“Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom”, by Adam Chandler

288 pages, Flatiron Books, ISBN-13: 978-1250090720

I walk. A lot. It’s really the only exercise I get. I’ve walked at every job I ever had, doing lap after lap around the joint until I wore paths in the carpet. Most of my employers were cool with it – or at any rate didn’t complain about it – while others…weren’t. Ah, screw ‘em. I even walk when I’m not working, like when I’m at the library reading, or in the computer lab, and get up every half-hour (because that’s as long as I can sit still) and take a lap – which is when I saw Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom by Adam Chandler and checked it out then and there. Because why not? Chandler’s book explores how modern American dining has changed over the course of the 20^th Century. While most pundits see fast food in only a negative light, Chandler uncovers the whole story by showing how fast food chains impacted Americans, both negatively and, yes, positively.

Personally, McDonald’s was THE fast food go-to joint. Saturdays my Dad would take Mom out for a well-deserved dinner at whatever place she chose; my brother Jonathan and I were basically left alone to watch TV (especially Airwolf) and scarf down our McDonald’s Happy Meals. On the many interstate vacations we went on we also inevitably had lunch at McDonald’s because it was cheap and reliable (dinner was something else; we always tried a local joint to add variety to our lives). Was all of this fast food good for me? Nope. But that’s the point of a guilty pleasure, isn’t it? If you want to eat healthy you don’t eat fast food; if you want to enjoy life a little you do. And Chandler relates these basic facts as he recounts the history of America’s greatest fast food chains and how fast food shaped America and how America shaped fast food, for fast food history is unquestionably American history, for good and for ill.

Chandler does a great job in showing how the Greatest Generation provided the perfect market for the explosive growth of seemingly every small-town burger joint into a much larger atmosphere which, when combined with a new advertising mindset, allowed them to become national icons – well, some of them at any rate, for with every international success there were a dozen failures (I still miss the Burger Chef that graced the strip mall opposite my childhood subdivision). If I had a complaint then it’s the double crutches of McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken that he leans on, to the detriment of other fast food chains. These other chains are discussed – White Castle, Hardees, Taco Bell and others, besides – but they all seem to come back to Mickey D’s and KFC at the cost of explaining how food tastes were changing overall. And the snide political commentary at times was as out of place as an onion ring in my large fries.

But anyway – Drive-Thru Dreams was an informative look at an often misunderstood and much maligned market whose greatest crime is giving the public what it wants. While I think the book would have been better had it been more linear, instead of bouncing about from one corporation to the next, what Chandler makes clear is that fast food did not originate from a single place but was created throughout the country, virtually at the same time. And over time, with the interstate highways connecting the country, fast food, in a way, connected us all.