Fast food occupies an outsized portion of American culture. The grease runs through our countrywide veins. But the story’s simplest part is the food, White Castle sliders, KFC buckets,e Whoppers and Baconators, and Egg McMuffinsy. As Adam Chandler argues in his new e-book, Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom, those are not sincerely restaurants. They are national establishments, roadside embodiments of the best of America and the worst of it.
“Critics frequently accuse McDonald’s and its ilk of being monoliths that throw around their influential shopping and advertising power to public damage,” Chandler writes. This column discusses unlivable wages, poor working situations, negative treatment of animals, and food of questionable nutritional value. All he has is the same opinion, which is real. Yet, it might be a mistake to write the whole thing. There’s a purpose: speedy food occupies this type of wonderful vicinity in our hearts, and it’s not just that we’re all silly and dangerous.
From my desk in Brooklyn, an easy stroll from a Subway, a McDonald’s, a Checkers, and at least Dunkin’ Donuts, I have known Chandler to speak approximately how we got here the way we must sense about it. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
So we have the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and the Golden Arches. How did that occur? How did a series selling brief drive-via burgers end up an icon of America?
I’d say the type of iconic nature of fast food takes to the air after World War II. The United States commits to this big countrywide undertaking of constructing the interstate dual carriageway device; there’s this flight, the humans shifting out of the towns and into the suburbs, that are being built right away, and there’s a toddler boom.
All this creates a need for roadside fare that humans can eat after they’re at the pass and commuting. More women are getting into the body of workers; the economy is diversifying, so [the demand for fast food] grows.
The folks that located those chains also are surely cookie-cutter American dream prototypes. Ray Kroc, Colonel Sanders, grew up negative and had normally been middle faculty or excessive college dropouts dedicated to a few forms of countrywide service.
[Kroc was briefly a Red Cross ambulance driver; Sanders joined the Army.] Dave Thomas of Wendy’s became an orphan and dropped out of exile, eventually returning to get his GED. I mean, there are many of these superb testimonies that we’d preserve in this Horatio Alger-type pantheon of American bootstrapping ideology.
It’s a dangerous notion, this American dream, due to how the U.S.A. has progressed. But suppose you tell the story of those human beings’ lives. In that case, it harkens back to this notion of America as a place of great possibility for people who didn’t have a ton of education, who truly wanted to work and paint hard, who had an idea and made it manifest.
That’s a totally American concept. The tale of fast food is likewise the story of how that dream gets corrupted over time, while wages stagnate and company powers swoop in. So, rapid meals have a throughline that uniquely seems American.
But it’s also about the meal themes. It?
Fast meals were, to begin with, created with middle-elegance, striving families in mind. These were people who were settling down, building families, and looking to make their lives paintings in an era of prosperity. This became kind of a literal gas for that, for nights out, for exploring the United States.
It became its own family-targeted. There changed into something very informal approximately it; it was low-stakes. It would help if you didn’t worry about the dishes. You take it to go, wrapped up in paper, and you throw out the paper while you’re finished, and there’s no wait carrier concerned. That’s new, precise, and democratic. We see it reflecting American ideology in hindsight. At the time, it became something that turned into accessible and less expensive qui,ck, and smooth.
You also make the point that rapid food provides opportunities for many humans via franchising. In the book, you speak about Aslam Khan, a Pakistani immigrant who started at Church’s Chicken as a dishwasher and became the chain’s largest franchisee. It’s some other American dream tale.
Yeah, it really is captivating to think about fast food as a powerful enabler of opportunity for small enterprises. You don’t think of it like that. Because of how corporatized the pictures [of these chains are], I assume it’s, in reality, tough to comprehend that nearby people run numerous franchises in a community.
