It’s 1:30 pm, and you’re already four hours into an eight-hour road trip. You grabbed a bite at home before you left, but you’re still far from any sort of destination and the hanger is starting to creep back in. Rather than add even more time between point A and point B, you know this is going to be the kind of meal where you swing through a drive-thru and eat at the wheel, but that opens up the biggest road trip question of them all: What are you getting to eat?
There’s a lot of choice out there, but what’s the best food to eat? Something that accounts for flavor, availability, convenience, and a minimal risk of staining your interior and filling the car with smells you’ll never get out. The perfect food should be edible alone (no need for a passenger to unwrap things or lay them out), manageable with one hand, and available in whatever flyover country you’re driving through. With those criteria in place, what’s your favorite food to eat while driving?
I go for simplicity
Collin suggested spam musubi, which is a fantastic pick, but it has a problem: It’s just not as widely available in the U.S. as it should be. For my pick, I’m going with something easy, simple, and available everywhere: Unsauced chicken nuggets and fries. Is it the most flavorful meal you’ve ever had? Absolutely not. But chicken is cheap, relatively light on grease for a drive-thru food, and nuggets can be passed from a cup holder to your mouth with one hand and zero eyes. There’s no barbecue sauce to drip on your seats, no ketchup to spill on your shirt, just simple sustenance to keep you going through a long drive.
My pick for the best road trip food is chicken nuggets and fries, available from nearly any drive-thru anywhere in the States. What’s yours? Leave your pick in the comments below, and I’ll sort through my favorite answers later in the week.
