Cracker Barrel is overrated. Each restaurant has the exact same mass-manufactured decorations lining the walls, the same dark and dingy interior, and the same cold concrete floor more reminiscent of grandma’s root cellar than her cozy little rural cabin. The food itself is but a crude facsimile of legitimate home cooking, and I highly suspect that most of it is prepared not in a cast iron oven or on an old-fashioned stove top, but instead in the pristine rustic microwaves. Not only is the texture and flavor of some of it very suspect, but portion sizes have receded over the years; when my prototypical atomized family, who was too unloving to properly cook at home for important occasions, used to drag me to Cracker Barrel as a child the portions were certainly very substantial–enough to feed a horse most likely. Today, however, most dishes are stunningly austere. I remember being served a measly two slices of ham, which were quite thin and small, alongside miniature biscuits and a diminutive ramekin of corn when I visited a couple of months ago. If you’re worried that you might leave hungry then don’t sweat it, as each course is chock full of cheap carbs intended as filler. Available are biscuits, dumplings, heaping loads of home-style fries, toast, grits, and rice in abundant portions. Absent here is, of course, a heaping helping of anything nourishing and enjoyable. In essence, you’re being sold a very poor illusion that latches onto your nostalgia for “primordial” Americana. The restaurant exists only to drive you into the store, where you will inevitably purchase yet more mass-manufactured nostalgia bait. Commercialism has killed the past, and now it’s profiting from the corpse. At least McDonald’s isn’t mincing its words, it knows that it’s corporate garbage and barely tries to sell itself as premium. Eat there, or anywhere else, instead.