Flavourful slices

There are no inherited rites in America, but if one were to come close, it would involve mainlining sodium beneath the comforting fluorescence of an anonymous fast-food dining room or beneath the dome light of a car. We do it because fast food is quick and cheap and portable. We do it because we have fond memories of wearing paper crowns at birthday parties, of Happy Meals and Frosties and road trips, and of bygone moments of innocence and intimacy with friends or parents or siblings. We do it because a slightly damp $12 turkey wrap is not a suitable salve for airport stress. We do it because the food is what we want a little soft and gross and perfect, nestled in colorful wrapping and flimsy little boxes like presents from our first loves. And we do it because the places are familiar to us. It's under McDonald's Golden Arches, for example, a sign more recognizable worldwide than the Christian cross that about 1% of the entire world's population breaks bread on any given day.

Simply put, nothing else does what fast food does as well as fast food does it. There is no other place, not libraries or gyms or the collective houses of worship that 80% of Americans frequent at least monthly. And there are virtually no other enterprises that 96% of Americans annually embrace. Not even the internet comes close to attracting that much loyalty or participation. On a descending spectrum of American certainty, it goes something like death, premarital sex, fast food, and income taxes. The United States is and remains a fast-food nation.

From its creation to its dominance, fast food is who and where we've been. You can trace most of twentieth-century America through fast food. It cannot be isolated from the entrepreneurial mania of the 1920s Machine Age, the trauma of the Great Depression, the hubris and swagger of the postwar economic boom, the building of the interstate highway system, and the national preoccupations with time and work and individual destiny. The evolution of fast food tracks with the American faith in processed food as well as its disillusion. That evolution also showcases the powerful effect of women entering the labor force. The contemporary story of the country's immigrant strivings, of its loneliness and failures, of its sluggish embrace of different cultures, of its international charisma, and of its regional identities can be distilled through fast food. The landscapes of the South would be incomplete without Chick-filA, Cook Out, and Bojangles'. In-N-Out and Del Taco are as Californian as Pollo Tropical is Floridian as Sonic is heartland as Dairy Queen is small town. The Midwest isn't the Midwest without Culver's, Steak 'n Shake, and Maid-Rite, and the Lone Star State would certainly be dimmer and duller without Whataburger. And if there's any redemption to be found on the New Jersey Turnpike, it's at a Roy Rogers.

The United States is singularly geared to love fast food and not just because the agricultural system is rigged to support it. Far more than anywhere else in the world, Americans drive cars with automatic transmissions on some of the straightest highways over built. Somewhere, someone is on one of those roads right now. The sun might be out, Steely Dan might be on the radio, and the driver almost certainly has no idea that the very last fries just out of reach at the bottom of a paper bag are linked to Thomas Jefferson, the self styled gastronome and principal author of the independence decree who first introduced the United States to tried potatoes after serving as the minister to France. "Potatoes deep-fried while raw, in small cuttings, served in the French manner," he requested of White House chef Honoré Julien before a dinner party. "This is the day of the expanding man," the song might go. "That shape is my shade."

In the midst of the ongoing national cleaving over American dining habits, the fast-food industry lives and draws power from its ubiquity and mass appeal. Critics frequently accuse McDonald's and its ilk of being monoliths that throw around their influential purchasing and marketing power to public harm. And while these gripes certainly have their merits, the secret to fast food's success has been its adaptability and its careful study and reflection of American desires and the national order-literal, figurative, and culinary. These oddities and contradictions are a lot of what this book is about.

In the summer of 2015, I first set out to investigate how the industry intersects with American life in a way that makes it such a beloved and resilient institution. I started by driving straight up the gut of the country from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, America's two unheralded coasts. As a result this book is a study of fast-food history, not just chronologically, but ethnographically as well. We already know why fast food is bad. But the conditions that made fast food possible are just as important as understanding why its popularity endures, particularly in this atmosphere of discord and high friction.

At its most essential, food is what unites us. The cultural canvas may keep shrinking, but it's hard to imagine Thanksgiving without turkey or the Super Bowl without buffalo wings. And, damn, it feels good to light off fireworks on the Fourth of July and demolish a Big Mac every once in a while.

This is an extract from Adam Chandler's Drive Thru Dreams published by Flatiron Books