Lecture 33: World War II and the Advent of Fast Food
were less likely to be disappointed. Chain restaurants fl ourish
for the same reason chain stores and name brands do: They can
organize on a much larger scale, buy ingredients, and ship them
more effi ciently. Apart from being chains, many of these restaurants served fast food.
The novelty was that you could either drive up and be served right
in your car or go in and eat quickly and get back on the road. The
earliest versions go back to 1919, but fast food is not a uniquely
American phenomenon. Most cultures have a form of street food,
but fast food is food meant to be driven to. Fast food does not necessarily taste bad. It is engineered to taste
good, with enough fat, salt, and sugar—all of which we may have
evolved to crave—along with fl avor additives. It would not have
sold so well if it tasted bad. Needless to say, fast food is now a
global phenomenon.The McDonald’s Empire
McDonald’s really set the model for the modern fast-food sector.
Richard and Maurice McDonald opened their fi rst restaurant in
Pasadena in 1937 and moved to San Bernardino a few years later.
The whole idea was to serve the food quickly, have an enormous
turnover, and keep the price as low as possible. Essentially, the
principles of the assembly line applied to food preparation. The key to their success was doing away with waiters, or carhops
used in drive-ins. They did away with busboys and dishwashers.
Everything was self-service. With a dramatically reduced menu—
with no substitutions allowed—they could just churn out food
industrially, especially because the working space was streamlined
and automated as much as possible. In the early 1950s, the McDonald brothers decided to start
franchising the business, which means that you sell the name for
a fee and build a restaurant, and a private investor operates it, but
he or she has to buy the ingredients from the mother company. In