What We Eat on the Road
One: Supermarkets are selling better food. Much of what’s offered is overprocessed, much of it is junk, much of it isn’t even food. But it seems to me, from a strictly anecdotal standpoint, that a growing segment of real food has taken hold. This goes for gas stations, truck stops, just about everywhere.
Two: Alternatives to the standards (steak, chicken, salmon, fajitas) are turning up in the most unlikely restaurants. Bean dishes, salads that aren’t 50 percent cold cuts, pasta dishes that focus on vegetables instead of meat, are all becoming more common.
Three: Towns and cities that until recently might have been considered hopeless now offer creative restaurants serving interesting food.
Mark Bittman has been traveling around the U.S. with his daughters, and he’s reporting about how much better America has gotten at serving food in remote areas of the country.
When I was in college, my friends and I would use the week or so we got off from classes in the spring to drive into the mountains, or into the wilderness—basically anywhere that wasn’t a beach, because that’s where most of the spring break crowd would be found, and we had the beach 10 minutes away from campus during the entire year anyway.
They say it’s not always the destination, but the journey, and I remember cramming our equipment into the car, running to the grocery store to load up on provisions, swapping out mixed CDs for episodes of This American Life, singing along (often poorly) to the radio, and reading books or magazines and shouting out loud our favorite passages. When we stopped for food, it tended to be the same fast food joints found at every rest stop—McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s—or maybe if we were lucky, it would be a tiny diner with a name like Peggy Sue’s which served milkshakes, and we’d get a bowl of chili, which was a good thing to get because chili is one of those things that taste better the longer it sits in a pot, and I’m pretty sure the chili we ate had been sitting in the pot for quite a long time.
I haven’t taken a road trip in a while, and am thinking about driving to my friend’s wedding in Texas this fall. Will it be cheaper than flying? Probably not. But seeing what’s available on the road these days may be totally worth it.
Photo: Shutterstock/Nicole Kucera
My boyfriend and I drove when we were moving across country (well, flew halfway then drove the other half). Because we ate an embarrassing amount of McDonalds while packing for our move I banned it while on the road. We ended up packing sandwich stuff and finding places to picnic. It was pretty great!
Mike! Drive, do it. I drove to my friend’s wedding last fall and it was such a nice trip, including a meal in rural Maryland at a place called Bagelmeister.
My favorite road trip comestible is Slush Puppies, which hardly count as “real food,”I but I love ‘em. I used to try every brand of pork cracklins I could find, but I mean, college, what can I say.
For six years, I’ve lived the public transit life, and I REALLY miss road trips.
Is it just me or is that Mark Bittman article incredibly condescending? Like, is it really surprising that Indianapolis, a city of nearly a million people, has at least one good restaurant?
@darklingplain It’s not just you. I see what you’re getting at, Bittman, but there’s an icky sense of coastal elitism in your shocked realization that there is, in fact, FOOD between San Francisco and New York.
@mirror_father_mirror I can’t believe he dissed the breezewood exit on the turnpike (sarcasm). But seriously, he was only like a half hour away from Johnstown, home of my grandmother and the best damn pierogies outside of Poland (presumably). And I’ve lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. And I currently reside in Chicago. So I got this, Bittman.
I cover the entire Upper Midwest for work and that entails a ton of driving. Seven years ago I ate nothing but fast food but these days it’s next to never. There are so many great places to eat throughout the country. I had the best black bean burger in my life up in Ely, MN this past winter and I still think about the ridiculously cheap and delicious pasty I got a couple months ago up in Ontonagon, MI. My favorite this year was a curry-flavored whitefish sandwich from a bistro in Ashland, WI – I’ve been wanting to go back there for the last four months.