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Illustration by Stacy Reece
Illustration by Stacy Reece

Uncomfortable Food

A queer Southern mother’s complicated relationship with Chick-fil-A.

Closing his checkbook after paying bills, Papa said, “I have a craving for Chick-fil-A.” The sun was bright, the summer air beckoning us outside. My grandmother, sister, cousin and I nodded.

Yes, today is a good day for Chick-fil-A.

We piled into the forest green station wagon with special kid-sized seats in the trunk. Because the AC didn’t reach all the way to the back, Papa had installed a miniature fan with bright blue blades to keep us cool. The fan whirred as he backed down the driveway. We went to the Chick-fil-A in the Perimeter Mall food court, the one closest to their home in Atlanta.

While Nana, Lauren and Chris disappeared into the buzzing crowd to look for a table, I lingered with Papa in line. I touched the edge of his papery hand. He leaned down and tilted his ear toward my mouth.

“Instead of a kid’s meal, could you get me a sandwich?” I asked. I hung my head, afraid he would say no. The request was an admission that I thought I was adult enough to eat an entire sandwich. Papa didn’t believe in wasting food.

“A sandwich, huh?” he asked, straightening back up. He smiled. “You think you can eat a whole chicken sandwich?”

I nodded.

“OK, then.”

Papa ordered, paid and handed me the white paper bag to carry to the table. After I gave my cousin Chris his box of nuggets, he caught sight of the aluminum foil-wrapped spheroid in front of me.

“You got a sandwich?” he asked. His jealousy confirmed it: I wasn’t a little kid anymore.

Papa looked at me. “I need to teach you how to eat it.”

With each bite, new sensations emerged: the crunch of a crispy edge, the acidity of a pickle. The last taste was the dregs of the bun, soaked in oil and still warm. As I swallowed that last bite, I knew my rite of passage was complete.

He unwrapped his sandwich and flattened the foil. He removed the top bun, revealing two thin slices of dill pickle in the buttered center. With a white plastic fork, he lifted a mound of coleslaw from a small Styrofoam cup and spread it directly on the chicken breast, patting and smoothing until the slaw was in an even layer.

“Get it all the way to the edges,” he instructed. When he was satisfied, he topped the meat and slaw with the pickled bun and handed me his fork, an act I took as seriously as if he had just handed me a flaming torch.

I completed my own spread, notably messier than Papa’s, but as careful as I could manage under the pressure. By now, everyone was eating. If I was going to finish this sandwich, I needed to start. I added the top bun and took a bite.

The softness of the bun meshed with the grain of the breaded chicken. The sugar in the slaw mingled with the salt. With each bite, new sensations emerged: the crunch of a crispy edge, the acidity of a pickle. The last taste was the dregs of the bun, soaked in oil and still warm.

As I swallowed that last bite, I knew my rite of passage was complete.

Shannon Yarbrough in the arms of her Papa
Shannon Yarbrough in the arms of her Papa

More than a restaurant, Chick-fil-A feels like part of my family. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents played a huge role in raising my sister and me. And they lived in the same community as the founders of Chick-fil-A, Truett and Jeannette Cathy. My grandfather Ashfield Yarbrough and Truett Cathy were both restaurant owners in the 1960s. Gramps’s restaurant, Campbell’s, was in East Point, Georgia. Cathy perfected his chicken sandwich at his diner, the Dwarf House, in the neighboring suburb of Hapeville, just a 10-minute drive from downtown East Point.

In 1967, Truett Cathy opened the first Chick-fil-A restaurant in Atlanta’s Greenbriar Shopping Center. Around the same time, Campbell’s burned down, and Gramps became the manager of the movie theater in the same mall. I imagine the two men crossing paths at the escalator, tipping their hats, asking about one another’s children and wives.

In 1986, the year before I was born, Chick-fil-A opened its first freestanding location. Earlier, Chick-fil-A’s expansion followed the proliferation of huge shopping malls. The decision to forge an alternative path was a strategic response to a decline in mall construction. Just a few years earlier, in 1982, Chick-fil-A saw the only major drop in sales the chain would have in its entire history.

That same year, the chain’s executives crafted Chick-fil-A’s purpose statement: “To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us. To have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.” The company aims to create a “culture of care” honoring its founders’ legacy.

Growing up, whenever Chick-fil-A or Campbell’s came up in family conversation, someone would look at me and say, If only your Grandaddy had invented the chicken sandwich.

Church was an important part of both families’ lives. As children, Truett and Jeannette attended West End Baptist in Atlanta, a 10-minute drive from Nana and Gramps’s First Baptist of East Point. My family was so integral to the expansion of First Baptist that our name is preserved in one of the stained-glass windows. As adults, the Cathys moved to the First Baptist Church in Jonesboro, where Jeannette taught Sunday School for more than 30 years. Growing up, I spent every other weekend attending Sunday School with Nana, a ritual of quality time I still cherish. While I never crossed paths with Jeannette, I can imagine the gray folding chairs, cookie plates and warm circle of women who were likely in her classroom.

By the time I was spending my summers at Nana and Papa’s house, Chick-fil-A was a leading national chain. One day, while watching TV at Nana and Gramps’s house, I discovered a signed VHS of Truett Cathy’s biography. I picked up the thick plastic case and ran into the living room to find Nana.

“What is this?” I knew who Truett Cathy was from TV commercials and his smiling picture on the walls at the Chick-fil-As we patronized. To me, he was as important as any celebrity.

“I went to a party at the Cathys, and Truett gave us all one of those,” she said nonchalantly.

“You know Truett Cathy?” I asked.

“Of course,” Nana said. “He and your grandfather were in the restaurant business at the same time. If Campbell’s hadn’t burned down, by now, we’d be rich!”

Growing up, whenever Chick-fil-A or Campbell’s came up in family conversation, someone would look at me and say, If only your Grandaddy had invented the chicken sandwich. It was a joke, of course, but beneath it was an acknowledgment that my family and the Cathys had walked parallel paths. Our family had come close to drinking from the Holy Grail, and it had somehow — just barely — passed us by. I discerned that an association with the Cathys was the next best thing.

Despite their radically different fates, even in death, the Cathys and my paternal grandparents aren’t far apart. They are buried in Greenwood and Westview, respectively, cemeteries founded more than a century ago that house some of Atlanta’s elite, only a 10-minute drive apart.

~~~

I first learned about Chick-fil-A’s funding of organizations with anti-LGBTQ agendas when I was in college, around 2007. Between 2003 and 2009, the company donated more than $3 million to Christian organizations with histories of homophobic programming. After bad press, Chick-fil-A’s leadership said the company would stop such support, but it continued. In 2017, the Chick-fil-A Foundation donated more than $1.8 million to three groups with histories of anti-LGBTQ discrimination, including Exodus International, a nonprofit that supported the abusive practice of conversion therapy. The debate rages on. Chick-fil-A leadership in 2020 claimed the company would “change its philanthropic giving model,” but offered no clear message about whether this change will mean a halt in support of homophobic organizations. And whether or not the company fulfills this promise, as long as its leaders stay commited to “traditional family values,” meaning the conservative Christian ideal of heterosexuality, we can assume their money will be funneled — publicly or privately — toward organizations that support this vision.

“Hate chicken,” my college friends and I called it. Over a decade later, the moniker still applies.

In 2012, Truett’s son, Dan Cathy, who was then Chick-fil-A’s chief operating officer and is now its chairman, went on the record to say he opposed legalizing gay marriage. Political leaders and business owners from Boston to California called for a boycott.

Atlantan Marci Alt started an online petition inviting Cathy to dinner with her same-sex partner of 12 years and their two children. It garnered over 31,000 signatures. New Yorker Carly McGehee urged queer couples to photograph themselves kissing in front of the company’s 1,600 restaurants on “National Same Sex Kiss Day.” In response, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee declared “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” which led to record-breaking sales.

One Saturday night in early 2011, she and I were curled together in my bed when she said she had a craving for waffle fries. Neither of us had a car, so we weighed whether to make the 15-minute walk to Chick-fil-A on a busy street in the dark. Temptation won.

During those days, a photograph of one franchise made it into the national coverage: the location closest to me in Decatur, Georgia, the same restaurant I went to with my college girlfriend.

One Saturday night in early 2011, the year before the headlines, she and I were curled together in my bed when she said she had a craving for waffle fries. Neither of us had a car, so we weighed whether to make the 15-minute walk to Chick-fil-A on a busy street in the dark. Temptation won. As we ran through the parking lot, a man with a kind smile opened the drive-through window. We ordered and took the bags to the tables outside. A cool breeze made the paper rustle.

A few bites in, I asked, “Don’t you feel bad eating this?”

My former girlfriend had been eating at Chick-fil-A since she arrived for college from South America three years earlier. She was graduating in the spring and hadn’t yet found a job, a necessary step to securing the papers to stay in the U.S. Those months felt like an invisible timer countdown to an outcome neither of us could control. Because we were closeted from everyone but a close circle of friends, the pressure of the pending transition fell mostly on us to manage.

She and I had in common a love for our grandfathers, men who stepped in to raise us when our own fathers couldn’t fill the role. But even though we adored these men, and they adored us, coming out to them was not an option. To reveal our interracial, interfaith, same-sex love would be identical to setting the only real homes we had ever known on fire. In some ways, the depth of this shared loss brought us closer together. We were used to the balancing act.

“I’m going to eat it while I can,” she said, her expression thick with flirtation.

A few months later, our relationship folded under the pressure. But that night, cravings satisfied, we staged our own private protest.

~~~

I have tried many times to quit Chick-fil-A. For years, the restraint worked. I told myself not to go, and I didn’t. I don’t know what prompted me to return, but I remember the pace was a slow trickle — a few times a year — until it wasn’t. At some point, I was back to going once or more per week.

In January 2016, Chick-fil-A stopped serving coleslaw. After that announcement, I thought I could quit the habit for good.

Months later, however, I found myself back in the drive-through, telling myself the discontinuation couldn’t be true. Remembering Papa’s instructions, I couldn’t eat a chicken sandwich without coleslaw. Surely, corporate would bring it back.

I craned my neck and spoke loudly into the red box with the microphone: “Do you really not have coleslaw anymore?” The young woman on the other end said kindly, “No, ma’am, that was discontinued a few months ago. I’m happy to get you something else.”

I never broke the coleslaw news to Papa. Five months after the discontinuation, in June, while in hospice care, he died in his sleep.

I wanted to tell her nothing else would do. I wanted to tell her that after 20 years of eating something the same way, any variation feels like a betrayal.

And how could I break the news to Papa? His health had steadily declined. By this time, he spent most of his days bedridden at home. I visited once or twice a week. Even though he could no longer eat an entire sandwich, I thought he would enjoy the part he could eat. But not without the coleslaw.

I didn’t tell the kind stranger on the other side of the red box any of this. Instead, I ordered a 12-pack of nuggets with waffle fries. I refused to try the kale salad, the coleslaw’s sexier replacement.

I never broke the coleslaw news to Papa. Five months after the discontinuation, in June, while in hospice care, he died in his sleep.

~~~

The same year that Chick-fil-A discontinued coleslaw and Papa died, I became a mother. Among all the other lofty self-improvement goals new parents make, I promised myself I wouldn’t introduce my daughter to Chick-fil-A and curse her with the same dilemma I face. But on a sunny Saturday evening when she was 3, after a hike at Stone Mountain, nostalgia overcame me, and I pulled into the drive-through for a milkshake.

The consequences were immediate. The next morning, when she woke up, she asked if we could go to Chick-fil-A for another milkshake. I was not prepared for the conversation, so I offered a maybe, which in toddler language means yes.

As we sat in the drive-through again, I imagined how I could untangle myself. But before I could figure out the answer, we were at the window, and I was asking if she wanted strawberry or chocolate.

~~~

In 2020, when the pandemic upended our lives, I sensed another opportunity to break my relationship with Chick-fil-A for good. Shifting to cooking at home and investing in shelf-stable foods, I turned to chickpeas.

I had been reading about replacing meat with legumes for both our health and the planet, and over the past few years, had already incorporated black beans and lentils into my diet. Other than hummus, which I didn’t particularly like, chickpeas were less familiar to me, and therefore more intimidating. But I decided if I could become a person who eats chickpeas, I would become less a person who eats fried chicken sandwiches.

Each time I face the question of whether to go to Chick-fil-A, I negotiate how best to integrate conflicting aspects of myself. I’m not new to this battle. Before I had the words to name it, I was already growing up queer and liberal in the Bible Belt of the Deep South.

I started a Pinterest board called “Chickpeas.” I read article after article about whether soaking was required (it is) and for how long (one to three days). Finally, I settled on two recipes: Mina Stone’s slow-roasted Greek chickpeas and Urvashi Pitre’s Instant Pot Chana Masala. Both were delicious. Months later, I tried Nigella Lawson’s Pasta e Ceci, a hearty soup full of chickpeas and ditalini pasta. I even found a hummus recipe I like, an Israeli-style, very creamy version by Michael Solomonov, a Pittsburgh-based James Beard Foundation award-winner.

In less than a year, I became the kind of person who likes chickpeas.

~~~

But it turns out that being the kind of person who likes chickpeas does not make me less of the kind of person who likes Chick-fil-A. I can’t change the pull of this nostalgia, my yearning to connect with my grandparents years after their deaths through a chicken sandwich, any more than I can change my sexuality or my status as a mother. Each of these traits comprises the core of my identity.

In recent years, my cravings have become more predictable. The upticks: During my divorce. When I’m driving long distances in the sun with the windows down. When I’m spending time with close friends who also know this battle. When I visit Nana, the last of my living grandparents. Whenever I’m near East Point. And the strongest of all: when I miss my late paternal grandparents, Nana Y. and Gramps.

Each time I face the question of whether to go to Chick-fil-A, I negotiate how best to integrate conflicting aspects of myself. I’m not new to this battle. Before I had the words to name it, I was already growing up queer and liberal in the Bible Belt of the Deep South. My identities already necessitated negotiation. What I’ve learned from the particularities of my struggle with Chick-fil-A is that this kind of negotiation is ongoing. Even if I go years without a Chick-fil-A sandwich, as I have before, it is unlikely that the craving — not for the food, but for that precious and short-lived time with my grandparents — will ever go away. And in times of grief, such as my divorce, my desire for the affection my grandparents provided is especially strong.

In negotiating this relationship, I’ve also learned that allowing myself grace in the moments when I need comfort opens my capacity to live more broadly according to my values. Though I often feel a ritual-like connection with Chick-fil-A, I am not creating the same rituals with my daughter. We do not go to Chick-fil-A as a treat or on special occasions. When she asks for fries, more often than not, we visit a locally owned independent restaurant that also specializes in chicken sandwiches. I make her smoothies, reducing the requests for milkshakes. When she’s older, I imagine having a conversation about this subject so she can make her own informed decisions.

As I move away from self-admonishment to self-compassion, I sense I’ve crossed another threshold, not so unlike the one I crossed when I ate that first chicken sandwich. The more care I give myself, the less I seek from outside sources. And the fewer restrictions I enforce, the fewer cravings I have. For now, this gentler approach is working. If I need to change course again, I trust I can. And no matter where I am on this journey, I finally accept that when I see that ubiquitous image of Truett Cathy smiling, I think of my grandfathers, the “culture of care” they created especially for me, and I smile back.

With over a century of family history in Georgia, Shannon Yarbrough grapples with her cultural inheritance through intimate reflections on relationships and community. Her insights come from living and working in Atlanta, her role as a queer single parent, and extensive domestic and international travel. You can find her on Twitter (for now) @thegreenchest

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