Doctor's Associates, or: How I Reconciled My Dislike of Jared with My Love of Subway

I grew up in the neo-socialist community of Columbia, Md. Founded in the mid-1960s by real-estate-mogul-with-a-conscience James Rouse, the unincorporated Central Maryland town was envisioned as a racially and socially blended Lake Wobegon. A supposedly perfect place where children could wander the woody paths while their progressive parents tended houses on acorn-strewn streets named for poems and literary characters. It was Stepford gone liberal and erudite.

Rouse divided the city into villages, each with its own village center. Each house within a village was theoretically within walking distance of the village center, where residents could shop for groceries, grab a bite to eat at one or two of the tiny local restaurants, or gather at the town hall to discuss who had incurred the wrath of the village's feared Architectural Committee by painting his shed fuchsia.

I lived in the village of Harper's Choice in the neighborhood of Longfellow on Eliot's Oak Road, the only street not named for something out of "Hiawatha" or "The Wreck of the Hesperus." When we were old enough, my brother and I were permitted to walk the bucolic half-mile path from our townhouse to the village center for lunch. With the $20 bill our mother had given us, (she expected at least $10 change from the excursion), we could buy congealing slices of New York-style pizza at Columbo's, a painfully unadorned ham sandwich with throat-scratching Fritos at the Red Caboose (their saving grace was excellent rainbow sherbet), or salad from the rapidly rotting items on the SuperThrift salad bar. To a suburban 9-year-old, the act of purchasing food himself is more important than the quality of the food that he is purchasing.

In the mid-1980s, Subway opened one of its first Maryland franchises in my village center. Owned and operated by a young Korean family that had recently come to the United States, the Subway was at once a local sandwich shop where you might meet up with a classmate after school and a purveyor of consistently fresh and tasty sandwiches. Not long after Subway arrived, the now useless Red Caboose gave way to a Chinese restaurant and Columbo's yielded to local chain Jerry's Subs and Pizza.

I marveled at the limitless concoctions I could buy at this new Subway for less than my $5 allotment -- a footlong tuna salad sandwich, an Italian B.M.T., a meatball sub, or a Cro-Magnon steak-and-cheese hoagie. And for my toppings, I could choose from standard lettuce and tomato to then-more outrageous green peppers, olives, and hot peppers -- a far cry from the lettuce-tomato-onion-pickle prison of the Roy Rogers "Fixin's Bar." With a 25-cent bag of Utz barbecue potato chips on the side, I was stuffed for cheap.

It was at this Subway that I learned what went into classic sandwich combinations. It was also at this Subway that I learned fast food isn't necessarily a heart attack in every bite. When a McDonald's planted itself across from the new Chinese restaurant, the old Subway's sales took a hit. When a shiny, new Subway opened in the nearby Hickory Ridge village center (the Mondoburger to the original's Good Burger), the old Subway started to take on water. And when the town remodeled the village center and left the old Subway invisible from the street, the old Subway sank.

By the time the old Subway closed, I had a driver's license and could high-tail it over to the new Subway in Hickory Ridge for lunch. And I must admit that the food was fresher than at the old Subway and the service more efficient. A Mark McGwire-lookalike named Dylan ran the place. He had smartly assigned one "Sandwich Artist" to pulling the bread from the oven and cutting it open, the next to meats and cheeses, the next to toppings, and the last one -- usually himself -- to wrapping the sandwiches and manning the register. The new Subway was visible from the street and boasted a steady supply of customers from the nearby high school and the burgeoning neighborhood. They offered footlong sandwiches for $2.99 on Tuesdays, guaranteeing a line out the door at lunchtime at least once a week.

During my four years in college at the University of Pennsylvania, I very easily could have gone through Subway withdrawal. I lived on campus, and the closest Subways were on the Drexel University campus and at 30th Street Station -- fairly short walks from Penn, but crossing the Market Street barrier to the north seemed like going to another country. More important, Philadelphia is the quintessential sandwich town. Why go to Subway when you can easily get a stellar hoagie from the local Lee's Hoagie House or Wawa? Only to break the monotony of an embarrassment of riches. I would only eat at Subway when I returned home for breaks -- and then exclusively at the Hickory Ridge subway, the paragon of efficiency and quality.

Just after I graduated from college, Subway introduced "Jared" as its spokesman. The chain was growing rapidly and repositioning itself as a healthy alternative to the Burger Kings and McDonald's of the world. It had seized upon as its new spokesman Jared Fogle -- an Indiana University student who lost 245 pounds off his 435-pound frame by eating a spartan diet comprised only of Subway sandwiches. All of a sudden, Jared was everywhere. He waved his old oversized pants like a bullfighter's cape in front of charging dieters who desperately wanted a quick fix.

Who couldn't admire this newly svelte, Nietzschean ubermensch who had conquered his weight problem by using institutions to his advantage? Me and the majority of Americans. Whereas it was hard not to perceive his initial appearances as borderline inspirational, his ubiquitousness and holier-than-thou attitude made me wish that he would cover himself with those big pants -- a living, breathing version of a Cristo sculpture.

The introduction of Jared was a harbinger of Subway's impending corporatization. The longstanding practice of cutting the top out of the submarine-shaped loaf of bread gave way to slicing the bread through the middle. Quality and efficiency sometimes fell by the wayside as it became easier to land a Subway franchise. Subways franchises became more consistent in their offerings (just try to find barbecue chicken or sprouts nowadays). New baked breads left a scent on your clothes when you left.

I valued those Subway franchises that retained some measure of independence or quirkiness in an environment pushing toward the uniform. When I began law school in Philadelphia, my access to a Subway became extremely easy. I lived downtown, and I often grabbed dinner at the Subway inside the Sunoco gas station at 22nd and Walnut streets. A tongue-less woman named "Santa" made Philadelphia-inspired behemoth subs on which you could get hot and sweet peppers; like a true Philadelphian, she counseled against mayonnaise in favor of oil and vinegar. Off Route 95 in Christiana, Del., an aged Subway franchisee held tight to her old ways and cut the top portion out of the bread. And back in Columbia, the Hickory Ridge Subway made the best of its corporate trappings.

Not surprising considering the chain's proliferation, I have visited unequivocally bad Subways across the country, including several in Washington that are way too stingy with their frequent-buyer stamps. But what keeps me coming back to the chain is the knowledge that I can nearly always get a sandwich with a high cost-to-quality ratio. I can get a sandwich that I can modify according to what I want that day. And wherever I am, I can get a sandwich that reminds me of proudly trekking to the village center with my brother, my mom's $20 bill in hand.