Chew On This: List 1

Most fast-food visits are impulsive. The decision to buy fast food is usually made at the last minute, without much thought.

Fast food is something radically new. Indeed, the food we eat has changed more during the past thirty years than during the previous thirty thousand years.

For thirteen weeks a medical student there consumed nothing but White Castle burgers and water. When the student not only survived the experiment but also seemed pretty healthy, people started to view hamburgers in a new light. Now hamburgers seemed wholesome, not deadly.

Los Angeles soon became unlike any other city in the world, sprawling for miles and miles.

The key to a successful franchise can be described in a single word: sameness.

“We have found out...that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists,” Kroc once said. “We will make conformists out of them in a hurry. The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”

Kroc began to resent the McDonald brothers, claiming that while he was doing all the hard work—“grinding it out, grunting and sweating like a galley slave”—they were sitting at home, reaping the rewards.

Walt Disney also pioneered the marketing practice now known as synergy. The aim of synergy was to link many products together in the mind of a consumer and secretly advertise them all at once.

Episodes of Disneyland advertised Disney films, books, and toys. Most of all, the TV show advertised Walt Disney himself, the living, breathing embodiment of the brand—the man who neatly tied all these products together into one fun, cheerful, friendly idea.

The McDonald brothers had aimed for a family crowd, and now Kroc improved and refined their marketing efforts.

For years children’s clubs have been considered an effective way both to advertise and to collect information about kids. These clubs appeal to a child’s need for friendship and belonging. Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, formed in 1930, was one of the trailblazers.

“We believe that the McDonald’s brand is so omnipresent already in America,” the spokesman said, “that having it in music, having it in TV, having it in movies, is no more intrusive than anything else children experience these days.”

As workers moved into houses downtown, small businesses opened to serve them. At J. C. McCrory Co. 5 and 10 Cent Store you could buy socks and pants; at John W. Dean Co. you could find children's shoes; H. L. Doll and Co. was a popular hardware store; and the Alice Govnice Confectionery on South Queen Street was the place to go for ice cream, candy, and chocolate.

At Burger King restaurants, frozen hamburger patties are placed on a conveyor belt and come out of a broiler ninety seconds later fully cooked. The ovens at Pizza Hut and at Domino’s often use conveyor belts.

Instead of celebrating individual talent, the system seeks workers who are interchangeable. It seeks workers who can easily be hired, fired, and replaced.

Fliers criticizing the union were distributed; they featured a drawing of Pascal with money falling from his pockets. Instead of encouraging cooperation and solidarity, the company pitted one young worker against another.

“The French fry [was]...almost sacrosanct for me,” Kroc said, “its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously.”

In 1965, Ray Kroc met with J. R. Simplot, Idaho’s great potato baron.

J. R. Simplot received the first patent for frozen french fries.

They emerge as shoestring fries. Four video cameras scrutinize them from different angles, looking for flaws.

The fries are sealed in brown bags, the bags are loaded by machines into cardboard boxes, and the boxes are stacked by machines onto wooden pallets. Forklifts driven by human beings carry the pallets to a freezer for storage.

Because potatoes contain different amounts of sugar at different times of the year, Lamb Weston adds sugar to the fries during the fall and leaches sugar out of them in the spring.

The taste of a french fry is largely determined by the cooking oil. For decades, McDonald’s cooked its french fries in a mixture of about 7 percent soybean oil and 93 percent beef fat. The mix gave the fries their unique flavor—and more saturated beef fat than a McDonald’s hamburger.

The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies will not disclose the formulas of their flavor compounds or the names of their clients. These secrets help protect the reputations of beloved brands.

Some of the more common tastes are sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, burning, warm, salty, astringent, metallic, and umami.

Some of the more common tastes are sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, burning, warm, salty, astringent, metallic, and umami.

The act of drinking, sucking, or chewing a substance releases its gases. They flow out of your mouth and up your nostrils, or up the passageway in the back of your mouth, to a thin layer of nerve cells called the olfactory epithelium. It’s located at the base of the nose, right between your eyes.

And what does that artificial strawberry flavor contain? Just these few yummy chemicals: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate...neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, y-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

It is basically a mechanical mouth. It measures all the things that can give a food the right mouthfeel: the bounce, creep, breaking point, density, crunchiness, chewiness, gumminess, lumpiness, rubberiness, springiness, slipperiness, smoothness, softness, wetness, juiciness, spreadability, springback, and tackiness.

One of the most widely used color additives comes from an unexpected source. Cochineal extract (also known as carmine or carminic acid) is made from the dead bodies of small bugs harvested mainly in Peru and the Canary Islands.