Chicken Caesar

Indignity Vol. 5, No. 131

Tom Scocca, JOE MACLEOD

21 Jul 2025 — 10 min read

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ANDY ROONEY 2.0

If Chick-fil-A Wants to Rest on Sundays, It Can Get Out of the Rest Stops

I HAD TO drive down New Jersey recently, and I didn't end up eating at any of the rest stops on the Turnpike, but I had to read the signs and think about whether I would. The rest stops have gone through a renovation program, and at first some of the new ones had what looked like improved food choices, but now, especially when you get well south of the city, the outlook gets pretty bleak.

Things bottom out, nourishment-wise, at the Richard Stockton Service Area, with 58.7 miles of the Turnpike to go: Burger King, Auntie Anne's pretzels, Nathan's hot dogs, and a Dunkin', if Dunkin' even counts as a place to eat now that the "Donuts" is gone from the name. Plus whatever you might scrounge at the convenience store. The stops before and after are barely better, except they have Shake Shacks, but I went to Shake Shack back when it was just the one actual shack on Madison Square Park with a sensationally long line, and when I got the burger it was not a sensation. The word "mid" wouldn't take off for years but the memory of that burger was there waiting when it did, and the result is my stomach does not want to stop the car for Shake Shack.

Then at the last chance to eat on the Turnpike, the Clara Barton Service Area, there's a different entry on the sign: Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A makes, in my experience, a nice fast-food chicken sandwich. When I was in high school and my friend and I were at the mall renting our tuxes for prom, we were supposed to get a coupon for a free Chick-fil-A sandwich with each rental. The clerk renting us the tuxes was hardly any older than we were, and through the magic of teen-dude solidarity my friend walked out of there with a stack of coupons in his pocket that kept us eating free chicken sandwiches all the way through graduation.

I don't eat at Chick-fil-A very often anymore because the company, whose ownership identifies as assertively and conservatively Christian, has had notoriously bad politics toward LGBTQ people, although it also ended up under attack for its commitment to DEI, because dogma, even intolerant dogma, eventually can't keep up with the endlessly, opportunistically moving targets of outright fascism. Sometimes you need to mail something, though, and the only shipping envelopes on the shelf are from Uline. Sometimes the only gas station around is a Shell.

But the restaurant also insists, as a matter of policy and principle, on being closed on Sundays. It always has been closed on Sundays; its website explains that the chain's founder "saw the importance of closing on Sundays so that he and his employees could set aside one day to rest, enjoy time with their families and loved ones or worship if they choose, a practice we uphold today."

As a general corporate commitment, this seems basically fine—a little unfair, if not coercive, toward employees whose holy days fall on different days of the week, maybe, but fundamentally an expression of the ever more rare principle that some things are more important than business. If you're going to make a sacrifice, though, you need to be the one who's making the sacrifice.

The Lord may have rested on the seventh day of His creation, but the New Jersey Turnpike is open seven days a week. If your fast-food restaurant can't be open seven days a week, it doesn't belong in a rest stop.

New York State tried to write this principle into law two years ago, when people driving the New York State Thruway suddenly noticed that their meal options were limited or missing on Sundays, because the contractor redoing the Thruway's rest stops had subcontracted some of the restaurant slots to Chick-fil-A. The bill would have protected the existing contracts, but South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham led an effort to grandstand against it anyway, denouncing it as an assault on Chick-fil-A's free exercise of religion, and the measure went unpassed.

The conservative movement's idea of pluralism is that you have to go hungry—or go without emergency medical care—if someone else decides that their religion requires it. Rather than retreat a step from the secular world to honor God's higher dictates, Chick-fil-A takes up a space in the secular world even when they're not using it. In covering the New York State Thruway controversy, the New York Times noted that Chick-fil-A also "operates a location inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the home of the Atlanta Falcons, that was closed for all eight of the football team’s home games this season, which took place on Sundays."

All of that, however, only represents one side of the Turnpike problem. The other side, troubling in the opposite direction, is that the seven-day fast-food restaurants are unappetizing. One of the first rest stop renovations, at the Thomas Edison Service Area, brought in a Pret-A-Manger. This seemed like good news; Pret-A-Manger had spread itself around the world by selling reliably decent, fresh sandwiches. But after stopping there a few times, I realized I wasn't stopping there anymore, and not just because it was barely into the drive. I wasn't going there because the sandwiches had been mediocre enough that I didn't trust them.

Thus the unpleasant question: is Chick-fil-A's sandwich consistently trustworthy because the company objects to contemporary society? Would a Chick-fil-A that was willing to compromise with the needs of Turnpike drivers also stop caring whether it was feeding those drivers slop? Are religiosity and nihilism the only available choices along the highways of our fallen society? I kept going past the end of the Turnpike and went to the Cracker Barrel just before the bridge.

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SIDE PIECES DEP'T.

FOR DEFECTOR, I wrote about the mystifying notion that Donald Trump's sex crimes or Benjamin Netanyahu's war crimes need to be investigated and exposed, when they're already longstanding matters of public record:

Everyone knows or has had the opportunity to know these things. And still, they were put forward as revelations, as weighty and controversial claims that required extraordinary support.

The longer these cycles go on, the more and more it seems to me that George Santayana gravely underestimated the problem: it's not merely the past but the present that keeps repeating itself when nobody can remember it. "Remember" isn't even quite the right concept; what this century seems to have lost is the ability to identify things for what they are.

WEATHER REVIEWS

New York City, July 20, 2025

★★★ The cumulus clouds were so large and dense that they made the day look fully overcast when the sun was only temporarily interrupted. When the light did get through it had a sparkle to it despite the heaviness of the air. The pagoda trees were dumping their flowers, filling the sidewalk joints with pale green. Inside the air conditioning of the pastry shop, pent-up sweat still poured out underneath the face mask. Off toward downtown the sky was genuinely dark and gray but nothing would come of it. Children stood around a shady corner of the playground, with a birthday banner dangling nearby, as two adults worked out how to hang a pinata from a swingset. The afternoon got hotter and hotter. An ice cream truck played "The Entertainer" right through Mister Softee territory but it never stopped moving. The breeze carried a brief but specific whiff of tomato vines from the community garden. A woman crossed the street bearing an eighth of a watermelon, plastic-wrapped, in her outstretched palm. A mosquito battered against the glass of the vestibule door from outside, while inside, in a rear corner, a spider waited in its web.

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.

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ADVICE DEP'T.

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SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Encyclopedia of Cookery; 1001 Recipes, Menus & Rules for Modern, Scientific and Economic Cookery (Vol. 4), by Eugene Christian and Molly Griswold Christian, published by the Corrective Eating Society in 1920, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

MARMALADE SANDWICH

Slice bread and spread with melted butter, then with marmalade. Press together and toast lightly. Butter and serve hot.

BAR-LE-DUC SANDWICH

Mix well equal parts of Bar-le-Duc and Neufchatel cheese with a spoonful of thick cream. To this add a teaspoonful of grated nuts and spread between slices of bread.

If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .