McDonalds

In the opening pages of “Fast Food Nation,” Eric Schlosser makes a series of observations about McDonald's. The company operates about 28,000 restaurants around the world. It's the nation's biggest buyer of beef, pork and potatoes, and the world's biggest owner of retail property. The company is one of the country's top toy distributors and its largest private operator of playgrounds. Ninety-six percent of American schoolchildren can identify Ronald McDonald. Roughly one of every eight workers in the United States has done time at the chain. The McDonald's brand is the most famous, and the most heavily promoted, on the planet. “The Golden Arches,” Schlosser says, “are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.” Of course, McDonald's isn't alone. “The whole experience of buying fast food,” he writes, “has become so routine, so thoroughly unexceptional and mundane, that it is now taken for granted, like brushing your teeth or stopping for a red light.”

Fast-food restaurants evolved from the drive-in eateries spawned by the post-World War II car culture of Southern California. The men who built the new industry were rugged individualists, but their insights all revolved around relentless homogeneity — in the food they offered and in the way they acquired, produced and served it. In 1948, Richard and Maurice McDonald shrank their menu to only those items that could be eaten without silverware, converted their kitchen to a food-assembly line that required almost no skill from employees and dropped teenager-attracting female carhops in favor of a setup that required patrons to help themselves. This Speedee Service System allowed McDonald's to lower its prices — drawing a clientele made up largely of families. The founders of Burger King, Taco Bell and Carl's Jr. were all directly influenced by what they saw at McDonald's. Dunkin' Donuts, Wendy's, Domino's and Kentucky Fried Chicken each took off during the 1950's as well.

Since then, the processes the McDonalds set in motion have gained momentum. As late as 1965, workers at McDonald's (by then Ray Kroc was C.E.O. of the chain) were still actually peeling and slicing potatoes. To see how this is handled today, Schlosser visits a “fry factory” in Idaho, watching as potatoes are washed and have their skins blown off by machines and are then fired through a Water Gun Knife — a hose that shoots potatoes, at 117 feet per second, through steel grillwork