Drive-Thru Dreams

A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom

By: Adam Chandler

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Paperback | 28 September 2021

At a Glance

Paperback
288 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.3 x 12.8 x 2

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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.

About the Author

Adam Chandler is a writer and journalist based in Brooklyn. A former staff writer at The Atlantic and Tablet Magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Texas Monthly, New York Magazine, Slate, Esquire, and elsewhere.

Industry Reviews

A Publishers Weekly Book of the Week

"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

Drive-Thru Dreams is one of my favorite food books ever.
Ed Levine, founder of Serious Eats

Adam Chandler makes the case that our love for fast food is a defining part of American culture. I spent much of my childhood chasing Happy Meal toys and clamoring for Blizzards. If you did, too, this book's for you.
Brandon Canter, NPR

Eminently readable, smart, and fascinating, Drive-Thru Dreams is, belying its subject matter, a full meal.
Entertainment Weekly

An entertaining treatise on how fast food has changed American culture, and been changed by it, Adam Chandler traces its history from the beginnings of White Castle to today.
Business Insider

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