Nostalgic nationalism and the banal Anthropocene on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives

Abstract

Across 24 seasons and 260 episodes of the Food Network show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, host Guy Fieri guides viewers through an All-American road trip to discover independent ‘mom-and-pop’ restaurants that are ‘off the beaten path’. With this mission, and through an aesthetic that draws on the symbols of post-war American culture, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives weaves food and car culture together to evoke a nostalgic and idealistic nationalism. While this show does not explicitly reference climate change, I argue that its hypernationalism operates as a cultural counternarrative to climate change discourse. The show presents, for example, the 1950s as a period of futurism, consumerism and optimism, a patriotic narrative that runs parallel to the focus on this same era as the period of ‘Great Acceleration’, which John Robert McNeill and Peter Engelke argue was a time of unprecedented industrialization, resource extraction and population growth that marked the start...