On Wednesday, we set off in our rented KIA for Cleveland. Our big vacation. It’s not first class to Ibiza, but that’s the state of our finances right now.
Because the kids are small, we broke up the trip into small bite size portions and a hotel stay in the center of the Pennsylvania. That meant two days in the car, two days in Cleveland, and two more days in the car.
It’s all good. The kids got time to kick around in hotel pools, and Steve and I distracted ourselves with elegies for the decaying towns that follow the rusting rail lines of the midwest. (next post)
It’s all good, except for the food. Good lord, where do you have to go to get something healthy? What’s wrong with some steamed carrots? Grilled chicken? Brown rice? Sans salt and grease? I’m sure there’s some decent restaurants down one of the smaller highways and roads, but along Route 80, all we found were Wendy’s, Burger King, and McDonald’s.
My colon is so lubricated with french fry oil, I’ll be …. Well, nevermind.
Why is the American highway so devoid of good food? Where are the cute little pubs that follow England’s major roads that serve ale and plowman’s specials? I want some pickled onions, dammit.
Can we blame our Fast Food Nation on some deficit in the American character (fear of novelty, preference for speed over pleasure) or is it a plot of corporate baddies to squelch out competition?
Apt. 11d 
I’ve often wondered this myself. Where can one get some broccoli? I think Americans’ attitude toward food is one of necessity for fuel. Eat fast so you can get back to being productive. The English pubs don’t have this attitude. It takes a while to eat a hefty sandwich, finish a pint, and then sit till the pint wears off. I’ve driven through the middle of PA several times. The middle of OH is worse.
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Laura (by which I mean Laura 11D, not the commenting Laura),
I used to travel along the highways as a child with my father who was a truck driver. Back in the 1970s, all you would find along the highways in both Canada and the United States were truckstops. Now they could give you a meal rather more substantial than a hamburger and fries, but they usually had questionable standards as far as cleanliness goes. The fast food chains entered that market in order to serve travellers like yourselves, lower to middle class families travelling on the roads. And they do fairly well at it, though the menus are quite restricted. You can find other sorts of food, but you have to leave the highways and go into a town. In a way, its a net loss: truckstops had more personality and the staff would often give you more personable service. But that’s how things go in North America. (the same trend to fast food chains along the freeways is happening in Canada too) My only advice is to either bring your own healthy stuff on the road with you (not usually practical given how much a whole family consumes) or plan time and effort to going off the road to eat at a real restaurant.
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In some parts of the country, going off-interstate hardly nets you anything. How well I remember a hiking (without camping) trip in the desert southwest: two whole weeks of crap food, with nary a vegetable and yet nary a chain. When we found the vegetarian restaurant in Flagstaff, we just about moved in and refused to leave. We stayed an extra day just for the sake of green (green!) foodstuffs.
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Usually what we do..even in England, come to think of it–is find a grocery store, instead, and buy fresh fruit plus sandwich stuff. Often they also have a little hot sandwich/soup/salad bar deli in the back (depending on where you are). Investing in a cooler full of bags of carrot sticks, etc., is also not a bad idea.
You do have to get off the highways to find anything at all that’s not fast food. I don’t think it’s an American character defect or a corporate conspiracy, just a normal course of events. I do think it’s actually getting better, although not where you were perhaps. But there are actually chains like Souper Salad and even the Applebee’s type restaurants where you can get a salad if you want it, now. When I was a kid, there were truck stops and fast food and that was it. Salad meant a piece of iceberg lettuce under a glop of cottage cheese.
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Grocery store is the only way to do it — and I agree with emjaybee that its the same in England. Off-raod food there is better than here, but grocery store food is even better, relative to off-raod food, than it is here, the grocery stores being so, so much better. Not to be chauvanistic or anything.
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Grocery stores, ethnic, and second-level roads (not freeway/highways) where available. And choose places that have a lot of beat-up older cars and pick-ups over ones with a more “tourist” feel (buses and RVs and very shiny rentals).
_The Interstate Gourmet_ though way out of date now, gives some idea of the sorts of things to look for. (Perhaps they’ve updated it?)
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Where are the cute little pubs like along the England’s major roads that serve ale and plowman’s specials?
Well, that’s an idealized vision of England you have there. Even over there, along the M and A(M) (their equivalent of the Interstates) it is all Burger King and Little Chef. If you want the pubs you have to take to the two lane with level crossing roads. If you drove across Pennsylvania on the blue roads you would probably come across some quirky places to eat. I’ll bet there are some fun places to have dinner near Amish country…
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Yes, I probably could find quirky restaurant off the beaten track in PA or deli meat at grocery stores, but they would involve much larger detours away from the highway.
I think it’s easier to find better, fast food in Europe than America. I took several long busrides through Spain. After a couple of hours, the bus would stop at a cafe along the side of the highway. Everyone would disembark the bus, enhale several strong cigarettes and eat tasty sandwiches at the counter along with a cafe con leche. McDonalds was only for the Americans in Madrid.
Okay, here’s another hairbrained theory. The puritanical Americans have never felt comfortable in cafes or pubs which serve the European fastfood needs. American pubs don’t cater to families and are mostly centered in urban centers. McDonalds is the only alternative.
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Panera’s is great for soups, salads, and sandwiches, and kids like them too. I wish there were more of them. Subway can also be pretty good.
Holding up English pub food as healthy? Hmmm. It’s probably just as healthy as Cracker Barrel, another spot that lines the highways here. Appealing for kids, plus they have those jumping peg games on the table.
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Grocery stores are good. Also, I really enjoy sampling regional cuisine, which miraculously still exists if you know where to look–guides like Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood can help you find them ISBN 0767908090 and amazon gives you a look inside, for your trip back. Or you can check out roadfood.com
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In America, it’s a function of (1) standardization & (2) addictive behavior and its corporate sponsors. The big point of McDonald’s and the like is knowing you will get exactly the same bigmac (or, as John Travolta points out in the beginning of Pulp Fiction, the same “royale”) anywhere you stop. Actually, what this panders to is American Mugwumpism—who knows what weird food and social practice you might find in a restaurant run by someone you don’t know (probably from a foreign country to boot).
Plus as we all know this food is constructed to create a quasi-addictive dependency, especially in children, so as this corporate cashstream gathered real steam in the 60’s, the HoJos disappeared and the MacD’s arrived.
I was just in Israel, and I’d like to propose that we establish felafel vendors along the major highways. I’ve always liked them, but didn’t realize they were Israelis’ answer to the Big Mac. They would satisfy that craving for fried stuff, but with chick peas, they’re freshly fried and they have plenty of fresh veggies. A bit messy in the back seat, perhaps…but so is ketchup.
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I took an I-40 road trip cross-country at Christmas time a dozen years ago. (We went south from NYC to meet I-40 in NC) Using some guidebook I’ve forgotten now, we did find good places to eat in Tennessee (Nashville and Memphis) but it was horrible from the Mississippi to Albuquerque. Plenty of good food in Albuquerque, where we spent a week. Flagstaff was another life-saver -I wanted to stay in Flagstaff, too.
Most miserable moment: checking into a motel in Oklahoma City one cold winter’s night and having to smell the really great Indian food the owner was cooking in the kitchen behind the desk. No, they weren’t willing to sell or share.
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A plug for Cracker Barrel — I’m a complete sucker for all the faux old world stuff, and the food is entirely palateable — if you catch them at the right time the fries are actually good and I have had really really good pancakes there once or twice. But healthy?…. no; I would avoid their salads particularly.
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Not being able to find good food or anything besides chain restaurants while on the road is interesting and sort of ironic, because one of the reasons that chain restaurants developed in the United States was because of increasing amounts of long-distance automotive travel.
Travelers in the early decades of the twentieth century were often at the mercy of whatever restaurants they could find; without reliable cleanliness standards, reliable food-distribution networks, or other things we depend on today, it was never quite certain *what* travelers would encounter. Howard Johnson’s, the Fred Harvey restaurants, and others flourished because they offered travelers clean, well-lit restaurants, reliable food, and a lack of surprises at a time when travel could be very surprising, in unpleasant ways (cars were less reliable, roads still rough at times, etc.). We take a lot of these things for granted now, but these types of restaurants developed for a reason. This doesn’t excuse a lot of the crap food you find these days, of course, just interesting to know.
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