Fast Food Nation: Introduction–Chapter 1

The whole experience of buying fast food has become so routine, so thoroughly unexcep­tional and mundane, that it is now taken for granted, like brushing your teeth or stopping for a red light.

Fast food has proven to be a revolutionary force in American life; I am interested in it both as a commodity and as a metaphor.

He viewed the emerging fast food industry as a threat to independent businesses, as a step toward a food economy dominated by giant corporations, and as a homogenizing influence on American life.

The centralized purchasing decisions of the large restaurant chains and their demand for standardized products have given a handful of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nation’s food supply.

The key to a successful franchise, according to many texts on the subject, can be expressed in one word: “uniformity.”

“We will make conformists out of them in a hurry... The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”

One of the ironies of America’s fast food industry is that a business so dedicated to conformity was founded by iconoclasts and self-made men, by entrepreneurs willing to defy conventional opinion.

A hamburger and french fries became the quintessential Ameri­can meal in the 1950s, thanks to the promotional efforts of the fast food chains.

But the steady barrage of fast food ads, full of thick juicy burgers and long golden fries, rarely mentions where these foods come from nowadays or what ingredients they contain.

Indeed, the cor­porate culture of McDonald’s seems inextricably linked to that of the Disney empire, sharing a reverence for sleek machinery, electronics, and automation.

Like Cheyenne Mountain, today’s fast food conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking façade.

Fast food is now so commonplace that it has acquired an air of inevitability, as though it were somehow unavoidable, a fact of modern life. And yet the dominance of the fast food giants was no more preordained than the march of colonial split-levels, golf courses, and manmade lakes across the deserts of the American West.

The political philosophy that now prevails in so much of the West—with its demand for lower taxes, smaller government, an unbridled free market—stands in total contradiction to the region’s true economic underpinnings.

No other region of the United States has been so dependent on government subsidies for so long, from the nineteenth-century construction of its railroads to the twentieth-century financing of its military bases and dams.

While publicly espousing support for the free market, the fast food chains have quietly pursued and greatly benefited from a wide variety of government subsidies.

Ru­ral communities are losing their middle class and becoming socially stratified, divided between a small, wealthy elite and large numbers of the working poor.

These changes have made meatpacking—once a highly skilled, highly paid occupation—into the most dangerous job in the United States, performed by armies of poor, transient immigrants whose injuries often go unrecorded and uncompensated.

And the same meat industry practices that endanger these workers have facilitated the introduction of deadly pathogens, such as E. coli 0157:H7, into America’s hamburger meat, a food aggressively marketed to children.

Elitists have always looked down at fast food, criticizing how it tastes and regarding it as another tacky manifestation of American popular culture.

Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases.

His career extends from the industry’s modest origins to its current hamburger hegemony.

The Karchers were German-American, industrious, and devoutly Catholic.

In the social hierarchy of California’s farmers, orange growers stood at the very top; their homes were set amid fragrant evergreen trees that produced a lucrative income.

He borrowed $311 from the Bank of America, using his car as collateral for the loan, and persuaded his wife to give him $15 in cash from her purse.

The city was inundated with middle-class arrivals from the Midwest, especially in the years leading up to the Great Depression.

General Motors eventually persuaded other companies that benefited from road building to help pay for the costly takeover of America’s trolleys. In 1947, GM and a number of its allies in the scheme were indicted on federal antitrust charges.

The southern California drive-in restaurants of the early 1940s tended to be gaudy and round, topped with pylons, towers, and flashing signs.

Architecture could no longer afford to be subtle; it had to catch the eye of motorists traveling at high speed.

The carhops had a strong economic incentive to be friendly to their customers, and drive-in restaurants quickly became popular hangouts for teenage boys.

The restaurant was small, rectangular, and unexceptional, with red tiles on the roof. Its only hint of flamboyance was a five-pointed star atop the neon sign in the parking lot.

The same town that gave the world the golden arches also gave it a biker gang that stood for a totally antithetical set of values.

They didn’t care if you had a nice day, and yet were as deeply American in their own way as any purveyors of Speedee Service.

Entrepreneurs from all over the country went to San Bernardino, visited the new McDonald’s, and built imitations of the restaurant in their hometowns.

Carhops were rendered obsolete by various remote-control ordering systems, like the Fone-A-Chef, the Teletray, and the ElectroHop.

The Insta-Burger Stove was an elaborate contraption. Twelve hamburger patties entered it in individual wire baskets, circled two electric heating elements, got cooked on both sides, and then slid down a chute into a pan of sauce, while hamburger buns toasted in a nearby slot.

Carl vehemently denied the charges and felt humiliated by the publicity surrounding the case.

He became embroiled in more than two dozen law­suits.

He proposed selling Mexican food at Carl’s Jr. restaurants as part of a joint venture with a chain called Green Burrito.

Carl looked like a stylish figure from the big-band era, wearing a brown checked jacket, a white shirt, a brown tie, and jaunty two-tone shoes.

He exuded the genial optimism and good humor of his old friend Ronald Reagan.