Always a Diet Coke

Jason Brown

• Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age by John Jakle and Keith Sculle
  Johns Hopkins, 394 pp, £27.00, January 2000, ISBN 0 8018 6109 8

When I eat at McDonald’s, it’s because I’ve lapsed into a fugue state brought on by nostalgia for my 1970s childhood. Or simply resorted to an act of roadside desperation. Driving on the highway in America is like flying economy class: you take your own food or suffer the consequences. Fast food can easily stand for all that is wrong with America, but that is not the way John Jakle, a professor of geography, and Keith Sculle, a professor of history, see it. The trenchantly anti-ironic Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age is the third book in a trilogy that includes a volume on motels and another on gas stations. It is overwhelmed by nostalgia thinly disguised as scientific analysis, but this does not overshadow the authors’ achievement: a comprehensive account of the rise of fast food to its place as America’s third largest industry. ‘In a culture of automobile convenience,’ they conclude, ‘few lack fond memories of road trips taken with their refreshments, refuellings and lodgings along the way.’ I don’t know many middle-class people apart from combat veterans who can imagine anything worse than revisiting the forced marches of childhood family road trips. Even those who had a good time are now embarrassed to admit it.