Do You Want Fries With That

“Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want.”
-- Waverley Root

The paper crinkled as I wadded the wrapper and threw it into the bottom of the empty and grease stained bag. Out of the countless times I had gone through this motion, I had never realized until now that it really was like unwrapping a present on Christmas day. I could feel the oily salt adhere to my fingers as I plucked clumps of French fries from their red cardboard sleeve. I unabashedly licked the savory residue off each digit before digging back into the cheeseburger, pillowy soft all the way through. This was the reassuring taste of nostalgia, of childhood and home, that I so desperately missed. Truly, eating under the glow of those golden arches is what it means to be an American. Which was a little jarring considering I was spending my summer on a foreign exchange program in Japan. The commercialization and industrialization of food, on a transnational scale, has drastically changed how people see food; that is, with an emerging homogenous world cuisine. And no other industry better exemplifies this concept of corporate globalization than fast food.
Americans spend an estimated 90 percent of their food budget on processed and packaged goods. We spend over 110 billion dollars annually on fast food; more money than movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and music – combined. It has penetrated so deep into our culture that it is no wonder that works like Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me grabbed national attention. When Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio went around the world looking at what families eat in a week, American families like the Revises of North Carolina seem prime examples of how pervasive the fast food industry has become.
Ron, a trim, fit man, works out mainly for the cardio benefits…But he eats fast food for lunch five days a week…The work outs were great, but there was an unintentional by-product: they had less time for home-cooked meals. “We would pick up fast food. It was the most convenient thing to do. That is not the result that we had in mind when we started this exercise program.”

Spending nearly 72 dollars every week on fast food, it makes up over 20 percent of their food expenditure. And they are hardly an outlier in this regard. As they said, fast food has simply become “the most convenient thing to do.” Indeed, as Michael Pollan points out, fast food is specifically designed for convenience (and unashamedly so, with a moniker such as ‘fast food’): from cup holders to support the quart of coke each passenger requires, the drive-thrus that eliminate the need to get out of the car, and the tailored concepts of foods like Chicken McNuggets that can be consumed one handed (without the pesky need for a plate or utensils), it is no wonder that up to 19 percent of American meals are eaten in the car. Through science and technology we have revolutionized both what and how we eat.
It was this very notion of modern worldliness that allowed McDonald’s and other fast food corporations to permeate throughout the rest of the world. Even political barriers such as the Soviet-American tensions could not prevent the golden arches from spanning into Russia
In 1995, my landlady Anya, a retired geologist, recalled that when McDonald’s and the pizza restaurants first opened in Moscow, it was precisely their foreignness that prompted long lines of curious customers.

Yet, as Caldwell soon discovered, though lines were out the door for the experience, many Muscovites, especially the older generation, could not quite understand the appeal of the actual taste of the food. Similarly in China, though families flocked to the eatery, adults generally avoided the food themselves, instead going for the experience—especially for the sake of their children.
Yan also discovered that working-class Beijing residents save up to take their kids to McDonald’s and hover over them as they munch. (Later the adults eat in a cheaper, Chinese-style restaurant.) Parents told Yan that they wanted their children to “connect” with the world outside China. To them, McDonald’s was an important stop on the way to Harvard Business School or the MIT labs.

To these people, McDonald’s is not necessarily the convenience that so many Americans like the Revis family use to make their daily routines easier. It is a gateway into a larger world scale society—especially for the sake of their children.
And it seems to be working; though their parents are still hesitant to eat a Big Mac, the kids have taken quite a liking to them. Just as Caldwell found adults questioning why anyone would be coming back for the food at McDonald’s, interviews with schoolchildren proved to show just the opposite: that McDonald’s has become so commonplace that the children readily identified it as Russian food. And when University of Hong Kong students complained of missing home-style cooking while in Taipei, all they said that they wanted was McDonald’s. From young girls in the Australian Outback considering Mackas (Aussie slang for McDonald’s) “their culinary mecca,” Samurai Colonial Sanders attracting children’s eyes in Tokyo, and college students in France compromising their culinary beliefs “when pressed for time…[ducking] into the nearest McDonald’s,” a new generation around the world is growing up accustomed to the fast food lifestyle.
But this childhood adoration of fast food may simply be that, childhood adoration. Not just foreign adults just now facing challenges to traditional home cooking, but even for the millions of American adults who grew up raised on a diet rich in fast food are starting to turn against it.
I ate a lot of McDonald’s as a kid…I loved everything about fast food…Whatever it is (surely food scientists know), for countless millions of people living now, this generic fast-food flavor is one of the unerasable smells and tastes of childhood – which makes it a kind of comfort food…but after a few bites I’m more inclined to think they’re selling something more schematic than that—something more like a signifier of comfort food…And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.
A backlash is emerging; people are becoming more and more aware of the unsettling notion that their hamburger may be more than just beef and a bun. What is “grill seasoning”? Or even for that matter, what kind of cow is this beef coming from? What has it been eating? It is questions like these that have spurred on a counterculture, looking to revolutionize society and lifestyle, centered on changing what and how we eat. Or rather reverting back to what and how we ate.
A consumerist theme targeted foods to be avoided, especially chemicalized “plastic” foods. A therapeutic theme had to do with positive concerns for pleasure and identity, particularly a hunger for craftsmanship, leisure, and tradition. Concerned with the integration of self, nature and community, an organic motif addressed serious issues of production and distribution, that is, how to reconcile private consumption with wider planetary needs.

It was a movement in direct opposition to everything that seemed to make McDonald’s and fast food so appealing in the first place. Should the burger I ate in urban Japan taste exactly the same as ones from my California suburban childhood? What about the notion that “not only is it served in a flash, but more often than not it’s eaten that way too…”? Or that it is food that necessitates families “eating alone together”?
Part of the problem is that these values of the “old-fashioned, traditional, nostalgic” and being “more honest, simple, and virtuous” are an extreme to which one must fully commit both time and skill. And most people just cannot make those sacrifices, which is why, though criticism like Pollan’s and Schlosser’s makes us more aware of the problems, there needs to be alternatives to these two extremes. For all of their faults, industry, science, and technology have made food cheaper. And for a world with an ever growing population, that is a good thing. Some consider McDonald’s as a form of “cultural imperialism,” that “the rapid spread of McDonald’s and its fast-food rivals undermines indigenous cuisines and helps create a homogenous, global culture.”
In this time at the beginning of the new millennium it is not unusual to hear intelligent people say that the era of the nation state and national culture is ending and a brave new world of global consumer culture, multinational economies, and transnational migration is upon us.

But is this really true? Yes, the burgers taste the same everywhere but at the same time, each culture has taken this bland, amorphous thing, and domesticated it. Whether you call it “glocalization” or that McDonald’s has become “multilocal” it is obvious that it is too easy to see only the one dimension of imperialism with fast food. Things are not that black and white. The deeper we look at cultures, and people, the more complex things become. And what if things are becoming more transnational? Is it so bad for a guy in Boston to grow up with a similar food memory as a woman in Beijing? Food is a strong unifier, and as we become more and more removed from community in one sense, sometimes even the most tenuous tie can keep us bound together in another.