The destiny of nations depends on
the manner in which they nourish themselves. — The Physiology of Taste, Jean Brillat-Savarin < 1 826>If so, America's destiny manifestly depends to no small degree on the ham
burgers, French fries and milkshakes served beneath the golden arches
of Mc Donald's. Last year the chain of drive-ins and restaurants rang
up sales of $1.03 billion, passing the U.S. Army < 1972 food volume:
$909 million> as the nation's biggest dispenser of meals. Now the chain is going on to new triumphs: adding an average of one new
outlet every day to its 2,500 in the U.S., and hanging on every one a
sign reading OVER 12 BILLION SOLD to commemorate an event that
occurred during August. Executives at world headquarters in Oak Brook,
Ill., a Chicago suburb, have not bothered to investigate who ate the 12
billionth hamburger, when or in which restaurant, because they know
that its consumption constituted only an ephemeral milestone. In four
months or less, given the current intensity of the nation's hamburger
hunger, those signs will be replaced by new ones proclaiming OVER 13
BILLION . . . Nonstop Munching. McDonald's statistical accomplishments are staggering.
To illustrate: if all the 12 billion McDonald's hamburgers sold to
date were to be stacked into one pile, they would form a pyramid 783
times the size of the one erected by Snefru. If a man ate a McDonald's
hamburger every five minutes, it would take him 114,000 years of
nonstop munching to consume 12 billion burgers. If all the cattle that
have ever laid down their lives for McDonald's were to be resurrected
for a reunion, they would stand flank-by-jowl over an area larger than Greater London. Statistics alone cannot adequately measure the impact of McDonald's on
U.S. life. The company's relentless advertising campaign has made the McDonald's jingle, You Deserve a
Break Today, almost as familiar as The Star-Spangled Banner. But the
chain's managers have wrought their greatest achievement by taking a
familiar American institution, the greasy-spoon hamburger joint, and
transforming it into a totally different though no less
quintessentially American operation: a computerized, standardized,
premeasured, superclean production machine efficient enough to give
even the chiefs of General Motors food for thought. In the $8
billion-a year fast-food industry, McDonald's is only one of dozens of
chains that strive for uniformity in menu and service. But none has
ever surpassed McDonald's in automating the ancient art of cooking and
serving food. At every McDonald's outlet, winking lights on the grills tell the
counterman exactly when to flip over the hamburgers. Once done, the
burgers can be held under infra-red warming lights for up to ten
minutes, no more; after that, any burgers that have not been ordered
must be thrown away. Cybernetic deep fryers continuously adjust to the
moisture in every potato stick to make sure that French fries come out
with a uniform degree of brownness; specially designed scoops make it
almost physically impossible for a counterman to stuff more or fewer
French fries into a paper bag than headquarters specifies for a single
order.
