Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (38 page)

Cleanliness, simplicity, visibility, predictability – if White Castle’s formula sounds familiar, it is because it was copied by one of the greatest business brains in modern catering: Ray Kroc, the genius behind McDonald’s. Edgar Ingram came up with the formula for modern fast food, but it was Kroc who could see its global potential. His secret weapon was spatial demographics. At the start of the 1950s, hamburgers were sold mainly to working-class men on inner-city sites, but Kroc believed that if they were pitched right, they could be sold to just about anyone. Having discovered that 75 per cent of family meals were eaten where the children wanted – and this in the midst of the
baby-boom era – that meant, as Kroc put it, ‘going after the kids’.
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Kroc’s first move in 1954 was to buy the franchising rights to an innovative conveyor-belt burger-grilling system he came across while working as a drinks-machine salesman in the California diner of two Scottish brothers, the eponymous McDonalds. Having secured the McDonald’s franchise, Kroc immediately began building family-friendly restaurants in affluent neighbourhoods, run with military efficiency by teams of highly trained teenage boys. The restaurants were far cosier than their ‘white’ predecessors, with warm brick interiors and cheerful furnishings, but they retained one essential feature: open-plan tiled kitchens, in which the entire hamburger assembly process (now reassuringly automated) took place in full view of diners. A cleanliness freak, Kroc extended his immaculate hygiene standards to the outside of his restaurants, often spending his weekends scraping chewing gum off the forecourts. He kept his target customers happy with special kiddie meals, take-home presents and their own ‘fun’ figure, the spooky Ronald McDonald, who by 1970 was recognised by 96 per cent of American children, second only to Santa Claus. It was all a stunning success, but Kroc was yet to display his greatest business gift: flexibility. When the nuclear family began to disintegrate during the 1970s, he simply moved back to the inner cities, flying around in helicopters to locate the best sites (usually road intersections) to attract his new target customers, identified as ‘roaming impulse eaters’ with little brand loyalty.
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With 30,000 restaurants worldwide, 50 million daily customers and a ‘Hamburger University’ with 275,000 graduates to its name, the global success of McDonald’s is all too familiar. Despite a millennial wobble caused by a series of exposés, including Eric Schlosser’s 2001
Fast Food Nation
, Morgan Spurlock’s 2004
Supersize Me
, and Cesar Barber’s ‘fat suit’ (in which the latter sued McDonald’s for giving him a heart attack), the Golden Arches have bounced back.
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Accused of making the world fat and giving it coronaries, the company showed it had lost none of Kroc’s adaptability, introducing new ‘healthy’ options, such as spring water and prepared salads, although some of the latter turned out to contain more fat than a standard cheeseburger.
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In early 2007, McDonald’s announced some of its best sales increases ever; not, as you might expect, in the fast-growing cities of Asia, but in Europe.
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One could hardly wish for a better demonstration of the power of image to control the way we think about food.

One of the great ironies of American fast food is that it is the product of one of the biggest and richest gastronomic inheritances on earth: the ethnic melting pot created by European migration to the USA. So how come such a rich cultural mix resulted in one of the blandest foods in history? The answer, as Harvey Levenstein argued in his book
Paradox of Plenty
, was that the very richness of the mix led to a national crisis of food identity.
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As successive waves of Irish, Italians, Germans, Hungarians and
Poles landed on American shores from the 1880s onwards, a desperate search began for a common food acceptable to all. Many felt obliged to ‘Americanise’ their native cookery by taking out all the interesting bits – Italian garlic, German blood sausage, Hungarian paprika – that might offend others. The result was lowest-common-denominator cuisine, devoid of character or flavour, whose only saving grace was the vast quantities of fresh meat it contained; something few immigrants had enjoyed back home. As people began to eat larger portions, they also began to add more of the only flavour enhancers – salt, sugar and fat – offensive to no one. The formula ought to sound familiar, because it gave rise to the planet’s blandest, yet most popular, food.

With its vast feed lots, processing plants and fast-food joints, the American food industry by the 1950s was a species apart – and the hamburger was its ultimate product. By extending the economies of scale of modern agribusiness through to the table, it achieved an astonishing feat: the intrusion of corporate branding into the very heart of food culture, the meal itself. For a mixed society desperate to ditch any vestige of individual food identity, its one-size-fits-all approach fitted the bill perfectly. But in order to succeed outside America, fast-food companies had to find markets where the food culture was already weak – where, effectively, it was already industrialised. Britain, for example. British food culture unravelled earlier than most, for the simple reason that Britain industrialised earlier than any other nation. Native cooks such as Hannah Glasse might have muttered about ‘French tricks’, but it was the Industrial Revolution that dealt the fatal blow to British gastronomy, by making the majority of the population reliant on imported processed food. It created the world’s first industrialised palate; one that, as George Orwell noted in his withering analysis of the British working classes during the 1930s,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, had utterly corrupted the nation’s taste buds:

… the English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have tinned milk – even that dreadful tinned
milk which is made of sugar and cornflour and has UNFIT FOR BABIES on the tin in huge letters.
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What with the working classes craving processed food and the upper classes craving French, British gastronomy in the mid twentieth century was in a sorry state indeed. While haute cuisine can hardly be blamed for the loss of British food culture, its colonisation of the gastronomic high ground hardly helped, since it perpetuated the notion that the best food was foreign, and that in order to eat it, one had to be posh.
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In his tragicomic survey of British restaurants in 1967, the
Bad Food Guide
, Derek Cooper wrote:

There is, alas, no reason for optimism on the eating front. For the minority prepared to pay for the privilege there will always be a small number of good restaurants. The majority of us will continue to put up uncomplainingly, perhaps even with a sort of masochistic pleasure, with the kind of bad food and bad service described in the following fourteen chapters.
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No wonder American fast food was such an instant hit in Britain. It met little resistance from a national gastronomy in disarray; and, of course, it appealed directly to the postwar British obsession with America. As far as McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the rest were concerned, Britain was a rollover; which is more than can be said for the rest of Europe. In France and Italy, American fast food was seen as nothing short of ‘gastronomic imperialism’. The first McDonald’s in France was physically attacked, and as we saw in the previous chapter, the Golden Arches’ arrival in Rome caused such outrage that it sparked the birth of the Slow Food Movement.

It is instructive to look at the passions aroused by fast food in Italy and France. Although neither nation has been closed to foreign culinary influence (the tomato, now considered essential to Italian cuisine, was imported from Peru as an ornamental plant in 1650, and only entered mainstream cookery in the nineteenth century), neither underwent the mass urbanisation that severed British cooking from its roots. Crucially, this has allowed both nations to maintain ‘vertical’ cuisines, in which
different levels of cookery (rustic, regional, amateur, professional) continue to inform one another. For the majority in France and Italy, food remains a way of life. When it comes under threat, it is considered worth fighting for.

The new frontier for American fast food is Asia, where rapid urbanisation is having a similarly disruptive affect on local food cultures as it once did in Britain. Although Asian cuisines remain some of the most distinctive in the world, the fact that American fast food has a place in Asia at all is symptomatic of the power of industrial food to appeal to those uprooted from their rural lifestyles. When it comes to global food cultures, it seems we have a choice. As Britain and America have demonstrated, ethnic diversity and mass migration can forge food cultures of sorts; highly adaptable ones at that. Yet many of those fusions come at a cost. When ‘anything goes’ in the gastronomic mix, food loses one of its greatest gifts – its cultural identity.

For those of us addicted to the choice of whether to eat Italian, Greek, Chinese, French or Indian every night, the loss of our own food culture in Britain may seem like a blessing. Over the past 20 years, our cities have been transformed by an eruption of restaurants offering everything from Malay, Thai, Mexican and Spanish, to Japanese, Ethiopian, Afghan – even British food. London in particular has become a fantasy playground for the dedicated gourmet; yet, as the parlous state of our culinary knowledge in Britain indicates, it is entirely possible to have a thriving restaurant trade and a bankrupt food culture at one and the same time.

The role played by restaurants in any national gastronomy is a complex one. Where food cultures remain strong, professional and domestic cookery can co-exist in a mutually beneficial relationship. However, in weak food cultures like our own, restaurants can become a substitute for cooking. At their best, restaurants can be fun, entertaining or romantic, allowing us to see friends on neutral territory, and occasionally (if we are lucky) to eat sublime food we would be
incapable of cooking ourselves. At worst, they stop us engaging with food, charging us vast amounts for bad dishes we could easily cook better for ourselves at home. In her 1989 book
Dining Out
, the American sociologist Joanne Finkelstein attacked American restaurants for creating ‘dioramas of desire’ in which artificial ambience took precedence over everything else, including the food.
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For Finkelstein, the American predilection for eating in restaurants was ‘fundamentally uncivilising’, since it replaced the authentic experience of the shared meal with something that was ultimately fake.

Fake or not, there is no denying the capacity of restaurants to animate public space. London’s recent ‘restaurant revolution’ has transformed previously empty swathes of the capital – notably the embarrassingly lifeless South Bank – into vast throbbing outdoor eateries. In the case of the Brunswick Centre (another modernist project previously inhabited only in the architect’s imagination), the change has been even more dramatic. A godforsaken pedestrian precinct over an underused car park since the 1970s, ‘The Brunswick’, as it now styles itself, resounds with the excited chatter of cappuccino-drinkers and pizza-guzzlers from dawn to dusk. Thanks to a major makeover with all the usual branded shops and cafés – plus central London’s largest Waitrose – it has been transformed overnight into that most hallowed of commercial phenomena, a mall.
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In short, it has become what it always wanted to be, but never dared dream of becoming. The Brunswick’s commercial success is obvious, but it is having the predictable effect on local businesses. One patisserie renowned for its coffee and home-made baguettes saw its trade cut by half the moment The Brunswick opened. Compared to the choice of Yo! Sushi, Giraffe, Carluccio’s and, of course, Starbucks just up the road, its charm seemed to evaporate like the morning dew.

One Bloomsbury coffee shop closes, another opens: so what has changed? Those in the vicinity of Bloomsbury can still purchase coffee if they want to. Their coffee-drinking rights are not affected. But to reduce coffee, or any other foodstuff, to a commodity is to miss the point. It is food
culture
, not just food, we need to be worrying about preserving, and that means everything that surrounds food, not just food itself. If we lose sight of that, we might just as well get all our
nourishment in tablet form and have done with it. Of course restaurant chains are perfectly aware of our innate need for ‘ambience’ when we eat – that, after all, is what they chiefly sell. But however cosy the feel of a Starbucks, with its comfy sofas, soft lighting, jazzy music and second-hand books – all the essential trappings of the Seattle coffee scene popularised by
Frasier
– it has about as much to do with local food culture as a Peppermint Frappuccino
^®
does with coffee.
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Starbucks outlets are stage sets, designed by marketing executives thousands of miles away to appeal to our fantasy metro-chic lifestyles. Add a mouse with big ears, and you might just as well be drinking in Disneyland.