For the week of July 4th, we asked writers to describe a person, object, or experience that they think captures a distinctly American spirit.

At some point I realized that I had accidentally watched every episode of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” The series, which airs, with an oddly comforting relentlessness, on the Food Network, bills itself as a road trip highlighting America’s unheralded small-town haunts. Its primary appeal, though, is its host, the chef and restaurateur Guy Fieri, who is famed for his frosted tips and wraparound shades, his garish rings and medium-rare complexion, and for the way he hails every new guest with a series of awed catchphrases, delivered with an all-caps, boldface chumminess. Double-fisting squeeze bottles full of mystery sauces, reminding his guests of his authority by tasting a recipe and gravely noting the presence of cumin, Fieri embodies a kind of American buffoonery that has always been easy to mock. The Times’ gleeful 2012 evisceration of his Times Square restaurant was a viral smash; clips of Fieri stuffing his face or tossing frozen meals to his fans are so grotesquely funny that they don’t require captions or commentary. Unlike Anthony Bourdain or Eddie Huang, who also host travel-themed food shows, Fieri does not offer historical or sociological insights on his culinary trips. And, in contrast to my experience watching their shows, I’ve never had even the remotest desire to visit any of the out-of-the-way destinations where Fieri and his convertible end up.

And yet, I keep watching. For a long time, I found myself wondering: Would he end up at any of the places I had cherished as a teen-ager? Weren’t the Donut Wheel, in Cupertino, or the Mini Gourmet, in San Jose, equally as good (or bad) as their just-outside-of-Cincinnati equivalents? When I learned that my friend Kris was also watching the show semi-obsessively, he and I began theorizing about our strange attraction. What we settled on was this: “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” is the opposite of destination dining. It’s a travel show about going nowhere. It is the precise opposite of FOMO: I never feel like I’m missing out on anything. I’ll never go to Bakersfield to eat “outrageous” Basque food, or seek out Asian Experience, an “outstanding” Thai (and pizza) joint thirty miles farther south, in Taft. But the show is a pleasing reminder of all the unassuming treasures just around the corner, all the entrepreneurs pursuing a modest, neighborhood version of the American Dream, the way landlocked immigrants often juggle their own aspirations with the expectations of whoever’s picking up the check.

Granted, Fieri may very well be as awful as his former producers say he is, and I often get the feeling that I wouldn’t be hailed as a “local” by the vast majority of diner customers he performatively pals around with. But Fieri is merely a vessel. At its best, his show skims across an America that still works for me as an idea: mom-and-pop restaurants, local specialties, food as community and comfort. The people he encounters seem genuinely thrilled to be in the presence of all that sunburn and chrome; at the very least, they don’t appear to be rehearsing lines off a script. Not every restaurateur can worry about authenticity or fidelity; sometimes, memorable food is born of necessity, or achieved purely by accident: the Greek-run pizzerias of New England, the Cambodian domination of Southern California's doughnut market, or the Mexican cooks secretly running Cupertino’s Chinese restaurants.

More often than not, these are the types of stories that “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” which privileges red sauce and burgers the size of Fieri’s head, merely implies. But I keep watching because it’s one of the only shows on TV that allows me to transpose stories proximate to my life onto someone else’s travels. The diner where my mom waitressed when she first landed in Kankakee, Illinois. The place in Champaign-Urbana where my dad first understood the appeal of pizza. (Of course, there was also my parents’ lifelong aversion to non-chain steakhouses, after being turned away from too many during our brief stint in small-town Texas.)

A couple of years ago, when I was visiting my parents, I came upon my mom watching “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” Occasionally, she would frown at how much salt—kosher, celery, and garlic—would get poured into something. “That’s how they make it taste so good,” she lamented. When I was a kid, my mom worked her way through the Betty Crocker cookbook, a red-and-blue, spiral-bound handbook for assimilating in Texas. Nowadays, my parents prefer to research Western dinner options in New York magazine or the Zagat guide, and to eat at Chinese restaurants that don’t show up on Yelp. I asked my mom if she actually liked the show, which is full of the sorts of gluttonous junk and monstrously inauthentic fusions that she hasn’t eaten in decades. By way of reply, she simply said, “hoisin sauce.” Every time Fieri’s face appeared onscreen, she would do an impression of him exclaiming, “HOISIN SAUCE!” Her imitation was part mockery, part homage. It’s not that serious, she was saying. We kept watching.