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.
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, 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 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 believes fast food engages so many people because we share a connection to it.
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 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.
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.
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 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. 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 because the fast food industry spends a lot of time trying to root out copycats domestically and abroad.
I remember, did they even have a phrase that was almost identical and easy to confuse?
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 models when they are trying to expand nationally.
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.
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 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.
After the break, the rise of the happy Meal, and the unlikely combo of politics and fast food, fast food and kids. I want to hear about those links.
A love story exactly.
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.
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. 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 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 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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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 like potatoes and eggs.
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.
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 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 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.
And as fast food continues to grow, these demands will also continue to grow.
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.
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 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 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 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, you just got to learn about fast food.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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. 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 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.
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.
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, 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 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
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.
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 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 the world.
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.
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