same. An engine of change and a sacramental anchor to the comforts of the past. Whether you’re hungry or not, it’s possible to both shudder at the sodium levels in a Burger King Croissan’wich and marvel at how the first cage-free egg consumed by millions of Americans will likely come by way of it. Most of all, fast food is an institution designed to be in tune with the scrambled frequencies and priorities of everyday life.
Between these poles are places like the small McDonald’s adjacent to the Phillips 66 on West Cemetery Avenue. It’s the first stop off Interstate 55 in Chenoa, a central Illinois town surrounded by corn and soy fields. The gas station is about half the short distance between I-55 and the old Route 66. It’s where I stood pumping gas in the August heat and was startled for a second when out of the corner of my eye I suddenly saw a woman rushing across the parking lot toward the store entrance. She was harried, as if she were chasing a bus she absolutely had to catch and that was already halfway down the block and speeding away. She did this wholly unselfconsciously and in sandals, while in her arms she balanced a white paper box as if it held everything fragile and dear in the world. She couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me, but looked as though she had lived life in ways I hadn’t even begun to imagine.
Inside the McDonald’s in Chenoa, three elderly women in shirts of varying floral patterns were eating ice cream at a table on the hot Saturday afternoon while employees idled behind the counter waiting for a rush that didn’t seem likely to come. Through another door in back was a small, high-ceilinged indoor playground that had been decorated with a few stray streamers and some Frozen-themed Mylar balloons. There were three Elsas and one Anna. Above a well-worn painting of a cartoon Hamburglar, simple paper lettering that spelled out HAPPY BIRTHDAY hung limply, blowing in the AC. Nearby, a chubby toddler with a side part and a button-front shirt tucked into shorts was being stuffed in a booster seat. The woman I’d seen moments earlier was now setting out paper plates and plastic forks around a sheet cake she had pulled from the paper box and topped with candles.
What she didn’t know as she had careered across the parking lot was that when she arrived, two boys would be wigging out joyfully twelve feet up in the plastic-bottomed turret of the indoor playground. That a young girl who had clambered up a ladder and across a minibridge would be hanging from netting and cawing like a crazed rooster. That over by a poster on the playroom wall, two boys would be devising a way to help Olaf the snowman find his carrot nose. That parents clustered together in booths would be eating McNuggets and cheering on two girls locked in a vicious race to scoot down the double slide first. That this gas station McDonald’s by the highway, the only game in town, would be the happiest place in Illinois and a berth through which a new generation of memories would pass.
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As the social fibers fray, as fights are waged in impersonal isolation, thicketed by social, digital, geographic, and economic divisions, there will be fast food. As diners fluent in the pieties about ethical food systems watch someone with no paid sick leave and no health insurance meticulously stir their $22 polenta, as the fast-casual quinoa dispensaries go cashless and leave more people behind, there will be fast food. Against our better interests and angels, there will be fast food.
Like our arteries, the American landscape will always be clogged with beacons to indulge, to sin, to repeat. Like going to the Grand Canyon or falling asleep at a baseball game, fast food will always be part of the national rite of passage. It will always be where a weekly family meal still represents a familiar ritual and a consistent means to an end. It’s where high school fund-raisers, jobs, and dates will happen along with senior breakfasts, Bible studies, and retirement parties. So long as there’s still democracy, it’s where some citizens will continue to cast their ballots. On the great roads between home and away, there will always be affordable, ready-made pit stops with playgrounds for kids, who, like wound-up tops, spin out their pent-up energy before the parks, gator