Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,44
it would dominate the roadsides and suburbs and meander across cityscapes into schools and hospitals, White Castle cofounder and impresario Billy Ingram commissioned a medical study. In it, a healthy young medical student ate nothing but White Castle sliders and water for over three months. “The student maintained good health throughout the three-month period,” Ingram announced at the end, “and was eating twenty to twenty-four hamburgers a day during the last few weeks.” Gloating further, Ingram trumpeted that a food scientist had even signed a report suggesting “that a normal healthy child could eat nothing but our hamburgers and water, and fully develop all its physical and mental faculties.”
This conceit may sound familiar. In 2004, filmmaker (and non–medical student) Morgan Spurlock set out to prove the opposite of Ingram by not exercising and gorging himself on five thousand calories’ worth of McDonald’s every day for a month for his film Super Size Me. Unsurprisingly, the results of his nominally scientific stunt appalled and horrified viewers and briefly turned Spurlock into a household name.
Held together, these two stunts offer an alluring, perfectly tidy narrative arc for fast food in America: It begins in 1930 at the scrappy dawn of the industry with the dubious marketing of burgers as simple, affordable, family-friendly sustenance. The story then crescendoes seventy-five years later with the indictment of fast food’s most recognizable conglomerate as corrupted by success, artificial ingredients, oversize portions, shareholder greed, and promotional fervor.
A few months after Super Size Me debuted, another fast-food flick hit theaters: Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. It’s the classic story of two twentysomething friends who, fed up with the stresses of life, embark on an elaborate, weed-fueled hero’s journey to their favorite fast-food chain. Along the way, the two pilgrims undertake a medical-marijuana heist at a hospital, smoke weed with an escaped cheetah, and hang glide from a clifftop to a White Castle after the actor Neil Patrick Harris (appearing as himself, high on ecstasy) steals their car.
Harold & Kumar did not win an Academy Award.* But just because it lacks the subtle visual poetry of Fellini doesn’t mean it was without its poignant flourishes. Zoomed out, it’s basically a buddy flick about two sons of Asian immigrants, who find relief and release in the very American experience of a completely frivolous road trip. The joke is that White Castle is their white whale; it works because it is a totally relatable quest. “It was the first time we almost ran out of hamburgers since 1921,” White Castle VP Jamie Richardson said of the aftermath of the release. “We knew about it and we worked with New Line Cinema, but when the film came out, we had been tracking up about two percent for the year, and instantly sales popped up for many weeks after that in the twenty-percent-plus range. It really had a dramatic impact on sales.” Super Size Me, on the other hand, almost certainly caused fast food sales to drop, particularly for McDonald’s, which just happened to abandon its super size menu options just weeks before Spurlock’s documentary debuted.
Though admittedly it’s silly to read too much into the particulars of two weird fast-food flicks, their coincidental timing is meaningful. By the early aughts, a new front in America’s culture wars was in full bloom. The once-encompassing sway of national institutions and media had fractured. Minus a fleeting nanosecond of national unity after September 11, the strain of all-afflicting partisan timbre that had taken hold in the 1990s came on stronger. Values became further affixed to their red-blue, right-left designations and extended to all facets of life, including American diets. Fast Food Nation and its fellow discontents helped the dissatisfaction with the consumerism of the 1990s snowball into an open questioning of social tenets—with the corruption of the food system as a central pillar. During the lead-up to the Iraq War, a righteous citizen either supported french fries or freedom fries. This would be followed by the dividing lines between heritage corn or corn syrup. Kale chips or brownies at PTA bake sales. Calorie counts and food regulations or free will and free markets.
As foodie-ism entered the lexicon, fast food and processed foods became the official bill of fare at the sectarian barricades. With the future of public health and the environment at stake, food that was wholesome became not just chic in certain circles of righteous-minded diners, but necessary; sustainable, local offerings from small farms and organic producers weren’t just an enlightened choice, but