First disturbing fact: McDonalds is the nation's #1 purchaser of pork.
Who can name a McDonalds menu item which is advertised as being pork based? Is it in the hamburgers? The McNuggets? The milk shakes?
I read once an interesting article in some magazine, maybe National Geographic, which explained that our modern style of processed, preserved, and packaged food in the United States are based on innovations prompted by wartime innovation. In the 1940's, great minds were set to develop some form of nutrition that tens of thousands of American soldiers could carry for weeks or months across the battlefields of Europe.
The result is everything from fried potatoes that can sit on gas station shelves for months to little McNuggets of chicken that were coalesced weeks before you eat them.
An impression I get from this presentation of the matter is that the fast food restaurants we eat in aren't actually the real business. The business is the great industrial plans where patties, buns, nuggets, fries, tots, cheesy-balls, and McMuffins, are pumped from their mechanized producers, packaged, labeled, tagged, dated, sorted, and loaded onto trucks and trains to their dispensaries: the restaurants.
Fast food is kind of like IKEA, the factory produces all the parts and packages them with some fantastic logistical control, then all you (well, some worker) have to do is assemble them. Thus, a value meal in 30 seconds.
And in fact, it reminds me even of our discussions of WalMart. The real magic at work is not in the uniformity of the franchise or the unrealistic prices, but rather in the regimentation of a supply line that can turn cows, potatoes, wheat, lettuce, tomato, chickens, pigs, and a well stocked laboratory of petrochemicals and the sort into food for 46 million people daily dispensed at almost 13,000 national locations.
That is a lot of food on the move. Imagine the trucks and trains and factories and machines and poor foreign labor at work non-stope to produce 46 million meals every single days.
It's like we're some kind of termite colony.
Who can name a McDonalds menu item which is advertised as being pork based? Is it in the hamburgers? The McNuggets? The milk shakes?
I read once an interesting article in some magazine, maybe National Geographic, which explained that our modern style of processed, preserved, and packaged food in the United States are based on innovations prompted by wartime innovation. In the 1940's, great minds were set to develop some form of nutrition that tens of thousands of American soldiers could carry for weeks or months across the battlefields of Europe.
The result is everything from fried potatoes that can sit on gas station shelves for months to little McNuggets of chicken that were coalesced weeks before you eat them.
An impression I get from this presentation of the matter is that the fast food restaurants we eat in aren't actually the real business. The business is the great industrial plans where patties, buns, nuggets, fries, tots, cheesy-balls, and McMuffins, are pumped from their mechanized producers, packaged, labeled, tagged, dated, sorted, and loaded onto trucks and trains to their dispensaries: the restaurants.
Fast food is kind of like IKEA, the factory produces all the parts and packages them with some fantastic logistical control, then all you (well, some worker) have to do is assemble them. Thus, a value meal in 30 seconds.
And in fact, it reminds me even of our discussions of WalMart. The real magic at work is not in the uniformity of the franchise or the unrealistic prices, but rather in the regimentation of a supply line that can turn cows, potatoes, wheat, lettuce, tomato, chickens, pigs, and a well stocked laboratory of petrochemicals and the sort into food for 46 million people daily dispensed at almost 13,000 national locations.
That is a lot of food on the move. Imagine the trucks and trains and factories and machines and poor foreign labor at work non-stope to produce 46 million meals every single days.
It's like we're some kind of termite colony.
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