Home-made Snacks
I’m not terribly creative with home-made road snacks, preferring instead the processed variety. My favorite is a nice baggie full of molasses cookies cooked to my mother’s recipe, which are sweet enough to satisfy but not so rich and sweet that they are cloying. On the natural side, orange slices are great, as are celery stalks. The celery doesn’t really fill you up, but it’s crisp and refreshing and the sheer effort to chew it helps pass the miles.
The worst? Whole apples. Most of the time I am ambivalent at worst towards, but biting into an apple in the car that hasn’t already been sliced is a nightmare. You are obligated to hold it in your hand the whole time, and the juice gets everywhere. The more of the apple you eat, the fewer clean and dry handholds you have on the thing, and at the end of the process you still have a wet, sticky core to deal with. Even sliced, the slices turn brown way too quickly.
Processed Snacks
Yes, I know–processed snacks make you fat, wreak havoc on your blood sugar, have wasteful packaging, poke gaping holes in the ozone layer, and introduce trans-fats to endangered species. They are also fantastic on road trips.
The hands-down best road-trip food ever in my book is Smartfood popcorn–the cheddar-flavored fast food popcorn available in every gas station along every major Interstate. It’s hard to avoid greasy, white powdered hands, but that and a rapidly expanding waistline are really the only downsides. Smartfood tastes much lighter and more subtle than other favorites like Doritos–which makes it much easier to keep eating over a period of hundreds of miles, a distance over which Doritos long since became overwhelming. I wouldn’t be shocked if the white powder on Smartfood was actually some sort of controlled substance; it is ridiculously addictive. Like a lab rat testing cocaine, I simply can’t stop eating Smartfood until the whole bag is gone or until I split in half, whichever comes first. It is this combination of sustained eatability and continued deliciousness that makes Smartfood nonpareil as a road snack.
Plain popcorn is, of course, much healthier, and there are much lighter health-oriented snack popcorns out there, making them potentially better road-trip foods, but they are not as readily available on a road trip as Smartfood.
Doritos are great, as are chocolate bars of all persuasion, but it’s hard to eat either over a period of hours while driving. For one thing, Doritos have the potential to make your steering wheel smell of Cool Ranch, and the potential for getting Dorito sweats makes Doritos on a hot drive an unappetizing prospect. On the chocolate side, it’s hard to sustain chocolate intake over a 600-mile drive–though I’ve tried valiantly to buck the odds with Reese’s Pieces.
No, when it comes to sugary road snacks, I fall into the warm, gelatinous embrace of the gummy treat. Gummy bears are one of my favorites–they are sweet enough to be pleasing but aren’t overwhelming, and an astonishing number of gummy bears can be consumed on a road trip with few ill effects. Peach gummy rings are such a ubiquitous favorite of mine on road trips that my friends have given me bags for birthdays; they’re nasty and fantastic all at the same time, a quality required for many road snacks. Beware–I once left a bag inside the car on a hot day, and the rings melted together and separated into their component ingredients in various color strati. It wasn’t appealing. Strawberry puffs are the cream of this particular sugary crop, but they’re surprisingly hard to find.
Fast Food
Like processed food, everybody knocks fast food–but we all eat it on road trips. There is little more satisfying than getting off the freeway, dashing through a drive-through, and getting right back on the freeway less than five minutes later.
My father used to constantly be driving long distances on the road, and he was a fast-food road eater par excellence. This was before cupholders, so he would cruise along with a burger in one hand, a soda in the other, a box of fries in his lap, and steering with one knee. This might sound unsafe, but I’ve witnessed the majesty of him in full operation and I’ve rarely felt more secure. I think the man could drive pretty competitively at Le Mans using only his left knee.
Personally, I think there can be only one winner in this category–Taco John’s softshell tacos. Taco John’s is a little known taco chain in the Midwest and Western plains states. Think South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming. Taco John’s tacos are slightly more expensive than Taco Bell’s, but the taste and quality are exponentially superior, with a delightful array of seasoning. I was reared on a steady diet of Taco John’s, and I’ve craved their tacos for years. I used to drive a few hours out of my way to hit the only one near my house; now it’s closed, and I’ve seriously considered paying people to freeze the tacos and ship them to me. They are that addictive.
The great thing about Taco John’s as road food is that unlike most tacos, their tacos hold together reasonably well and are easy to eat with one hand. They’re also satisfying but not massive, meaning you can eat a couple over 50-100 miles without gorging yourself.
Runners-up? Well, a good hot dog works well on the road, though I’d pass on big heaping servings of chili. McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets are also a road-trip staple and help the miles pass by.
Full Meals
I’ve never really brought along full meals on road trips–they seem unwieldy and difficult to keep warm unless you wrap them in foil and place them in the engine compartment. But I’m sure some of you have some favorites, and I’m eager to learn.
Beverages
Given the sugary, fatty, and salty nature of most road food, bringing along the right beverages on a road trip is of paramount importance. Since most road beverages are also sugary and dehydrating, it is of course key to bring along some water. But road-tripping man and woman cannot live on water alone.
Most, like Cookie the Dog’s Owner, prefer ice-cold Coca-Cola or Pepsi. I’m not among them; I simply can’t stand dark cola and the taste that, as Bloom County so succinctly put it, reminds one of malted battery acid. A good root beer works well, and Mountain Dew is of course a perennial favorite for long road trips.
No, my premiere road-tripping beverage is Crystal Light, that sugary quasi-lemonade concoction that exists as slightly upper-crust version of Tang or Kool-Aid. Sweet but refreshing, Crystal Light can be mixed strongly or weakly without compromising the taste, meaning it tastes great mile after mile without wearying the taste buds. Gatorade works well too, but it tends to be pricey.
And no, you in the rusty pickup driving through West Texas–a case full of Old Milwaukee does not count as a good road beverage. You know who you are.
The top photo, with the Eat sign perched out in desolation comes from Flickr user jessiqua, the orange slice came from Sesselja Maria, the in-action Smartfood driving shot from solupine, the gummy bear army from Bethany L. King, the Taco John’s excitement from just a spark, and the Crystal Light homage from Steeena.
–Chris H.
