Deciphering America: Inside a Cracker Barrel

When I was in the States, I flew to Washington D.C., landed in the afternoon, rented a car, got stuck in a four-hour traffic jam, drove to the coast, and checked into my motel late in the evening.  Tired, I didn't really feel like searching for a restaurant, so I gave up and simply ate at the Cracker Barrel adjacent to my motel.

I chose the Cracker Barrel, because it was safe and would be a quick meal for a tired traveler:  I knew exactly what the menu would have on it, exactly the moderately-priced mid-level quality of food, even exactly what the food would taste like.  There would be no soaring, unexpected culinary delights, but no frightening surprises either.

After I ordered my catfish, I looked around me, at the restaurant, at the wait staff, at the customers, at the two identical cornbread muffins my waiter had brought me, at the displays of antiques affixed to the walls.  That's when I realized:  to understand America and everything that had happened there in the past year all you need to do is go eat at a Cracker Barrel.

For those of you from Canada or Central Asia who don't know what a Cracker Barrel is: it's a giant chain of restaurants headquartered in the South that have a theme of nostalgia, delivering a version of country living to all people who enter.  The menu features "old-fashioned" Southern cooking, every restaurant has antique relics as part of the decor, and to get to your table you have to walk through a giant gift shop filled with new versions of products of yesteryear designed to recall a past era in America.

The Cracker Barrel in...wherever...it doesn't matter as this is how all Cracker Barrels look.

The first thing that struck me was that every single customer in the restaurant was white.  And a millisecond later I realized that every server and staff person was either Hispanic or African American.  Yes, it could have been random coincidence, but I have been in a few Cracker Barrels in my day and this sort of dynamic isn't particularly unusual in what I have witnessed over the years. It was as though I had entered a bygone era of segregated living.  Don't think I'm overstating things:  in 2004, Cracker Barrel settled a multi-million dollar law suit brought by African-Americans who alleged that they had been discriminated against by being seated only in smoking areas of Cracker Barrels or by being provided no service at all.  How comforting it must be, even on a subconscious level, for the white customers in the Cracker Barrel I was visiting, to eat in a place where the social order fits their mental picture of how life in America was and how life should be.

The distinctive Cracker Barrel interior, no variation among the thousands of restaurants across America.

The displays of old advertising signs and antiquated objects like butter churns and hand-powered machines for washing clothes are another element that romanticizes this longing for nostalgia and a yearning for a distant, cherished past where life was blissfully simple. I am not longing for the days where I have to churn my butter by hand, so this retro decor doesn't appeal to me particularly, but it serves as a marketing tool to draw people into Cracker Barrels.  More importantly, it also represents a powerful reinforcement to the ideology that suggests that America was best in some past era where old-fashioned ways were prevalent.

Even the gift shop attached to each Cracker Barrel is a monument to this romanticized version of the past.  DVDs of old television shows aired long before most of the customers were born fill the display racks. Antiquated soda pops like Grape Nehi are crammed on the shelves and acres of scented candles tempt all who love the aroma of smoldering artificial vanilla. Memorabilia depicting patriotic scenes and featuring the American flag are also prominent. Country music blares over the sound system. Nostalgia can also be a valuable commodity: it is a wish for simpler times, being exploited for profit.

My catfish was OK, neither bad nor great, served on the same nondescript beige plates found in every Cracker Barrel.  Yes, my macaroni and cheese and green beans were acceptable, not particularly distinguishable from any food you might get in a college cafeteria, nursing home, or other large institutional dining facility.  What most impressed me was the lack of spice or seasoning in any dish I received there--salt was the dominant flavor I could detect.  There is no sriracha, fish sauce, or chutney in a Cracker Barrel, thank you very much, and I could not imagine the commotion that would be caused if any such item found its way upon a Cracker Barrel table. Nothing spicy, alien, avant-garde, or progressive is allowed anywhere within the boundaries of this tightly-controlled world. Is it any surprise that many Cracker Barrel diners face the outside world, beyond the Cracker Barrel, with the same aversion to difference and unfamiliarity?

I finished my meal and ambled outside to sit in one of the old-style rocking chairs that can be found on the "front porch" of every Cracker Barrel--each chair 25% off for a limited time, the tag on my chair informed me.  As I slowly rocked, trying to rock the excess of nostalgia out of my system, I understood completely what happened on a bleak November Tuesday in 2016.  Yes there was hatred present on that day, but just as powerful was that slogan "Make America Great Again."  It's also been the unstated credo at every Cracker Barrel for decades.  Uncertain and complicated lives, futures that are not easily deciphered, a world that is compressing more rapidly by the day, boundaries between nations that are less clear, and rapid technological change in a world where the rich and powerful pay little heed to average folks--these frightening realities are easily erased once you step foot inside a Cracker Barrel.  Might they also be similarly erased when a candidate marketing the same nostalgia comes along? That is the conclusion, perhaps not even consciously considered, that drove so many Cracker Barrel diners and helped propel them to casting their fateful votes.

Yes, everything you need to know to decipher America, at least one half of it, can be found inside your nearest Cracker Barrel.  No matter how strongly one might hope, however, the past can never be reproduced, whether it be in a Cracker Barrel or by an unscrupulous politician skilled at manipulating human desires and yearnings. It is a lesson many Americans will soon learn the hard way, in the very near future.