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program, "Making Fast Food," >> Ellen Pincus: Welcome to the Wisconsin Historical Museum and this History Sandwiched In
with Dr. Nicolaas Mink. This program is in conjunction with our new exhibition,
"Wisconsin Innovations: From
the Iconic to the Unexpected," and it's on the fourth floor
The Wisconsin Historical Museum gratefully acknowledges the leadership support of the Madison Community Foundation,
the Innovations Exhibit, and the
additional support HSI event is also made possible by American Family Insurance, the Evjue Foundation with
from Promega Corporation, Madison Gas & Electric Foundation
and Wisconsin Public Radio.
Today's lecture is "Making Fast Food."
We normally think of fast food beginning in the American
suburbs with the emergence of chains like McDonald's, but fast food has much deeper roots in American life and culture.
Here to explore America's early infatuation with fast food is Dr. Nicolaas Mink.
Dr. Nicolaas Mink is an interdisciplinary scholar of food, food ways and food systems.
He is an award winning author,
and he is published widely on food, culture and the
He has two books forthcoming, "Fast food: A History," and "Salmon: A Global History." He currently teaches in the
Environmental Studies Department
Conservation Society Salmon Education and Outreach programs. Illinois. In the summer, he runs the Sitka
[APPLAUSE] So, without further ado, please welcome Dr. Nicolaas Mink.
>> Nicolaas Mink: Is this on? Okay, great. Thanks, everybody, for coming.
I want to thank the Historical
Society. They, in fact, made much of this
When I was an undergraduate and a graduate student here I spent most of 12 years from '98 to work possible.
Department both on my BA and on my PhD where I worked with John Sharpless, some of you guys may 2know him, and Bill Cronon,
some of you guys may know him.
I'm going to spend about the next half hour talking a little bit about the development of
fast food in this country.
How it happened, why it happened and what I think it means.
who are interested in the food Especially to people like me
system. That's what I do at Knox College, I teach food systems,
I teach food policy, especially from an environmental angle.
I guess is the big question that my research asks. How is it that our food choices affect the nature around us
But before we begin, and my talk today will be about fast food,
largely how we got to McDonald's, I want to show you
a couple pictures. You may recognize them.
What do you guys think? What are some of the things that come to mind when you see
Heart attack, okay. [LAUGHTER] a photograph like this?
Fantastic fries. >> Easy.
Cheap.
You guys didn't say what I >> Cheap. Salt. Easy.
wanted you to say. [LAUGHTER]
because most people don't. Which is okay,
I wanted you to see this burger and this fries here as a radical and revolutionary food invention
of the 1950s. And I know that's very hard to
we think banal or commonplace, think of today. When we see this type of food
or normal or heart attack, but in the 1950s when this type of food became widespread, and
particularly in the 1960s when
it became mainstream, it was a radical and revolutionary way of
revolutionary mode of food eating and it was a radical and
production. And not just, of course, the hamburger and the French fries
but what I'm talking about from industry standards is what's
called the limited set menu. The limited set menu, you guys
should know that because you
live in a world of limited set menus.
10, 11 items, all prepared to order and served year-round at a restaurant. And what I mean by that is 9,
was revolutionary. That, in the 1950s and 1960s,
competitors of McDonald's. You guys, many of you may remember Burger Chef. At one time one of the great
A series of bad business decisions ended their career in the early 1980s.
Although, Hardee's has the
Hardee's. rights tHere's Hardee's.burgers and is bringing back the Triple Chef now at some selected
Henry's, which at one time was a great competitor of McDonald's
in the 1960s. These all are reflecting, these 1950 advertisements, of the limited set menu.
9, 10, 11 items served
year-round. And it was a tremendous, and this is the Whopper, they
expanded to 12 items with Burger
King, and they were the first to introduce a fish sandwich in
This is the opening ad for the 1963.
McDonald's, Ray Kroc's first McDonald's in Des Plaines.
encourage you to think about is not only how radical and But what I really want to
been accepted in the 1920s, 1930s. revolutionary this is but how this type of food would not have
It would not have been accepted, and in fact it wouldn't have
been possible, I would argue. The cultural ideas were not there about this type of eating,
the agricultural system necessary to produce potatoes, and the agricultural production,
meat, buns, Coca-Cola, milk shakes was not established
yet in the 1920s and 1930s. And in fact, McDonald's, in its early years, had a heck of a
and potatoes. And so this was a big, big deal in some ways from a cultural time supplying itself with meat
institutional standpoint and standpoint, from an
from a food standpoint. This 9 item, 10 item limited set menu.
But when I first began this research, which is now six years
of people are. ago more or less, I was kind of under the impression that a lot
That fast food as we know it today really began in the 1950s and 1960s through this sort of
nexus of suburbanization. New modes of family life. The automobile. And this is the story that Eric
Schlosser's Fast Food Nation
tells. And if you haven't read Eric
course it still sometimes cracks Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, of
the, if there's ever a Dateline story about fast food, Fast Food Nation will crack the top 10 on
an Amazon best seller list 10 years after its publication.
was how I originally envisioned my dissertation research going, which this book is based off of, But I was told this story and it
about a year of research was and what I soon discovered after
that the cultural battles, the institutional capacity, the food
decided by the time we get to what the birth of fast food actually is analyzed in a book ways itself, all of that was
And so I began to start asking like Schlosser.
myself, what if this is actually the end of the story? What if where we begin our
stories about fast food in
America, or as the restaurant industry would say the quick service sector of the restaurant
industry, what if it's actually not the beginning but what if it
the Des Plaines McDonald's in 1955 that the important debates that people had about food and What if by the time we get to
10 item, 11 item set menu, what if those had already been decided? this type of food way, 9 item,
doing this now for a long time And I've become convinced after
and reading a lot of articles on this industry that all the
before the beginning of the story. really cool stuff happened
out as a historian, and even And I think oftentimes that's one of the things that you find
though I teach in the environmental studies department I'm an historian, that
oftentimes you've been told that
this is the beginning of the story but in many ways some of
rich textured history happens before our history sometimes the cooler stuff, the really
began. And for me, as I began to
formulate this book and formulate this idea, the birth
of fast food and a modern fast food industry, or what the
restaurant industry calls the quick service restaurant
industry, actually began with an event you've all heard of.
You've all heard, if you like history you all know this event,
but you probably haven't thought of it in this way.
The birth of the modern quick service restaurant industry or
modern fast food begins at prohibition.
Begins in 1919 and 1920.
And prohibition is something, of course, that we only think about
alcohol and the Volstead Act and as far as the prohibition of
that story that we tell over and over again in our undergraduate history classes and it's fun
because students like to debate these types of things because it's still relevant to them, but
outside of the home, prohibition for American food and eating
is an important way post because it ends a couple important food stories and it also begins a
couple important food stories,
And what I mean by that is that for the vast majority of working modern quick service restaurant industry.
pushing it, but for the vast and middle class Americans, and maybe the middle class is
majority of working class Americans if you were to eat outside the home in 1915, 1913,
1910, 1890, you usually did so
called free lunch. in a way that was participating in this great tradition that we used to have in this country
And if you've never heard of free lunch all free lunch was was a tradition in which when
you went into a saloon or you went into a bar, you went into a
tavern in Wisconsin, you ordered your beer and with that beer
came your food. With that beer came your
lot of times they'd have salted meats or cheeses or breads or in sandwiches. With that whiskey came your, a
Boston, particularly, beans. And this was a widespread
phenomenon, especially in urban America, particularly in the
Midwest on the east coast and in the Rocky Mountain states in
which if you were a working class person, one of the key
consumers of the fast food industry by the 1940s, if you
were a working class person,
you would take your lunch in a saloon. You would eat alongside of a
bar.
You would come in with your friends. Most of the time they were
working in your factory alongside of you. They were working in your workplace in some sort of
fashion.
restaurants and for most diners, And these free lunches were extravagant events. It wasn't just, for most
it wasn't just a cracker. It wasn't just a small serving of things.
But particularly in Chicago and Milwaukee and Boston you would
have tremendous spreads. And these free lunches, quite
literally, fed the working class
in many of these urban environments. And in fact, you hear reformers,
the great progressive reformers of the late 1890s, particularly the 1900s, complain about these free lunches.
That they were facilitating this
dependence on the saloon for the working class.
mentioned that one lunch at a Chicago saloon, which seems to But one Chicago journalist
be sort of typical from what I've been able to read,
consisted of 100 to 200 pounds
of meat, one and a half to two bushels of potatoes, 50 loaves
45 dozen eggs on some days, 10 dozen ears of sweet corn and $1.50 to $2 worth of breadof vegetables. beans,
Actually not that different from
or by the distillers. So Pabst Blue Ribbon, this is the idea of the tied house, Pabst Blue Ribbon would get this
food for these saloons and they would deliver it every day. Well, prohibition suddenly
owners out of work and put turned about 300,000 saloon
now become consumers of food or milpurchasers of food. of And one of the things that we nedon't think about from anld
economic standpoint, from an
industry standpoint, is actually that about 300,000 saloon owners, that's how many they
said there were, about 100,000
of them opened up in the next year as restaurants. A tremendous economic
reorganization of a significant part of the American economy. A third of these saloons don't
to reopen, because that's kind just close their doors and never
of the story that I had been told, that's the story that I always thought of.
A third of them reopened their
class and increasingly to the middle class Americans that use pathese spaces as places toat cater to consume food.nd middle
And with prohibition comes a
tremendous professionalization project of all of these former
restaurateurs, and saloon owners and now new
restaurateurs, particularly ones that aimed for the middle classes and the middle class
appetite, it really marks the beginning of a great
professionalization project of the quick service restaurant
industry. You guys have heard of the NRA? The important NRA which is the
We should all know about that important NRA now because of National Restaurant Association.
Herman Cain. That's why he is so good.
He knows his culture better than
anybody. He's in charge of one of the
was in charge of a very powerful most powerful, for 10 years he
political lobby. The National Restaurant Association forms immediately
after the end of prohibition to help professionalize this new industry. Most of your state and local
restaurant associations happen
within a year or two of prohibition. And this professionalization
project really stakes its identity and stakes this
tell them to you right now and emerging industry's identity on three key elements which I'll
you'll say, well, this actually, I don't know any of these, which
industry looking in the future is funny because it's an
and, ironically, they turn out to be totally wrong.
identity on three ideas and concepts. The first is the cafeteria. The second is an all-women's
workforce.
And the third is a professionalized workforce of skilled labor.
Now doesn't that sound very different than the modern quick service restaurant industry.
workforce and a significant portion of that workforce being skilled labor often trained in The cafeteria, all-women
The future of food. The future of food would be, in the quick service restaurant universities like Wisconsin.
women. industry, would be created by
areas, especially in the Midwest And women had always been a significant part of the workforce of kitchens in urban
and on the east coast. But there's a significant increase in women's presence in
kitchens from about the 19-aughts to the 1930s you see
a growth of about a third of the labor force of American
kitchens, which are primarily feeding the middle and working
increase in the number of women in these kitchens, and not only was women's labor and women's bodies and women's knowledge
important but they were there for a reason because in this
out this claim to a type of domestic cuisine. proIf you see old restaurantthe iadvertisements in the 1920s,
1930s, 1940s, the key cultural
marker is home-cooked. Home-cooked food. Even in what would be considered
these early quick service restaurant models.
The second thing that they stake their professional identity on
is a growth in skilled labor, particularly skilled women's
labor. And that would come from the
growing home economics
departments of universities like the University of Wisconsin,
like Kansas State, like Iowa like the University of Indiana,
State. All of these home economics departments, too often we've
viewed home economics as kind of
through this lens of the 1950s and the 1960s which was this
reinforce gender hierarchies and institution which sought to
reinforce a women's place in the home. But actually if you look at it
in the 19-teens and the 1920s there was a lot of possibility
departments. for women in the workforce seen through home economics
And in fact, home economics departments in the 1920s all develop a curriculum called
institutional management or institutional administration. And what institutional
administration, among other things that that type of management and institutional
training prepared women for, was work in the restaurant industry.
Particularly restaurants that catered to the middle class and working classes.
were still male space. The elite restaurants, those
Those were still, the Palmer House in Chicago, that was still
But for working class restaurants, for middle class restaurants, this is where women manly territory.
economics departments, trained would come in, trained in home
class people who at one time in understandings of food and nutrition and diet and create home-like cuisine for working
took all their meals in saloons. At one time took all their meals
You guys have probably all heard in saloons.
The first great restaurant of Howard Johnson's, probably with Fred Harvey which does the same thing.
on the road. chain, particularly the quick service restaurant chain or one aimed toward the middle classes
By the 1960s there's about 600 Howard Johnson's. They only had, until the 1940s,
they only employed women in their kitchens. By the 1970s it would have been hard to find a woman in a Howard
Johnson's kitchen.
women. But in the 1920s and 1930s they only hired women, and most of the time they hired skilled
Women who had degrees from the University of Wisconsin.
Indiana University, Kansas Women who had degrees from
State, University of Minnesota because they wanted to create a new sense and a new identity
around this emerging industry of
feeding the working and middle classes.
early fast food being dominated by skilled women with home It's remarkable to think about
economics degrees from the University of Wisconsin.
And then the third key part of
this professionalization project was the great innovation that begins in southern California in
the 19-aughts, the 19-teens, but
That's the cafeteria. And the cafeteria is more than rapid pace in the 1920s and that's the cafeteria.
just a place in which you go through a line as a consumer and
you're fed quickly at noon or 1:00 or 5:00 or 6:00, but more
importantly, for these early entrepreneurs in the restaurant
industry, it was a particular type of food service and food preparation that this cafeteria innovated.
And that type of service
is called steam table, or steam table, table d'hote. Can you say that one time
so you remember it? Steam table, table d'hote.
All steam table, table d'hote
was, or table d'hote, was the blending of sort of new technologies with an older way
table d'hote would be essentially taking a bunch of food, preparing it, and it was of serving food and steam table
preparing it all ahead of time. You cook your beef stew, your veal cutlets, your spaghetti and usually complicated dishes,
rush happens, big batches, and meat sauce an hour before the
then when its time to serve people, you take those big batches and you put them on a
steam table, this is this great 19-teens invention, and you can serve people quickly. And it lent itself to a
particular type of food.
itself to a more complicated If you cook food early, an hour before it's served or two hours before it's served, it lent
type of food. It lent itself to stews. It lent itself to pies.
It lent itself to roasts. Because in the kitchen you have all this food waiting for people
12:00 you begin moving all that cooked food from the kitchen to the steam table to the consumer. to come in and at 11:00, 11:30,
emulates domestic cuisine. And in interesting ways that
more famous restaurants or It emulates domestic cuisine. My favorite example that I love to give to people is one of the
cafeterias in St. Paul, Minnesota, called Richards Treat.
If you're from St. Paul,
or you have relatives from the Twin Cities who are older because it closed in '57,
a very important closing date,
so 50 years ago. From 1924 to 1957 is when it was open.
It was one of the great restaurants of St. Paul and the Twin Cities.
best restaurants in America. It was considered one of the
It was begun by a couple of home economics professors, Nola Richards and Lenore Treat.
They have endowed many
scholarships at Millikin University. In fact, their athletic center
is named the Richards Treat Athletic center.
But both of them were trained in home economics.
Both of them actually got PhDs
in home economics. Treat started the institutional management programs at Indiana.
She started the institutional management program at Kansas
State, and then she moved to University of Minnesota where
they began the institutional
management program there. And this is the early 1920s, they begin to start talking
about, well, we're training all these women for restaurant work to work in cafeterias, to work
and we want to have a little in these quick service spaces
training laboratory. And so they open up a cafeteria in St. Paul, Minnesota,
where they hire only trained
women where most of them are, in fact, University of Minnesota graduates, even the cooks.
And it becomes this immensely popular restaurant in the 1920s,
Hines' famous guide books? 1930s, 1940s. Have you guys heard of Duncan
The early Jane and Michael Stern in some ways mimic the early
Duncan Hines praises Richards Treat cafeteria for its great food, for its great service, for Duncan Hines guide books.
home-like service, for its its home-like food, for its
domestic cuisine. And there are actually important reasons for this.
That you have this tie between
women and quick service food and the development of this professional identity in what
would be soon called fast food, and that's largely because
and technologies in the institutional kitchen were very technologmuch the same.chen and technologies in the home kitchen
They all used pans. There wasn't an elaborate cold They all used pots.
refrigeration even in the finest chain set up yet. So they didn't have very good
restaurants in the 1920s and 1930s.
one key reason. And that key reason is the main similarity between domestic cuisine and early quick service
restaurant cuisine in the 1920s,
and that was they were based on a system of leftovers. Home food used to all be based
on a system of leftovers. Institutional food used to be based on a system of leftovers, and that was all because when
you cook in a steam table table d'hote food system you have a bunch of leftovers, and because you have a bunch of leftovers,
culinary knowledge is at a
premium. That's why our mothers and
such good cooks because they grandmothers were considered
could take leftovers and recreate them into a new type of
And that's the basis of home food.
cooking for, I would say, most of the 20th century, and that's the basis for restaurant cooking
through at least the 1930s into the 1940s is how well can you cycle that food through that
Because when you look at the system.
restaurant industry you've got five cents on the dollar, three cents on the dollar, two cents
on the dollar is what you're
And the difference between using making. In a great restaurant system it will be 10 cents on the dollar.
restaurant closing down. leftovers wisely and not is the difference between your restaurant thriving and your
And when you have leftovers and when leftovers are the sovereign of the restaurant system of food
production, you need skilled
labor. You need people who know how to manipulate food, how to turn
food into something different because three-quarters of the foods on most restaurant menus
that are leftover, that are being cycled through the system. in the 1920s and 1930s are foods
The turkey the next day becomes the turkey tetrazzini. The chicken becomes the chicken pie.
The steak becomes the meatloaf until it's all gone, and that's
how you make your money.
And it's that type of food system that really requires professional labor, that really
requires skilled labor. And that's the sovereign of the quick service food system until the 1930s, through the 1930s.
And even as this system develops, what's so ironic is that it's going to erode from underneath for reasons that a
lot of people didn't expect.
And it's going to erode because of, I would argue, the mechanization of the kitchen.
And particularly, the development of a new arsenal of kitchen technologies that is
separation between an institutional kitchen and a domestic kitchen. And those are the three ones
that are, by the 1950s, every major kitchen has in a quick
what I call the holy trinity of restaurant food production. seAnd that's the high powerednd freezer, the griddle, the high
powered griddle, and then my
favorite, you guys know what that is?
There's no more important invention in the American food The deep fryer.
Comes from England where its system in the 20th century than the deep fryer.
used to make fish and chips. It's originally a coastal technology because it was made
for cooking fish and chips. You'll see all the early deep fryer manufacturers are all on the coast in the 19-teens
and 1920s.
By the 1940s the deep fryer is in every single institutional kitchen.
And it is best exploited by the fast food sector. By the quick service restaurant industry.
It used to be really hard to
deep fry food. You have to have a couple different pots of oil going.
Always cleaning it. Institutional deep fryer is self-cleaning.
incredibly easy to use. It's fast, efficient. It's powerful. It doesn't burn the oil and it's
Like the griddle, like the It's quick.
freezer. All technologies that are foreign to any kitchen in the
1920s become foreign to home
restaurant kitchens, by the kitchens i1930s.1950s yet dominate restaurant kitchens, particularly quick service
considerable outlay for equipment than the average The average restaurant of today involves a much more
From a cafeteria owner in Cleveland. eating place of even 10 years ago.
And what this new holy trinity of restaurant food production
does is it remakes the paths
through which food travels in an institutional kitchen.
based upon recycling leftovers, not much of a cold chain Instead of having a path that is
have high powered freezers. So it's all about getting the food into the system and then quick seyou keep it hot.s don't
And if you keep it hot, that's
how you keep it from spoiling. Because heat does the same thing
We've become lovers of cold but you can keep food from spoiling in many different ways, and one of which of heat, one of which
is salt, one of which is smoke. And these new technologies
restaurant kitchen. And it produces a whole new type reshape the way and rewrite the way that food travels through a
of food system because instead of needing to rely on skilled
labor based on leftovers, based on recycling this food through
the food system, you now can create a system in which you
base your food on keeping things
cold and using these really high powered technologies to cook
consumers. things immediately for
That's a really radical thing compared to the 1920s. And, of course, the great
reflection of this holy trinity are hamburgers and French fries.
They're all based upon this new technology. All technologies are in place by system.
It's dangerous food to Wimpy, right? the 1930s.
He's slovenly. He's overweight.
He doesn't have a protestant
work ethic. There are people that were frightened by this, especially
the ones that adopted this model
of professionalization through women and domestic cooking and
Because in this new model you no home cooking in cafeterias.
longer are doing steam table table d'hote but you're now doing what's called a la carte,
freezer-based a la carte
cooking, cooking to order. It's what McDonald's does.
But the last, of course, real change has to come from how you market it and how you sell it because this food is dangerous
if its identity is based on the home or it's based on domestic
cuisine. But it's not so dangerous when
you start creating ideas around this food and a culture around
this food that separates it from domestic food.
You guys ever thought of the
term going out to eat? Eating out? Of course, the last thing you're
not saying is eating outside the
home. You're creating a mental separation between domestic
cuisine, the foods of our grandmothers, and this. And once you've made that cultural jump, you can do
whatever you want if you're an
institutional food provider, if you're the quick service restaurant industry.
And, of course, one of the
things that you can do, right? Not a woman in sight. Not a woman in sight.
Compare that to Richards Treat. This is McDonald's 1960s, 1950s.
It was a revolution. And it's a story that hasn't
often been told in that type of way.
And I'm thankful for the And I'm really glad you guys all came.
Historical Society having me. So do we have any few questions, time for some questions?
[APPLAUSE]