May 11, 2023 • 22 mins
Fast food has been around in the U.S. since the rise of establishments like White Castle in the 1920s. It has changed not only what and how we eat, but the worldwide supply chain, politics, pop culture and more.
Georgetown History professor Marcia Chatelain explores this in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America” and in her One Day University lecture, “Drive-Thru America.” She joins host Steven Schragis to discuss how America came to be the fast food nation.
One Day University is a co-production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. It is a Curiosity Podcast. You can sign up at the website OneDayU.com to become a member and access over 700 full length video lectures. You can also download their app. Once you’re a member, you can watch Professor Marcia Chatelain’s lecture, “Drive-Thru America: A Culinary History of the Fast Food Industry and How It Shapes Our Lives”
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
The popularity of the bagel leads places like Dunkin Donuts
to have bagels available. And you know, for the New
Yorkers who are listening, I'm not saying this to offend you,
but you know, they're actually quite successful in bringing bagels
to a national market.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to one Day University Talks with the world's most
engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Shregis. About
one in three Americans eat fast food on a typical day,
(00:44):
and there are nearly two hundred thousand fast food or
quick service restaurants in the US. It's big business, not
only in America but across the globe. Look at a
company like McDonald's. It made twenty three billion dollars in
revenue lat year. Professor Marsha Chatlin knows that fast food
has changed more than just our diet. Her lecture is
(01:07):
titled Drive through America, a Culinary History of the fast
food industry and how it shapes our lives. Marcia teaches
history and African American studies at Georgetown University in twenty
twenty one, she won the Poelitzer Prize in History for
her book franchise, The Golden Arches in Black America. Marsha
(01:29):
believes fast food engages so many people because we share
a connection to it.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So fast food is such a great topic to write
about because everyone comes into the conversation with some experience,
some opinion, some knowledge of the topic. You know, as
someone who has spent most of her career teaching about
race and history and you know some really difficult subject
matter from the past, it's always good to have a
(02:02):
table set with familiar topics for people to come to,
and fast food does that. You don't have to explain
that much about McDonald's or that much about the fast
food experience for people to be able to join the conversation.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I think I'm going to add something here that studying
fast food also involves learning about intellectual property. Yeah, because
I went to law school many many, many years ago,
and I learned about what's still considered a landmark ruling,
the White Castle versus White Tower case. So could you
explain that a bit to us.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
I think in our contemporary moment, we have a very
clear sense that you know, no business in their right
frame of mind wouldever do really agregious copycatting. We know
that in the fashion industry we have counterfeits, and we
also know that, you know, sometimes people get into fights
about intellectual property, but in the early days of fast
(02:59):
food in the nineteen plays and thirties, there were not
the kind of claims on intellectual property that we know
of today. And so in the early days of White Castle,
which is really considered one of the forerunners of the
fast food franchise, they were getting beat by a competitor
called White Tower that was basically stealing all of their ideas.
(03:23):
They also had sliders. They also had these restaurants that
looked like castles, but towers in their incense. And the
case went all the way to the Supreme Court about
whether or not, you know, White Castle had a claim
on the architecture of its buildings and its trademarks and
its slogans. And you know, this was an important moment
(03:45):
because the fast food industry spends a lot of time
trying to root out copycats domestically and abroad.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
I remember, did they even have a phrase that was
almost identical and easy to confuse?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yes, So White Castle told people to enjoy their sliders
by the sack, and white Tower told people to enjoy
them by the bagful. I mean, they really didn't try
that hard to distinguish themselves, Marsha.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
The growth of the auto industry and the federal highway
system is directly connected to the growth of the fast
food industry. You said that many times that cars played
a huge role in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yes, so the whole idea behind fast food initially was
to be able to serve food very quickly to people
in urban centers who may be working on construction sites
or out on a night of you know, enjoying some
alcohol and needing something to eat late at night. But
eventually the concept of fast food was really about the
(04:50):
ability to use the car as a second dining space.
And so as car ownership becomes more accessible in the
United States in the nineteen forties and fifties, there is
a whole car culture that fast food seamlessly integrates itself in.
So if it's going to a McDonald's drive in and
eating your dinner in your car, or using the expanded
(05:11):
highway network to travel across the country and to different states,
there's a way that fast food is about both the
efficiency of the product as well as the celebration of
the sense of freedom that cars in the highway system
provided more and more people.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Your lecture also talked about a magic moment in fast
food history, this one that I knew nothing about at
the Philadelphia World's Fair when the meat grinder was introduced.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Yeah, you know, it's so funny. World's fares they still
exist to an extent, but not at the level of
popularity of the World's Fares of the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, where people would converge to see, you know,
technology unfolding. All of this is to say the meat
grinder revolutionized the meat industry because instead of relying on
(06:07):
distinct cuts of meat to be processed and sold as such,
you could take products from various parts of the cow,
grind them up together, and here you have ground meat.
And ground meat made meat eating more accessible to poor customers.
It reduced waste in the processing of cattle, and the
(06:29):
meat grinder also opens up the possibility for the burger
to be formed and served and sold cheaply, and as
burgers became more popular, it became more socially acceptable for
people in the middle and upper classes to eat ground meat.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
All right, let's move on a little bit from ground
meat to Howard Johnson's, and I want to hear about
that chain's important role in the fast food industry and frankly,
what happened to them. I remember lots of them around
when I was younger. So tell us about Howard Johnson's then,
why they're so important.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
You know, Howard Johnson's the last one closed a few
years ago, and it is a relic of that car
era of the United States. So in the nineteen twenties
and nineteen twenty five, Howard Johnson was found as a
chain of restaurants that specialized in ice cream. It was
kind of a faily restaurant that would call today, and
(07:24):
then they added the hotel concept that still exists today.
But Howard Johnson is so important for fast food because
they created the distribution channels that fast food relies on
now as well as chain restaurants. And it's this idea
that you set up these different distribution centers in regions
(07:47):
and that the local restaurants can get the food from
the regions, so you reduce your shipping costs. You don't
have to worry about inconsistent suppliers. They also learned that
if you prepare foods at these distribution centers, than the
restaurants were places where you could just heat and serve,
and a lot of team restaurants today still use these
(08:09):
models when they are trying to expand nationally.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
You've stated that fast food played a heightened role in
the civil rights struggle, especially just after the nineteen sixty
eight assassination of Martin Luther King. Why is that so.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
One of the things that I discovered when I was
writing my book was that there is a civil rights
story of McDonald's that is really in plain sight in
American cities when we look at the concentration of McDonald's
and other fast food restaurants and predominantly African American communities.
And so what I was really curious about was how
(08:47):
did McDonald's, this brand that was very much associated with
the suburbs of the nineteen fifties, how does it end
up in cities like Chicago and Newark, African American sections
of Los Angeles in Detroit. And what I discovered was
after Martin Luther King Junior's assassination, there was a big
push to bring McDonald's franchises into African American neighborhoods.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
After the break, the rise of the happy Meal, and
the unlikely combo of politics and fast food, fast food
(09:34):
and kids. I want to hear about those links.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
A love story exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
And certainly the happy meal, but not just the happy Meal.
Also a little about a company that I didn't know
anything about and you've lectured on, called Burger Chef.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yes, so there was a time in the US that
Burger Chef was more popular than McDonald's if you could imagine.
Burger Chef also created what was called the fun meal
for them, but you know what becomes like the happy meal,
where you have a self contained meal in an attractive
packaging for kids with a toy or some type of promotion.
(10:10):
Burger Chef was huge. I mean they had a cross
promotion with even Star Wars. But what the McDonald's brothers
understood when they were redefining the McDonald's dining experience, and
what Ray Kroc would later bring with McDonald's and other brands,
was that fast food could be a product that wasn't
(10:31):
very expensive, and you could market it to children so
that they would pester their parents until they could be
able to go to McDonald's or any fast food restaurant.
And so much of the fast food industry's growth that
happens in the nineteen fifties and sixties is really catering
to nuclear families, baby boom families. That the experience of
children is really center to how the family is going
(10:53):
to entertain itself. So McDonald's and others understood that when
you create characters and you have crossed promotion with popular toys,
you get really consistent customers in children.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
So now we've heard about kids, let's move on to celebrities.
What is their role in their history when it comes
to fast food.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
You know, when I was writing my book Franchise, I
spent so much time in the archive looking at old commercials,
looking at old print ads, and the use of celebrities
to sell fast food is really popular in the nineteen
sixties and seventies. Between nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety, you
have the golden age of celebrity endorsements, and you know
(11:38):
they're coming from a number of sectors. You've got athletes
who are actually leasing their names to fast food restaurants,
including Joe Namath and Ernie Ford, growing up in the
nineteen eighties. It was the era of people like Michael
Jordan who are front and center selling McDonald's. You have
people like Patti LaBelle and Gladys Knight and just a
(12:00):
number of really big stars who are promoting fast food.
And part of the appeal of those commercials is, look
at this famous person. They're just like us. They also
enjoy a big mac occasionally.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
In your lecture, you explain that even though hamburgers, fried chicken,
and tacos are the big three, there's also an increasing
amount of fast food influenced by foreign delicacies that are
not in that group.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
As the American palette changes and there's an availability of
foods from around the world, you see these products finding
their ways into fast food. Sun dried tomatoes, Chipotle sauces
being available into fast food. All of these are the
opening up of what we would once call international or
ethnic foods that become cheap, and the supply chain becomes
(12:54):
large enough to actually supply fast food restaurants, and we
see these tastes coming into these products. One of the
kind of most fun parts of researching McDonald's is to
learn about how they market their products and countries where
people don't really eat beef, for where pork is prohibited food,
and they do these incredible workarounds, whether it's a Samosa
(13:16):
burger in India or you know, the enhancements of the
McDonald's menu in China. You see all of these different
ways to make sure that the food is both recognizable globally.
The brand is, but the foods are a little bit
more regionally catered. I'm kind of of a generation where
when I was a young kid, bagel was considered an
(13:39):
ethnic food. I need wonderbread to not make bagels. You
had to go to a proper Jewish Jelli for a bagel.
But then the popularity of the bagel leads places like
Dunkin Donuts to have bagels available. And you know, for
the New Yorkers who are listening, I'm not saying this
to offend you, but you know, they're actually quite successful
in bringing bagels to a national market.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
You know, I'm not sure I agree with you about
the advisability of ordering a bagel at Dunkin Donuts, but
I'm gonna letico I'm just gonna let it go and
move on. Okay, I want to talk about the supply
chain a lot of people don't realize what a huge
impact the fast food industry has on the supply chain.
I certainly didn't until I heard about it from you
can you give us some background and some statistics, somethings
(14:22):
like potatoes and eggs.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
What you need in order to provision the major fast
food brands is kind of astonishing. Not just enough potatoes,
but enough potatoes that are cut and processed in order
to serve all of the burger and chicken chains, the
number of fresh tomatoes, the number of eggs, and so.
(14:45):
At the various moments where fast food restaurants are expanding
their offerings, whether it's the introduction of the fileo fish,
whether it's the introduction of breakfast and then the transition
to all day breakfast, you have to ensure that they're
is a supply chain behind it so that customers can
consistently receive the same product from coast to coast. In
(15:09):
twenty nineteen, for instance, you know, there was an estimate
that McDonald's uses about three point four billion filling with
the b pounds of US grown potatoes each year. And
so just that one company is able to demand this
many pounds of potatoes, this is like unbelievable when we
(15:30):
think about the fact that on average nine million pounds
of potatoes have to be available in America daily in
order for fast food to continue to do its work,
and so the pressures that it puts on the American
agriculture system, the meat processing system is kind of just shocking.
(15:51):
And as fast food continues to grow, these demands will
also continue to grow.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Marcia. A phrase of yours is politics and fast food
go hand in hand. And when people give you a
puzzled look, you say, hey, just think about Bill Clinton.
Tell us what you're thinking.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Well, Bill Clinton's presidency, I think had a lot to
do with inspiring me to write this book, because he
was very much of that new generation in the White
House during his election of the nineteen nineties, you know,
as a boomer president, and as someone who was often
photographed jogging to McDonald sometimes with Al Gore, sometimes with
(16:30):
secret service, and someone who was very much a product
of the culture of the rise of fast food. And
I think that outside of kind of what order he
liked to have at McDonald's and the presidents that eat
there or don't eat there, the political life of fast
food is so important for us to think about because
(16:50):
with an industry so large, they are dependent on the
regulations or the lack of regulations that the federal government
puts in front of them or facilitates for them. When
I was writing Franchise, I discovered the number of African
American franchise owners were able to tap into federal resources
for minority owned businesses in order to become part of
(17:11):
the McDonald's network. Issues like the minimum wage, issues like
worker safety and standards. It's the health and safety of
the workers and what they get paid or what they
don't get paid, and what are the rights that workers
have and that context, and what are the responsibilities of
corporations and the franchises that sit under them are so
I think that if you want to learn about American politics,
(17:35):
you just got to learn about fast food.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Here's a phrase you don't use. Healthy eating and fast
food go hand in hand. I want I never heard
you say, but in your lecture you do describe the
d Lights chain as an example of why you don't
say that.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
I mean the attempts to try to create healthy alternatives
or healthy items and a fast food venue. They're hard people.
I don't go to fast food restaurants to eat salads,
and anytime the major fast food brands try to have
a lighter menu offering or these chains that try to
say we are a light brand like Delights, they don't
(18:13):
do well because that's not why people are going to
have fast food. And I think that there's been incredible
pressure on the fast food industry to take accountability for
the health and wellness of its food. But I think
it's about larger questions about the diversity of food opportunities
that we may have or may not have based on
(18:36):
our social position in society. But no one goes to
a fast food restaurant so they can have a side
dish of carrots. And I strongly stand by that statement.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
I'm going to assume you would say that struggling with
healthy food is one of the biggest concerns one of
the biggest problems in the fast food industry. Are there
any other major problems they just keep facing and aren't
quite sure how to well.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I mean, I think one of the fundamental issues about
fast food is this idea of work. How much workers
are making, how much they're not making. What can be
done in terms of representing the voice of workers, is
it through a union, Is it through local pressure through
ordinances about the minimum wage? Is it a combination of both.
(19:23):
How do we make sure that fast food work is
work that properly compensates people and treats them with dignity.
I think that the marketing of fast food is always
an issue because we know that there have been disparities
in terms of race and the children who are marketed
to more or less than others. So you know, fast
(19:45):
food is always going to be a place that I think,
even as it's accepted and embraced and quite successful, will
always be a place where there are a lot of contentions.
And I think it's about these larger questions of the
role of a corporation in a civil society and in
a democracy.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
You sometimes on your lecture with the assertion, whatever you
eat or don't eat, like all of us, you are
living in a fast food nation. Can you tell us
why you often close with that.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
It doesn't matter if you're eating the food or not,
if you like it or not, if you want your
kids to eat it or not, if you know you're
ordering the bagel at Dunkin Donuts or not. We are
living in a context in which the availability of fast
food fundamentally changes our relationship to eating, how fast we eat,
(20:38):
the consequences of those foods, on the larger public health,
on the quality of jobs, on what's available when you're
on the road versus what's not available. We are very
much kind of in a fast food nation. To borrow
the title of Eric Schlosser's excellent book, because there's no
(20:59):
escaping the consequences of it, right, So, the price of potatoes,
the price of eggs, the price of tomatoes, all of
these things are impacted by the large buyers. You know,
whether or not we think the fifteen year old should
make twenty dollars an hour, or if we think it
should be seven dollars an hour, these questions are so
much shaped by our assumption on fast food as a
(21:20):
first job for young people. So, you know, we are
living in it, and I think that the best way
to deal with it is to learn as much as
possible and really engage in the various questions and controversies
and opportunities that it provides us to really reflect on.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Marsha, thank you, I appreciate it, and I really hope
I see you again lecturing soon, because you are just
fascinating to listen to thank you, Thank you so much,
thanks for joining us here at One Day University. Sign
up at our website one dayu dot com to become
a member and access over seven hundred full length video
(21:56):
lectures from the world's finest professors. You can also download
our app. There you can learn more about today's episode
and watch Georgetown professor Marsha Chaplin's lecture on the history
of fast food in America, as well as her talks
on civil rights, the Great Migration, and more. Join us
next time when we rank the most powerful people in
(22:18):
the world.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
If you can reshape political debate, if you can get
governments to act, if you can have the soft power
to influence one point eight billion young people, you ought
to be on our list, and so Bretta is online.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
One Day University is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
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review in your favorite podcast app. You can also check
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Speaker 1 (22:55):
School of Humans
The popularity of the bagel leads places like Dunkin Donuts
to have bagels available. And you know, for the New
Yorkers who are listening, I'm not saying this to offend you,
but you know, they're actually quite successful in bringing bagels
to a national market.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to one Day University Talks with the world's most
engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Shregis. About
one in three Americans eat fast food on a typical day,
(00:44):
and there are nearly two hundred thousand fast food or
quick service restaurants in the US. It's big business, not
only in America but across the globe. Look at a
company like McDonald's. It made twenty three billion dollars in
revenue lat year. Professor Marsha Chatlin knows that fast food
has changed more than just our diet. Her lecture is
(01:07):
titled Drive through America, a Culinary History of the fast
food industry and how it shapes our lives. Marcia teaches
history and African American studies at Georgetown University in twenty
twenty one, she won the Poelitzer Prize in History for
her book franchise, The Golden Arches in Black America. Marsha
(01:29):
believes fast food engages so many people because we share
a connection to it.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So fast food is such a great topic to write
about because everyone comes into the conversation with some experience,
some opinion, some knowledge of the topic. You know, as
someone who has spent most of her career teaching about
race and history and you know some really difficult subject
matter from the past, it's always good to have a
(02:02):
table set with familiar topics for people to come to,
and fast food does that. You don't have to explain
that much about McDonald's or that much about the fast
food experience for people to be able to join the conversation.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I think I'm going to add something here that studying
fast food also involves learning about intellectual property. Yeah, because
I went to law school many many, many years ago,
and I learned about what's still considered a landmark ruling,
the White Castle versus White Tower case. So could you
explain that a bit to us.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
I think in our contemporary moment, we have a very
clear sense that you know, no business in their right
frame of mind wouldever do really agregious copycatting. We know
that in the fashion industry we have counterfeits, and we
also know that, you know, sometimes people get into fights
about intellectual property, but in the early days of fast
(02:59):
food in the nineteen plays and thirties, there were not
the kind of claims on intellectual property that we know
of today. And so in the early days of White Castle,
which is really considered one of the forerunners of the
fast food franchise, they were getting beat by a competitor
called White Tower that was basically stealing all of their ideas.
(03:23):
They also had sliders. They also had these restaurants that
looked like castles, but towers in their incense. And the
case went all the way to the Supreme Court about
whether or not, you know, White Castle had a claim
on the architecture of its buildings and its trademarks and
its slogans. And you know, this was an important moment
(03:45):
because the fast food industry spends a lot of time
trying to root out copycats domestically and abroad.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
I remember, did they even have a phrase that was
almost identical and easy to confuse?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yes, So White Castle told people to enjoy their sliders
by the sack, and white Tower told people to enjoy
them by the bagful. I mean, they really didn't try
that hard to distinguish themselves, Marsha.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
The growth of the auto industry and the federal highway
system is directly connected to the growth of the fast
food industry. You said that many times that cars played
a huge role in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yes, so the whole idea behind fast food initially was
to be able to serve food very quickly to people
in urban centers who may be working on construction sites
or out on a night of you know, enjoying some
alcohol and needing something to eat late at night. But
eventually the concept of fast food was really about the
(04:50):
ability to use the car as a second dining space.
And so as car ownership becomes more accessible in the
United States in the nineteen forties and fifties, there is
a whole car culture that fast food seamlessly integrates itself in.
So if it's going to a McDonald's drive in and
eating your dinner in your car, or using the expanded
(05:11):
highway network to travel across the country and to different states,
there's a way that fast food is about both the
efficiency of the product as well as the celebration of
the sense of freedom that cars in the highway system
provided more and more people.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Your lecture also talked about a magic moment in fast
food history, this one that I knew nothing about at
the Philadelphia World's Fair when the meat grinder was introduced.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Yeah, you know, it's so funny. World's fares they still
exist to an extent, but not at the level of
popularity of the World's Fares of the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, where people would converge to see, you know,
technology unfolding. All of this is to say the meat
grinder revolutionized the meat industry because instead of relying on
(06:07):
distinct cuts of meat to be processed and sold as such,
you could take products from various parts of the cow,
grind them up together, and here you have ground meat.
And ground meat made meat eating more accessible to poor customers.
It reduced waste in the processing of cattle, and the
(06:29):
meat grinder also opens up the possibility for the burger
to be formed and served and sold cheaply, and as
burgers became more popular, it became more socially acceptable for
people in the middle and upper classes to eat ground meat.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
All right, let's move on a little bit from ground
meat to Howard Johnson's, and I want to hear about
that chain's important role in the fast food industry and frankly,
what happened to them. I remember lots of them around
when I was younger. So tell us about Howard Johnson's then,
why they're so important.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
You know, Howard Johnson's the last one closed a few
years ago, and it is a relic of that car
era of the United States. So in the nineteen twenties
and nineteen twenty five, Howard Johnson was found as a
chain of restaurants that specialized in ice cream. It was
kind of a faily restaurant that would call today, and
(07:24):
then they added the hotel concept that still exists today.
But Howard Johnson is so important for fast food because
they created the distribution channels that fast food relies on
now as well as chain restaurants. And it's this idea
that you set up these different distribution centers in regions
(07:47):
and that the local restaurants can get the food from
the regions, so you reduce your shipping costs. You don't
have to worry about inconsistent suppliers. They also learned that
if you prepare foods at these distribution centers, than the
restaurants were places where you could just heat and serve,
and a lot of team restaurants today still use these
(08:09):
models when they are trying to expand nationally.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
You've stated that fast food played a heightened role in
the civil rights struggle, especially just after the nineteen sixty
eight assassination of Martin Luther King. Why is that so.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
One of the things that I discovered when I was
writing my book was that there is a civil rights
story of McDonald's that is really in plain sight in
American cities when we look at the concentration of McDonald's
and other fast food restaurants and predominantly African American communities.
And so what I was really curious about was how
(08:47):
did McDonald's, this brand that was very much associated with
the suburbs of the nineteen fifties, how does it end
up in cities like Chicago and Newark, African American sections
of Los Angeles in Detroit. And what I discovered was
after Martin Luther King Junior's assassination, there was a big
push to bring McDonald's franchises into African American neighborhoods.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
After the break, the rise of the happy Meal, and
the unlikely combo of politics and fast food, fast food
(09:34):
and kids. I want to hear about those links.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
A love story exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
And certainly the happy meal, but not just the happy Meal.
Also a little about a company that I didn't know
anything about and you've lectured on, called Burger Chef.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yes, so there was a time in the US that
Burger Chef was more popular than McDonald's if you could imagine.
Burger Chef also created what was called the fun meal
for them, but you know what becomes like the happy meal,
where you have a self contained meal in an attractive
packaging for kids with a toy or some type of promotion.
(10:10):
Burger Chef was huge. I mean they had a cross
promotion with even Star Wars. But what the McDonald's brothers
understood when they were redefining the McDonald's dining experience, and
what Ray Kroc would later bring with McDonald's and other brands,
was that fast food could be a product that wasn't
(10:31):
very expensive, and you could market it to children so
that they would pester their parents until they could be
able to go to McDonald's or any fast food restaurant.
And so much of the fast food industry's growth that
happens in the nineteen fifties and sixties is really catering
to nuclear families, baby boom families. That the experience of
children is really center to how the family is going
(10:53):
to entertain itself. So McDonald's and others understood that when
you create characters and you have crossed promotion with popular toys,
you get really consistent customers in children.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
So now we've heard about kids, let's move on to celebrities.
What is their role in their history when it comes
to fast food.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
You know, when I was writing my book Franchise, I
spent so much time in the archive looking at old commercials,
looking at old print ads, and the use of celebrities
to sell fast food is really popular in the nineteen
sixties and seventies. Between nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety, you
have the golden age of celebrity endorsements, and you know
(11:38):
they're coming from a number of sectors. You've got athletes
who are actually leasing their names to fast food restaurants,
including Joe Namath and Ernie Ford, growing up in the
nineteen eighties. It was the era of people like Michael
Jordan who are front and center selling McDonald's. You have
people like Patti LaBelle and Gladys Knight and just a
(12:00):
number of really big stars who are promoting fast food.
And part of the appeal of those commercials is, look
at this famous person. They're just like us. They also
enjoy a big mac occasionally.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
In your lecture, you explain that even though hamburgers, fried chicken,
and tacos are the big three, there's also an increasing
amount of fast food influenced by foreign delicacies that are
not in that group.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
As the American palette changes and there's an availability of
foods from around the world, you see these products finding
their ways into fast food. Sun dried tomatoes, Chipotle sauces
being available into fast food. All of these are the
opening up of what we would once call international or
ethnic foods that become cheap, and the supply chain becomes
(12:54):
large enough to actually supply fast food restaurants, and we
see these tastes coming into these products. One of the
kind of most fun parts of researching McDonald's is to
learn about how they market their products and countries where
people don't really eat beef, for where pork is prohibited food,
and they do these incredible workarounds, whether it's a Samosa
(13:16):
burger in India or you know, the enhancements of the
McDonald's menu in China. You see all of these different
ways to make sure that the food is both recognizable globally.
The brand is, but the foods are a little bit
more regionally catered. I'm kind of of a generation where
when I was a young kid, bagel was considered an
(13:39):
ethnic food. I need wonderbread to not make bagels. You
had to go to a proper Jewish Jelli for a bagel.
But then the popularity of the bagel leads places like
Dunkin Donuts to have bagels available. And you know, for
the New Yorkers who are listening, I'm not saying this
to offend you, but you know, they're actually quite successful
in bringing bagels to a national market.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
You know, I'm not sure I agree with you about
the advisability of ordering a bagel at Dunkin Donuts, but
I'm gonna letico I'm just gonna let it go and
move on. Okay, I want to talk about the supply
chain a lot of people don't realize what a huge
impact the fast food industry has on the supply chain.
I certainly didn't until I heard about it from you
can you give us some background and some statistics, somethings
(14:22):
like potatoes and eggs.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
What you need in order to provision the major fast
food brands is kind of astonishing. Not just enough potatoes,
but enough potatoes that are cut and processed in order
to serve all of the burger and chicken chains, the
number of fresh tomatoes, the number of eggs, and so.
(14:45):
At the various moments where fast food restaurants are expanding
their offerings, whether it's the introduction of the fileo fish,
whether it's the introduction of breakfast and then the transition
to all day breakfast, you have to ensure that they're
is a supply chain behind it so that customers can
consistently receive the same product from coast to coast. In
(15:09):
twenty nineteen, for instance, you know, there was an estimate
that McDonald's uses about three point four billion filling with
the b pounds of US grown potatoes each year. And
so just that one company is able to demand this
many pounds of potatoes, this is like unbelievable when we
(15:30):
think about the fact that on average nine million pounds
of potatoes have to be available in America daily in
order for fast food to continue to do its work,
and so the pressures that it puts on the American
agriculture system, the meat processing system is kind of just shocking.
(15:51):
And as fast food continues to grow, these demands will
also continue to grow.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Marcia. A phrase of yours is politics and fast food
go hand in hand. And when people give you a
puzzled look, you say, hey, just think about Bill Clinton.
Tell us what you're thinking.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Well, Bill Clinton's presidency, I think had a lot to
do with inspiring me to write this book, because he
was very much of that new generation in the White
House during his election of the nineteen nineties, you know,
as a boomer president, and as someone who was often
photographed jogging to McDonald sometimes with Al Gore, sometimes with
(16:30):
secret service, and someone who was very much a product
of the culture of the rise of fast food. And
I think that outside of kind of what order he
liked to have at McDonald's and the presidents that eat
there or don't eat there, the political life of fast
food is so important for us to think about because
(16:50):
with an industry so large, they are dependent on the
regulations or the lack of regulations that the federal government
puts in front of them or facilitates for them. When
I was writing Franchise, I discovered the number of African
American franchise owners were able to tap into federal resources
for minority owned businesses in order to become part of
(17:11):
the McDonald's network. Issues like the minimum wage, issues like
worker safety and standards. It's the health and safety of
the workers and what they get paid or what they
don't get paid, and what are the rights that workers
have and that context, and what are the responsibilities of
corporations and the franchises that sit under them are so
I think that if you want to learn about American politics,
(17:35):
you just got to learn about fast food.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Here's a phrase you don't use. Healthy eating and fast
food go hand in hand. I want I never heard
you say, but in your lecture you do describe the
d Lights chain as an example of why you don't
say that.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
I mean the attempts to try to create healthy alternatives
or healthy items and a fast food venue. They're hard people.
I don't go to fast food restaurants to eat salads,
and anytime the major fast food brands try to have
a lighter menu offering or these chains that try to
say we are a light brand like Delights, they don't
(18:13):
do well because that's not why people are going to
have fast food. And I think that there's been incredible
pressure on the fast food industry to take accountability for
the health and wellness of its food. But I think
it's about larger questions about the diversity of food opportunities
that we may have or may not have based on
(18:36):
our social position in society. But no one goes to
a fast food restaurant so they can have a side
dish of carrots. And I strongly stand by that statement.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
I'm going to assume you would say that struggling with
healthy food is one of the biggest concerns one of
the biggest problems in the fast food industry. Are there
any other major problems they just keep facing and aren't
quite sure how to well.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I mean, I think one of the fundamental issues about
fast food is this idea of work. How much workers
are making, how much they're not making. What can be
done in terms of representing the voice of workers, is
it through a union, Is it through local pressure through
ordinances about the minimum wage? Is it a combination of both.
(19:23):
How do we make sure that fast food work is
work that properly compensates people and treats them with dignity.
I think that the marketing of fast food is always
an issue because we know that there have been disparities
in terms of race and the children who are marketed
to more or less than others. So you know, fast
(19:45):
food is always going to be a place that I think,
even as it's accepted and embraced and quite successful, will
always be a place where there are a lot of contentions.
And I think it's about these larger questions of the
role of a corporation in a civil society and in
a democracy.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
You sometimes on your lecture with the assertion, whatever you
eat or don't eat, like all of us, you are
living in a fast food nation. Can you tell us
why you often close with that.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
It doesn't matter if you're eating the food or not,
if you like it or not, if you want your
kids to eat it or not, if you know you're
ordering the bagel at Dunkin Donuts or not. We are
living in a context in which the availability of fast
food fundamentally changes our relationship to eating, how fast we eat,
(20:38):
the consequences of those foods, on the larger public health,
on the quality of jobs, on what's available when you're
on the road versus what's not available. We are very
much kind of in a fast food nation. To borrow
the title of Eric Schlosser's excellent book, because there's no
(20:59):
escaping the consequences of it, right, So, the price of potatoes,
the price of eggs, the price of tomatoes, all of
these things are impacted by the large buyers. You know,
whether or not we think the fifteen year old should
make twenty dollars an hour, or if we think it
should be seven dollars an hour, these questions are so
much shaped by our assumption on fast food as a
(21:20):
first job for young people. So, you know, we are
living in it, and I think that the best way
to deal with it is to learn as much as
possible and really engage in the various questions and controversies
and opportunities that it provides us to really reflect on.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Marsha, thank you, I appreciate it, and I really hope
I see you again lecturing soon, because you are just
fascinating to listen to thank you, Thank you so much,
thanks for joining us here at One Day University. Sign
up at our website one dayu dot com to become
a member and access over seven hundred full length video
(21:56):
lectures from the world's finest professors. You can also download
our app. There you can learn more about today's episode
and watch Georgetown professor Marsha Chaplin's lecture on the history
of fast food in America, as well as her talks
on civil rights, the Great Migration, and more. Join us
next time when we rank the most powerful people in
(22:18):
the world.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
If you can reshape political debate, if you can get
governments to act, if you can have the soft power
to influence one point eight billion young people, you ought
to be on our list, and so Bretta is online.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
One Day University is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a
review in your favorite podcast app. You can also check
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Speaker 1 (22:55):
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