Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,71
national appetite, fast food’s greatest virtue—and what people fail to appreciate most about its significance—is its creation of America’s most successful democratic gathering points: small matchbox chapels with practically no barrier to entry or belonging, regardless of race, age, class, gender, religion, or other. There is no velvet rope, no palm to grease, and no tracking shot of VIPs being ushered through the kitchen. There is no waitstaff injecting a sense of hierarchy, no dress code, no reservation book, and no culinary norms. You are welcome to bumble in wearing last night’s clothes and order seven small cheeseburgers and an apple pie at ten thirty in the morning.
For these reasons eating fast food is an experience with which nearly everyone is familiar. It’s both an intimate common reference point and, somehow at the same time, the least countercultural thing imaginable. Some countries have the unifying trials of compulsory national service; America has a paper tray mat turned translucent by stripes of french-fry grease and tiny stars from dabbed-up ketchup. It’s a secular communion and an inimitably American haven, something beautiful, terrible, perfect, and imperfect that cannot be replicated with nearly the same spiritual fidelity anywhere else in the world.
EPILOGUE
The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they nourish themselves.
—JEAN BRILLAT-SAVARIN
My fast-food story begins in the late 1990s with a simple ritual. I’m the first of my friends with a driver’s license. It’s 11:00 P.M. on a weekend night and we’re all crammed into a green Volvo with time for one last insinuation of independence before we dutifully rush across the Houston sprawl to make our midnight curfews. In the car sit members of the graduating high school class of 2000, Eagle Scouts and AP-course surveyors, yearbook staffers and youth-group nerds, sheltered kids in the last American generation to come of age without ubiquitous cell phones and portable internet. For us and for many in the pre-millennium adolescent corners of Texas, eleven o’clock meant one uncomplicated thing only: Whataburger. And for our $2, nothing held a candle to the Whataburger taquito—a perfect, made-to-order eggy breakfast taco loaded with delicately crisp hash browns (or bacon or sausage), melted American cheese, and a slather of company-branded picante sauce so good it’s sold in local grocery stores.
If we had enough time to spare, my friends and I would go inside to eat the taquitos. The cashier would hand us small numbered Whataburger plastic table tents to hold while we waited for our orders, markers that, if you were sixteen, you might sneak into your pocket to decorate your room with later. Then we’d all jam into a booth and devour our taquitos and talk about the otherworldly basketball exploits of Hakeem Olajuwon or high school politics or the unremarkable dramas of our romantic lives.
And if we were running behind schedule, there was always the drive-thru. And if the drive-thru line was jammed because of a concert, a high school football game, the rodeo, or the frequent 11:00 P.M. crush, we’d just speed away into the Texas night with the windows down and the CD player skipping at every bump, toward the next Whataburger, which was never more than an eight-minute drive away.
There are stories like this all across America. “Two potato taquitos with cheese, please” was mine. As a Texas kid, I felt about Whataburger the way a kid in Ohio might have felt about Steak ’n Shake, the way a kid in North Carolina might have felt about Cook Out, the way a kid in California might have felt about In-N-Out, the way a kid in Wisconsin might have felt about Culver’s, and so on. I was young and mostly polite, my metabolism was boundless, my ritual was sacred and my curfew corruptible. I hadn’t the slightest clue about what all had gone into making my ritual possible. I had the luxury of not knowing how lucky I was.
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The current discourse about fast food mirrors all political discourse—highly polarized, fragmented, and partisan. Broadly speaking, arguments against fast food are defined by principled positions on issues like wages, health, the environment. For some, fast food stands for an enfeebling, artificially inexpensive product irresponsibly peddled by an industry that has become a byword for corporate greed and economic injustice. “If you want an example of how the one percent have gotten wealthier on the backs of working people, here you have it: the fast-food industry,” New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who has used a slate of anti-fast-food bills to