Mark Batty Publisher

Grease Goes Global

February 9, 2009

The 20th century gave rise to many earth-shaking and wide-reaching innovations—the jetliner, the computer, television, nuclear war—but few have had as much effect on the shape of city life as the fast food joint. In little more than 90 years, fast food has spread out from its US roots and become a global phenomenon; its beginnings in a highly successful 1912 automat on Broadway are hardly discernable in McDonalds’ Indian lamb-burgers and the myriad other regional variations that companies have put in place today.

Like many successful business concepts, fast food has come to be dominated by a few goliath corporations that spare no expense fashioning distinctly identifiable and predictable brands. The icons of these brands become something like signposts of contemporary life, recognized by children and sought after by travelers seeking moments of consistency in an inconsistent world, whether they are ensconced on a sleepy Iowa highway or a bustling London intersection.

The passage of fast food from metropolitan curiosity to quotidian staple was anything but smooth or assured. The staggering amount of meat sizzling on griddles daily does not simply spring into existence, and as recently as 60 years ago the idea that farmers would raise enough beef, chicken, and other McProtein products to fill the supersized bellies of modern consumers would have been laughable. Today, though, behind the plastic façades of corporate fast food joints, there lurks a sprawling infrastructure dedicated to providing beef for patties, chicken for nuggets, and potatoes for fries. Likewise, before an out of work circus performer dreamt up the act of McDonalds’ archetypal, clownish spokesman, franchises had no centrally planned and coordinated PR efforts. Now, the fine-tuning of a corporate image is something of a science, and the operations and look of each franchise is controlled down to the minutest details by a central office.

Peering at the machinations of fast food restaurants as a whole is staggering. Just tallying the amount of a single ingredient moving through the kitchens produces numbers so astronomical they are impossible to visualize. A single beef processing plant might supply McDonalds with over a hundred-million pounds annually; and that is a single plant for a single company. How much of New Hampshire could you cover, to an inch deep, with 100-million pounds of ground beef? And these plants cover just the processing part of the operation: actually raising animals requires further facilities and planning. The need to produce this much flesh can put enormous stress on the ground and pump stink into the air: you can smell the stockyards for miles along California’s Interstate 5, and the chicken houses of the Southern US produce mountains, literally, of filth, which can then seep into local water supplies.

It’s hard to believe that this sort of industrialization is the sort of thing that the mastermind behind McDonalds, Ray Kroc, had in mind when he had his epiphany and saw a string of streamlined burger shacks strung along every road in the United States. Kroc himself was something of a neat freak, and concocted a fine-tuned, well-oiled—no kidding—and spit-polished spectacle of eating that married a brand of vertical integration that the Carnegies and Fords of the world would have envied with a 50s sensibility replete with paper chefs’ hats and white uniforms.

Even if certain fast food brands have taken a bit of a beating recently, and become synonymous with the ascending wave of obesity in developed countries, the fast food joint persists as one of contemporary culture’s most recognizable icons. As the influence of major corporate brands shift, local variations crop up. In London, the most popular theme to be riffed is the chicken shack.

With names like Carolina Chicken, Texas Chicken, and Perfect Fried Chicken, these chicken shacks dot the streets of London like grease-spots cling to napkins: with a slight glossy look, ripe with smell of hot oil and fried birds, wholly embedded into the surface of things. In Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie, Siâron Hughes takes a close look at the varied looks of fried chicken joints in all their crispy fried glory.

Perusing the many storefronts Hughes documents, it’s difficult to miss the similar aesthetics: tri-colored, red, white and blue mascots stare out from awnings and menus, seemingly copied on the quick from each other. In fact, it seems most all employ the same sign maker. And there is a certain fascination with Americanness that shows itself in names of places that might be American (“Carolina,” “Texa,” “Smoky Hills”), which apparently give chicken joints a necessary trans-Atlantic link. (Oddly enough, Hughes finds more Americanness in the London establishments than the examples from the US.)

Though the places profiled in Chicken certainly make use of the infrastructure and technology that has solidified fast food as a cultural touchstone, they are completely devoid of the corporate slickness that unites the major brands. The local chicken shacks take up the framework made glossy by advertisers and refashion it in their own idioms. The results are at times jarring and at times amusing. Ad slogans like “Dunk Your Dipper!” and “Best Breast In Wales!” shout from pictures of wings and fries in various combinations. Busy menus are crowded with multiple, ill-conceived, poorly lit photographs of chicken deep fried in a combination of spices. “Spicy!” is an important thing to advertise, it seems, since it is one way the independent chicken joints differentiate themselves from their tamer, corporate rivals.

Take a look for yourself, and examine the way “Marinated Spatchcock” and “Hot and Spicy Wedges!” are and are not part of the same phenomenon as McDonalds, Arby’s, and Taco Bell.

–JCD

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