Drive-Thru Dreams
A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
“This is a book to savor, especially if you’re a fast-food fan.”—Bookpage
"This fun, argumentative, and frequently surprising pop history of American fast food will thrill and educate food lovers of all speeds."
—Publishers Weekly
Most any honest person can own up to harboring at least one fast-food guilty pleasure. In Drive-Thru Dreams, Adam Chandler explores the inseparable link between fast food and American life for the past century. The dark underbelly of the industry’s largest players has long been scrutinized and gutted, characterized as impersonal, greedy, corporate, and worse. But, in unexpected ways, fast food is also deeply personal and emblematic of a larger than life image of America.
With wit and nuance, Chandler reveals the complexities of this industry through heartfelt anecdotes and fascinating trivia as well as interviews with fans, executives, and workers. He traces the industry from its roots in Wichita, where White Castle became the first fast food chain in 1921 and successfully branded the hamburger as the official all-American meal, to a teenager's 2017 plea for a year’s supply of Wendy’s chicken nuggets, which united the internet to generate the most viral tweet of all time.
Drive-Thru Dreams by Adam Chandler tells an intimate and contemporary story of America—its humble beginning, its innovations and failures, its international charisma, and its regional identities—through its beloved roadside fare.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everybody, "no matter how refined the palate or how anointed the social status," has a fast food pleasure, freelance writer Chandler states in his perceptive cultural history of the restaurants he identifies as a quintessentially American innovation. The book begins in a flurry of vivid portraiture of the genre's titanic innovators. These tales of larger-than-life individuals including the cussing-and-cooking "ham who served chicken" caricature Harlan Sanders (Kentucky Fried Chicken) and the famously "cruel" yet meticulously meritocratic Ray Kroc (McDonald's) start as glorious capitalist pirate tales but end with those idiosyncratic visions being "swallowed up by the burgeoning corporate state." Chandler shows how the democratic spread of cheap, fast food reflects different periods in American history, from the prewar Upton Sinclair inspired push for clean industrialized dining, to the postwar sprawl of prosperous highway-linked suburbs, and ultimately to the current divide over "interpretations of purity" in what constitutes healthy fast food. He throws cold water on the idea that "fast casual" eateries such as Chipotle are anything new, pointing out that their clean-looking aesthetic just harkens back to the industrial appeal of hamburger restaurants such as White Castle. This fun, argumentative, and frequently surprising pop history of American fast food will thrill and educate food lovers of all speeds.
