Route 66 was never supposed to be a food destination. It was a lifeline, 400 miles of two-lane highway stitched through Oklahoma when the country needed a way west in a hurry. Families used it to flee the Dust Bowl. Soldiers used it to return home. And though Oklahoma didn’t exist for the first 130 years of the republic, as Rhys Martin of the Oklahoma Route 66 Association points out, the state’s story sits at the intersection of two celebrations: Route 66 turns 100 the same year America marks its 250th birthday. “Oklahoma became a state in 1907, and the highway came almost 20 years later,” Martin says. “We really represent the growth of this part of the country.” The growth shows up clearest in the food. The road needed something worth stopping for: A Cornish immigrant sold pasties from a roadside stand and a Lebanese family opened a steakhouse in Bristow because the workers from the oil fields needed feeding.…