Deez Interviews: Meet the writer behind the new ~fast food culture~ book that’ll change the way you think about the U.S.
Happy Friday, Deezers! Today’s interview is with Adam Chandler, a Brooklyn-based writer who’s covered just about everything from bodgeas for the NYT to Billy Joel fandom for The Atlantic. We talked to him about his new book Drive-Thru Dreams — which just came out on Tuesday — his fave fast food facts, and why he dedicated the book to his mom (awww). Enjoy!
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The interviewee: Adam Chandler (follow him @AllMyChandler!)
The gig: Author of Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom
You started working on Drive-Thru Dreams, back in 2015. What inspired you to go down this road?
Well, first of all, I love fast food. Completely unironically. I grew up in Texas, where it's still not really controversial and divisive to eat fast food, and fast food is deeply enmeshed in the car-centric way of life there. I also have fond memories of this beloved regional chain called Whataburger, where my friends and I would go every weekend night in high school as a late-night ritual before our curfews.
But for most of the past decade, I've been living in parts of Brooklyn where fast food is controversial and divisive. And I think there's something meaningful and telling about the divide. It centralizes all of these contentious issues in American life — wages, health, the environment, and the ways that people eat and live — into one extremely recognizable context.
To write this book, you undertook a road trip from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. What was that like as a research process and like, a general life experience?
It was great and truly stressful. What helped immensely was that the trip had a thematic framework, which was to drive between America's two unsung coasts and be immersed in America's unsung national food. So I created a mix of structure (visiting company headquarters, meeting workers and franchise owners, and scheduling interviews with interesting people who I thought might be representative of the story) and then a kind of a free-wheeling road trip where I ate a lot of terrible food and let the fate (and often inertia) take the wheel.
Some of the best and most interesting times were spontaneous, last-minute calls. I watched the first Republican debate from Ben Carson's Iowa headquarters. I ended up at a Sonic with a bunch of people who'd come to Kansas City for a Phish show. One of my AirBnB hosts in Arkansas was a widower, who I think started to rent out rooms in his house just to have people around, and I ended up staying an extra night because he was this unbelievably kind, insightful person.
Another night, I ended up in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and went to a McDonald's to write down some notes from the day, and this group of teens made fun of me for ordering a salad (which, for the record, was the first time I'd ever done that at Mickey D's) and then told me about how the store was their hangout because there wasn't much else to do in town.
It was an unbelievable luxury to do it because it was technically "work,” and it was an unbelievable privilege because the odds that I would encounter problems on a 4,000-mile trek across America by myself were much less than for others. I think keeping those realities front of mind kept me grounded and helped me make the most of it.
What is your favorite fast food factoid that everyone should know?
There are so many and you can't make me choose! Here are five of them ranked from most dystopian to least:
Almost 1% (~68 million) of the world's population eats McDonald's on a given day.
Former Chicago mayor and White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel lost part of his middle finger to an Arby's meat slicer. [editor’s note: had to google this bc WHAT!!!]
Colonel Sanders was a real person who shot a rival gas station owner during a Great Depression turf war.
Fatburger has a veggie burger on its secret menu. It's served with bacon and it's called a Hypocrite Burger.
Popeyes is named for Gene Hackman's character in The French Connection, not the spinach-obsessed sailor.
Before this book, you wrote about everything from Chinese food to gefilte fish as an Atlantic staff writer, but you also covered business, politics and foreign affairs. Would you say you identify as a food writer now that your book's out?
I've always considered myself a generalist, which is really just a noble-sounding way of saying that I have ADD and I'm a little afraid of being defined by a beat. And the book is kind of emblematic of that. There are chapters that parachute into topics like the Great Depression, the false promises of the American Dream, globalization, race, and income inequality. Of course, this is what exactly food writers do as well, but I think I'd be doing them a disservice if I claimed to be one.
And finally, we noticed you dedicated this book to your mom, "the first and best storyteller." Please elaborate??
My most sentimental anecdote involves my big sister and I going to Hebrew school on Sunday mornings as kids. Somehow, my mom talked her way into becoming a volunteer storyteller at our Sunday school, a position that I'm pretty sure didn't exist before her. It also wasn't something she needed to do, by the way. She worked a stressful full-time job during the week.
But every Sunday, every single class would go to the library one at a time and sit on the carpet, and she would read them a story or recite one from memory for about 15 or 20 minutes. This went on well into the age when something like that would seem embarrassing to a kid. But it never did. She was that good. (I mean, they built her into the curriculum!) She even had business cards made up with her name and her title: Storyteller.
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Well damn, we’re crying; are you crying?? Go follow Adam on Twitter @AllMyChandler and get a copy of Drive-Thru Dreams stat!!!