Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,72
burnish his progressive bona fides, said in 2016. Meanwhile, for their supporters and devotees, places like Jack in the Box and Milo’s and Burgerville largely speak to convenience, ceremony, comfort, and perhaps a defiant rejection of elitist-seeming cultural signifiers.
If this rift didn’t seem apparent before, its apotheosis was reached with the 2016 election of Donald Trump, whose very public love for quick-service fare led him to be dubbed “the nation’s fast-food president” by The New York Times that same year. Throughout his campaign, the thrice-married Manhattan billionaire real-estate mogul blasted images of himself on social media eating KFC and McDonald’s on his private jet to project an everyman persona and forge a genuine connection with voters. (Taking a cue from his running mate, in 2016 Mike Pence also posted a picture of himself on a plane, eating KFC with his mother.) Trump’s calculated fast-food high jinks stoked extensive media coverage, of course, but they also struck a nerve with people across America. Those who felt alienated and overlooked by establishment figures were endeared; others who wanted their presidents’ meals to have larger cultural and environmental significance were horrified.
The fast-food kingdom doesn’t just contain all of these contemporary energies; it’s also the product of a century of competing social forces. Almost a hundred years ago, White Castle embarked on a tech-forward quest to serve accessible, mass-produced burgers and completely uniform experiences. As cars entered the mainstream, fast food became a partner and companion of American mobility and, later, a savior of suburbia during the baby boom. As the roads prospered into the giant interstates of the postwar era, roadside chains became an economic equalizer for midcentury endeavorers, arriving immigrants, and urban entrepreneurs left behind in the cities. With the labor force democratizing, fast food answered the question “What’s for dinner?” in young households with working parents. Within the past half century, the arches and curbside marquees have evolved into avatars of American corporatism and global dominance to be seen as admirable, menacing, or both. Domestically, fast food is now a symptom of a national lifestyle that seems as frenzied as it is unhealthy. Yet, at the same time, it’s an unexpected antidote, offering lonely, isolated, and otherwise forgotten people venues to pursue connections and community in a cold, stratifying world.
Where other countries can be defined and distilled down to their theologies, norms, state parties, and militarism, the drive-thru lane is the American panopticon—a half-circle channel where most everything seems visible. Over the past few decades, fast food has become a prism through which American economic anxiety and cultural despair can be interpreted. In public perception and popular culture, fast-food work has gone from an exemplar of possibility to a consequence of the American worker’s decline in power. At the consumer level, the topic of fast food plays an outsize role in the arguments about how Americans are supposed to eat, live, and conduct themselves, whether by way of individual destiny and free will or guided by social responsibility and sustainability.
And then, there is the food—addictive, unnatural, majestic, gratifying. Most any honest person, no matter how refined the palate or how anointed the social status, can own up to harboring at least one fast-food pleasure, guilty or otherwise. One will-weakening item that their resistance is useless against and their fealty is set to. In spite of all the politics, controversies, and stigmas, some of the best yarns about fast-food kryptonite have been spun by figures in the upper echelons of the culinary world, gastronomes who, despite their stature, could never fully disavow the merits of lowbrow, everyman grub.
The burgers at In-N-Out have enchanted the fabled likes of Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Alton Brown as well as Thomas Keller, who salutes the California icon as “the perfect example of classic American fast food.” Laurent Tourondel, the celebrated French chef and restaurateur, is partial to the Burger King Whopper, while British baker and anti-clean-eating evangelist Ruby Tandoh calls their fries “the jewel in the King crown.” Celebrity fusionist Dale Talde carries the McRib, the Golden Arches’ limited-time white whale, in his heart. Doffing his toque to Popeyes, Top Chef Masters’ Michael Schlow asks, “Who doesn’t like spicy, delicious, perfectly greasy, crunchy fried chicken?” Meanwhile, Craig Hopson, the onetime executive chef of Manhattan’s exclusive Le Cirque, favors Jack in the Box: “Crunchy, rich, creamy, totally not good for you, delicious.”
In its temptation and horror, fast food is a reflective pillar of a country that changes with the times and somehow manages to stay the