful symbolism in this story. And that’s what In-N-Out did a few months ago. That's after the break.

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Peter: So let's say you run a burger chain that's known for classic, uncomplicated, American fare. Burgers, fries, milkshakes. And let's say that despite your company's rapid expansion to new markets in recent years, it's still owned by the same family, in fact still run by the founder's only granddaughter. Let's say your company tucks references to Bible verses into the corners of its cups and wrappers as a way of tastefully embracing that founding family's faith without forcing it on anyone or making a big deal about it. Let's say your brand is inextricably linked with the idea of "family values" yet you’ve been forthcoming about the family’s problems with substance abuse, and now support a foundation that provides treatment and resources for people struggling with addiction. Let's say you have a mixed reputation, politically, but you do very public charity work on child abuse, and human trafficking.

Let's say all this is true. Let's say you pay your employees reasonably well, with clear paths for advancement and benefits and healthcare. That in this sense at least, your company has a pretty universal reputation for doing good.

But also your company makes its money selling beef.

I guess my question is, in the face of the climate crisis, does anything change?

Has In-N-Out taken any climate action? Do they engage with this conversation at all?

Meg: Okay, so In-N-Out does the things as a California business that they are legally required to do by the state of California.

But they have not taken action to limit global warming in any kind of public, publicly visible way that I'm aware of.

Peter: The answer, unfortunately, is no. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Meg: There's this law now in California that requires any company that does business in California that is bigger than a certain size to disclose their scope 3 climate emissions, um, and what that means is like, don't just tell us that you changed the light bulbs in your buildings. Tell us about your supply chain. Tell us how much carbon emissions are involved in. getting your product from point A to point B, and growing that product. Tell us the climate emissions of all of your suppliers.

And obviously these are not particularly accurate numbers. There's a lot of like, you know, accounting magic happening to make some assumptions.

Um, but this is a lot. The goal of this is to just increase transparency and sort of hold companies' feet to the fire for the ways in which they are responsible, accountable for carbon emissions that at this point a lot of companies don't bother disclosing.

Peter: The law, essentially, requires In-N-Out to account for and disclose the emissions involved in beef production, which they didn't previously have to do. It basically says, hey, if you are a company that does a certain business, we want to know how much CO2 that business produces. So, a company like Amazon, now has to account for and disclose the emissions involved in actually delivering packages, which didn't used to count. It's kind of a common sense thing to make into a law.

But In-N-Out increased its political spending significantly to try to keep it from going into effect.

We don’t have these emissions numbers yet. The law only became official a few months ago. But, it makes sense why In-N-Out would want to keep this information tucked away like the secret menu.

Worldwide, beef production is responsible for about nine percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Not just food or livestock-related emissions, nine percent of everything. So whatever these numbers are, they’re not gonna make the restaurant look good.

And “good” is definitely their reputation. Or at least how they’d like to be seen, as a company that takes the high road, the path that’s right rather than the path that’s easy or most profitable. But not this time. Not on climate.

And it turns out if you are an In-N-Out enthusiast, whose childhood memories are wrapped up in the nostalgia of this restaurant, but your job happens to be reporting on climate change, In-N-Out’s stance on this law, its active lobbying against a policy that would allow us to make informed decisions about emissions that brings up a lot of complicated emotions.

Meg: I think the thing that's sort of personally challenging for me is, um, I think In-N-Out actually does a lot of really good work. Um, it seems like they put a lot of money into causes that they care about. It's a family owned business. And they've been, they've been sort of, they've been very, very public, um, in terms of some of the struggles with like substance abuse, uh, use in that family. And so they do a lot of giving, related to that. Um. In-N-Out Burger also does a lot of giving related to human trafficking.

And yeah, I think what's hard, what's hard about that is like climate change is going to make human trafficking worse, right? In all likelihood, climate change is going to cause more wars, more instability, um, more migration, more opportunities for people to be exploited.

And so I think if that is, if that is something that In-N-Out Burger really values, um, and really supporting communities like that, I think that climate change is something they should be concerned about as well.

Peter: To some extent, what In-N-Out is selling is the memory of a time before all this complicated calculus. Their restaurants are pictures of simplicity. Even the menu asks you to make as few choices as possible. Burger? Or cheeseburger? It does not ask you to think too hard about what to order. Or what their palm trees represent. Or why a burger chain endemic to southern California is creeping outward, spreading across the country like an invasive species.

Meg: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's almost like, you know, if you spend 500 years building an economy that functions on growth, and if that growth is fueled by fossil fuels, and if those fossil fuels are heating the planet, like, that is a very hard loop to get out of.

Peter: This, I think, is why Meg’s palm tree story struck me. Because In-N-Out’s palm trees are supposed to invoke a fun treasure hunt movie. But if you think about it, the plants themselves are actually a symbol of unchecked growth, a tree that spreads anywhere and chokes out everything else.

Treasure hunt stories, meanwhile, are generally cautionary tales. About the perils of obsessing over wealth and ignoring the greater good until you’ve lost track of what actually matters in life. They are often stories of corrupted ideals.

In a sense, those two things have both happened here. A company that would like to be known for treating people well and doing good expands rapidly and loses track of what good even is, and how to do it.

It’s the business equivalent of that part of the movie where the bad guy is hanging off the cliff, and they can save themselves if they would just let go of the treasure. But of course they don’t, and they end up tumbling into lava, or something.

They got what they wanted. And they deserved what they got.

In-N-Out is growing like it wants 100% market coverage, on a continent completely covered with palm trees.

The problem is, that wouldn’t be paradise, that would be the apocalypse.

I’m glad someone pointed this out.

Meg: I am not gonna, like, say that they are lobbying on behalf of their palm trees. But the thing that just struck me as I was reporting this that just, that just felt so funny to me was, like, If In-N-Out Burger does not take climate action, if In-N-Out Burger decides that the status quo is fine, that sort of ironically supports In-N-Out burger's brand. Because the worse the climate gets right, the hotter the world gets, the more we do nothing, the more parts of the US will have palm trees.

Not saying that's why they're doing it. I'm just saying it's ironic.

Peter: Meg Duff is a science writer in New York. Her article on the climate implications of In-N-Out’s palm trees first appeared in Slate.

In-N-Out's lobbying against California's carbon disclosure law was first reported by Rebecca Burns at The Lever.

This piece was written and produced by me, Peter Frick-Wright, with music and sound design by Robbie Carver.

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