Place on the Food Chain

The quintessential American cuisine has far less to do with the entrees themselves than with the process by which they are prepared and served. It is fast food of a wide variety of types from the likes of Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, et al. We also must include the presentations of the fast food chains’ slightly more dressed up cousins: Red Robin, Applebee’s, Red Lobster, IHOP, and so on. The chains offer consistency and reasonable pricing from coast to coast, which was their original attraction at a time when food safety regimens at roadside restaurants were…well…inconsistent. Consistency still matters to travelers on road trips. Most customers nevertheless are locals. You can’t tell where in the country you are by the architecture or menu of a McDonald’s (with a few exceptions such as a flying saucer McD’s in Roswell), but you can tell by the customers. At a time when the nation is increasingly divided along class lines (and other lines too), the customers remain a full cross-section of the local population: rich, poor, and all the shades in between patronize fast food outlets. An interesting account of the restaurants’ history and current place in the culture is Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom by Adam Chandler.

Chandler tells us that few of the common offerings by the chains were invented by them; at most they tweaked the recipes a little. French fries, for example, go back centuries. Thomas Jefferson, for one, requested from the White House chef, “Potatoes, deep-fried while raw, in small cuttings, served in the French manner.” A few years later Dolley Madison famously served ice cream at the White House, which is why there is a brand named after her. (She liked oyster flavor, of all things, which fortunately did not catch on generally.) It is unknown who invented the hamburger sandwich. Hamburger without the bun was regarded as a German specialty in the late 19^th century and could be found described as such on many American restaurant menus. Someone (or many someones) must have tried it on a bun, but who is not recorded. By the 20^th century it was no novelty.

The modern sandwich version of the hamburger was popularized (once again, not invented) in Wichita, Kansas, in 1916 by Walt Anderson who sold burgers for 5 cents each in his restaurant named White Castle. At a time when ground meat was a chancy selection in many establishments, his open kitchen where the beef could be seen being ground fresh made his burgers a hit. So did the onions and spices he added. Promoter Billy Ingram happened to eat there and knew a hit when he tasted one. He teamed up with Anderson and took the chain national in 1921 with a franchise model soon copied by competitors. From the start the locations and site plans wherever possible were designed to be automobile-friendly, which Ingram rightly deemed a key to success. Despite being the earliest hamburger franchise, White Castle was far surpassed in popularity by several others after WW2, but it still has dedicated fans. I have friends who on some sort of principle won’t step foot in a McDonald’s or Burger King but who will nonetheless drive the extra miles to a White Castle.

The founder-plus-promoter combo was a pattern for success repeated many times in the 20^th century. Someone would open a restaurant or roadside stand that proved locally popular; a promoter with a vision partnered up with the owner and created a franchise. The most famous case was Ray Kroc who in 1954 espied the innovative and very successful drive-in McDonald’s, operated by the brothers Mac and Dick McDonald in San Bernardino. (The Big Mac was named for Mac McDonald, which was probably better than naming it for his brother.) Within a decade Kroc turned the franchise into not just a national but a global brand.

Perhaps counterintuitively (or then again perhaps not), what the founders and the promoters of the successful chains seem to have had in common was growing up poor. What for most people would have been a serious obstacle became instead a singular motivation. Glen Bell (Taco Bell) worked a series of menial jobs after WW2 before opening a taco stand. Al Copeland (Popeyes) said, “I never forget being poor. I know what it is and I don’t want it.” Colonel Sanders was broke time and again from failed businesses before his fried chicken recipe took flight. (The “Colonel” is legit, by the way: not as a military rank but as an honorific awarded by the Governor of Kentucky.) S. Truett Cathy (Chick-fil-A) was one of seven siblings in a public housing project. William Rosenberg dropped out of school at 14 and delivered telegrams before opening Dunkin’ Donuts. So, too, many of the most successful franchisees: Aslam Khan, for example, was born into poverty in Pakistan and emigrated to the US in the 1980s. He started as a dishwasher at a Church’s Chicken, rose to manager in three months because of his reliability and hard work, and eventually became a business owner with 97 Church’s outlets. His career from dishwasher to multimillionaire took 13 years.

The chains take a lot of heat from advocates of healthy eating. McDonald’s notoriously was waylaid in Morgan Spurlock’s movie Super Size Me, which documented Spurlock’s month of eating only at McDonald’s thrice daily. Spurlock ate 5000 calories per day and the results were not good. McD’s apologists respond that in fairness it’s hard to imagine 5000 calories per day of anything for a month being good for you. One can see both points of view, but few people really go into a fast food restaurant expecting health food. Nutritional factors aside, it’s easy to be snobbish against the chains, especially in parts of the country where non-chain midrange providers still prevail. As it happens one of those areas is my home state of NJ; independently owned diners in particular are abundant here: 525 at last count in a quite smallish state. The chains exist to be sure, but they are not as prominent as in much of the country and are mostly to be found on major highways. As a single man who dislikes cooking for himself, I eat out for either breakfast or lunch at modestly priced establishments 5 or 6 days per week, but I haven’t bought from a chain in all of 2019 to date. That’s not meant as some social statement, however: it’s just a reflection of the local options. I have no objection to Wendy’s and its ilk per se. When I’m on a road trip they are my most likely lunch stops, and for the very same reason they were for folks in 1921.

One segment of the customer base, it must be acknowledged, has had some trouble ordering from the fast food menus: traditionally the chains have not been vegan-friendly. The ground is shifting a little in this regard as we are admonished from some quarters to get less of our protein from traditional farm animals and more from plants and insects. A few of the chains offer veggie burgers nowadays though I’m not aware of any offering bugs. I’m not eager to get on board with either personally as a consumer, but it does raise the possibility of fortunes to be made from brand new franchises that offer nothing else. Kentucky Fried Crickets perhaps.

The Smithereens – White Castle Blues