Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom

by Adam Chandler

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Book cover for Drive-Thru Dreams

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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 guilty pleasure. One item against which their resistance is useless and their fealty is set.

We tend to think of fast food as corporate and impersonal. And for good reason. But, in unexpected ways, fast food is also deeply personal. After all, the only inherited rite in America might just be mainlining French fries beneath the comforting fluorescence of an anonymous fast-food dining room. Drive-Thru Dreams by Adam Chandler tells the personal and contemporary story of America, its innovations and failures, its international charisma, and its regional identities through its beloved roadside fare. Fast food's menus, mass appeal, and blue-collar roots, offer a reflection of a century of national life explained by American habits, desires, economic realities, and political identities.

We are all too familiar with the dark underbelly of the fast-food kingdom, but it is also symbolic of what we mean to be: democratic, efficient, and accessible to the masses. A sharp contrast to Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation, Chandler's insightful and hilarious cultural study with Drive-Thru Dreams shows that the fast-food industry, though imperfect, reflects much of what makes us Americans.
  • ISBN10 1250090741
  • ISBN13 9781250090744
  • Publish Date 22 June 2021 (first published 1 July 2019)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Out of Print 5 April 2024
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Flatiron Books
  • Format Paperback
  • Pages 288
  • Language English