I recently stumbled on a Wikipedia page on American diner lingo: ‘sunny side up’, ‘pigs in a blanket’, ‘peel it off the wall’ and so on.
I recently stumbled on a Wikipedia page on American diner lingo: ‘sunny side up’, ‘pigs in a blanket’, ‘peel it off the wall’ and so on. Whether or not these phrases were all commonly used (did anyone really ask for ‘shit on a shingle’ when requesting minced beef with gravy on toast?), the list’s length hints at the remarkable breadth of 1930s American street food.
Then McDonald’s came along. While the old diner offered choice and customisation, the fast-food restaurant offered the opposite — faced with the choice, people chose to sacrifice variety for speed and consistency.
The American obsession with choice has now shifted from food to coffee. In 1993, when I first heard a Berkeley student demand a ‘half-decaf, half-regular latte with low-fat milk to go’, I remember thinking that, in a London café, they would be risking a punch in the face.
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