Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want To Know About Fast Food

The hamburger was invented in 1885 by Charlie Nagreen in Seymour, Wisconsin, who noticed that no-one wanted to buy his meatballs at the county fair because they took too long to eat. When he “squashed the meatballs and put them between two slices of bread, people could walk and eat” at the same time (7). Thus, the hamburger was invented. 

However, the hamburger did not become popular until the advent of the automobile city, Los Angeles, whose abiding message was “faster is better” (11). The drive-through was born there, so that you could consume food without getting out of your car. The drive-ins that opened in Los Angeles in the 1930s competed for drivers’ attention with bright signage and pretty girls in fun uniforms and became especially popular with teenage boys. Brothers Richard and Maurice (Mac) McDonald were keen to cash in on the trend and opened up their own drive-in restaurant in Pasadena in 1937 and then moved to a larger building in San Bernardino.

By the late 1940s, the brothers had grown tired of the drive-in business because maintenance costs were too high. When they opened a new place three months later, they came up with “a radical new system for preparing food”, designed to be faster, cheaper and promote increased sales (14). They got rid of every food item that had to be eaten with cutlery and replaced breakable glass cups with paper ones. 

How work was done in the kitchen changed, too; instead of hiring a skilled chef who could make many dishes, the McDonald brothers “hired a few people to prepare the same thing again and again,” so that kitchen workers became like assembly-line workers in a factory (14). These relatively unskilled workers were easy to hire, fire and “unlikely to demand a big paycheck” (14). 

One businessman, Ray Kroc, was the main reason why McDonald's gained worldwide renown. He was impressed with McDonald's’ “Speedee Service System” and persuaded the brothers to take their business around the country (19). A franchising system meant that “a local businessman would build a new McDonald’s restaurant with his own money—and Kroc would tell him exactly how to run it,” making sure that the essential ingredient of sameness was in place (20). Franchising was key to the success of McDonald's and other fast-food joints, too, because it meant that businessmen could make a lot of money without having to run a restaurant, while the company opened a new restaurant without spending too much money.  

The McDonald's Speedee system has had a big impact on the fast food industry, which has spread from the US into Europe and involves “gigantic multinational corporations, earning billions of dollars a year” (23). Similarly, the franchising system has become a model for other types of business and is adhered to by companies such as Kwik-Fit and Weight Watchers.

The relationship between big companies and children has changed in the past thirty years. Whereas initially only a few companies like toy and cereal manufacturers targeted their adverts at children, the United States now spent over $500 billion worth of advertising aimed at children. Born a year apart, and both in Illinois, Walt Disney and Ray Kroc possessed a genius for creating imaginative worlds that would help in the sale of products to children. Their success encouraged a global prototype. 

Disney served as a role model for Kroc because Disney pioneered the marketing practice known as “synergy,” which aimed to link many products together in the consumer’s mind “and secretly advertise them all at once” (30). The presence of Disney characters on associated merchandise was one such method of achieving synergy.

Kroc decided that children would be McDonald’s target customers and he picked the right moment, given the baby boom that followed World War II. He tried to come up with a kid-friendly mascot for the brand and after a few failed mascot attempts, a hamburger-eating clown called Ronald McDonald was created in 1963. The mascot proved a great success and after a few graphics revisions, Ronald McDonald became the second-best-known make-believe character after Santa Claus. 

Brightly-colored Playlands and McDonaldlands inside the restaurants also made McDonald's seem “more than just another place to eat” (34). It was the success of McDonald's that helped to create the children’s advertising boom in the 1980s. Crucially, “the new children’s advertising tries to encourage not only how much stuff kids buy now, but also how much they will buy in the future” (35). The idea is that childhood fondness for a brand will encourage lifetime brand loyalty.

Advertisers therefore spend time and money studying children’s preferences, with focus groups being organized for children as young as two. This has gone as far as “neuromarketing,” which employs the use of scientific equipment to study the magnetic activity in children’s brains as they watch commercials. However, repetitive exposure to television commercials is a crucial factor in hooking children. During the course of a year, the average American kid watches more than 40,000 TV commercials and with about half of these being for junk food, children are “being taught what to eat by the same junk food ads, repeating again and again” (41). 

Fast food chains also work closely with big toy manufacturers, “giving away small toys with children’s meals and selling larger ones at their restaurants” (42). This means that “amid all the giveaways and huggable mascots, it’s become almost impossible to separate children’s entertainment from fast food advertising” (45). On a more sinister and tragically-ironic level, McDonald's Happy Meal toys are manufactured in places where prices and wages are low and sometimes include child labor.