Adventures in Good Eating

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a diner door, cutlery, a notebook opening)
Before the cake. Long before the cake.

[Verse 1]
He sold printing for a living and he drove the whole country,
and in nineteen-thirty-something there was no way to see
which roadside place would feed you and which roadside place would not —
no stars, no guides, no reviews, just whatever you got.
So he wrote them down. Every one. Good and bad and worse.
Kept a list for his own supper. That's how the whole thing starts.

[Chorus]
Adventures in Good Eating! He self-published it himself!
A list of where to stop between Chicago and the coast!
He was America's first food critic and nobody says his name —
they say it in the baking aisle, and they mean a yellow box.
Duncan Hines. Duncan Hines.
He ate the road so you didn't have to guess.

[Verse 2]
It sold. It sold like nothing. People kept it in the glove,
and a sign that said RECOMMENDED BY DUNCAN HINES was worth more than money to
a little place in nowhere with a decent piece of pie —
he could make a roadside diner and he never took a dime
from any place he wrote about, and that's the part they cut,
that's the part that isn't in the box, that's the part that's lost.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
Nineteen forty-nine, he licensed out the name.
He was seventy-something. It seemed a reasonable trade.
And the mixes made him richer than the guidebooks ever could,
and the guidebooks went out of print, and the mixes stayed for good.
Now the name means a cake. Just a cake. Nothing more.
The man who ate America is a flavour in a store.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(a notebook closing)
He wrote down every meal.
Somebody should have written down the man.