Roadside Dreams, Fast Food Nightmares

If John Jakle, Keith Sculle, and Eric Schlosser ever got together in the same room, I would love to be a fly on the wall. That might indeed be the only safe place to perch, considering their fundamentally different approaches to the same subject. To be sure, Jakle and Sculle, authors of Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), and Schlosser, whose more recently published Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of The All-American Meal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) made a noticeable splash in the national media, agree that scholars have slighted their subject for far too long. We Americans spend far more on fast food than we do on new cars, higher education, or personal computers--and perhaps with far greater impact on our minds, not to mention our arteries and waistlines. But after agreeing on the merit of studying fast food these two books diverge sharply, one respectfully praising American ingenuity and hustle, the other mourning the deadly costs of the banquet.

Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age is the third volume in a gas-lodging-food trilogy that anchors a Johns Hopkins University Press series, the Road and American Culture. The other volumes in the series are The Gas Station in America (1994), also coauthored by Jakle and Sculle, and The Motel in America (1996), by Jakle, Sculle, and Jefferson Rogers. Each volume is a useful all-in-one reference work, full of details about the revolutionary transformation of the American landscape wrought by the automobile. The books are especially helpful in informing us about which roadside entrepreneurs did what and when in their ingenious attempts to capitalize on Americans' apparently insatiable appetite for services that combine convenience and speed with fantasy and escape.

After briefly surveying restaurants before the automobile, Jakle and Sculle summarize the history of various roadside enterprises, grouped in chapters dedicated to sandwiches, hamburgers, ice cream, chicken, seafood, pizza, tacos, steak, and assorted other "concepts." As students of landscape, Jakle and Sculle are more interested in place than food. Thus, at the outset they rework the customary food-studies axiom to read "we are where we eat." The quick-service restaurant offers an "alternative place," "a testing place for comprehending the world beyond the normative routines of residence and workplace. Restaurants attracted people not so much according to the food available as to the sense of place they offered. Food was often incidental to the other attributes of place, especially those attributes that engendered socializing, and the opportunities to watch others socializing" (p. 8). Chapters are labeled with this spatial rather than culinary orientation, as in "Hamburger Places," "Chicken Places," and so on. While the authors fail to provide much direct information about how customers actually experienced these places, they do a good job of detailing the evolution of roadside form, layout, and architecture. The hundreds of photographs, ads, charts, and maps alone are worth the price of the book.

Each concept category contains sketches of corporate history, as we learn why some companies succeeded (such as White Castle and Subway) while others failed (Snappy Service and Maid-Rite). It is also instructive to learn about the decline and fall of once-hegemonic chains (Howard Johnson's, Dog 'N' Suds, Chicken Delight). Inevitably, McDonald's gets a chapter to itself, although the explanation of its spectacular growth relies too heavily on the personality of founder Ray Kroc--as in "Kroc's restaurant empire grew because he worked hard on it" (p. 141). This organization scheme does get repetitious, as each chapter covers the same few decades over and over, but the penultimate chapter provides a synthesis of sorts by focusing on the evolution of fast food in one middle-American city, Springfield, Illinois.

Overall, this book does better with questions of what and when than with issues of why, how, and who. Except for heroic entrepreneurs like Kroc, people are noticeably absent from the narrative...