Wisconsin Public Television University Place History Sandwiched In  Nicolaas Mink Making Fast Food  October 18, 2011 UP638   cc >> Ellen Pincus: Welcome to the Wisconsin Historical Museum and this History Sandwiched In program, "Making Fast Food," 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 here at the museum. The Wisconsin Historical Museum gratefully acknowledges the leadership support of the Madison Community Foundation, the Innovations Exhibit, and the HSI event is also made possible by American Family Insurance, the Evjue Foundation with additional support 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 environment. He has two books forthcoming, "Fast food: A History," and "Salmon: A Global History." He currently teaches in the Environmental Studies Department of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. In the summer, he runs the Sitka Conservation Society Salmon Education and Outreach programs. So, without further ado, please welcome Dr. Nicolaas Mink. 

[APPLAUSE] >> 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 work possible. When I was an undergraduate and a graduate student here I spent most of 12 years from '98 to 2010 working in the History Department both on my BA and on my PhD where I worked with John Sharpless, some of you guys may know 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. Especially to people like me who are interested in the food system. That's what I do at Knox College, I teach food systems, I teach food policy, especially from an environmental angle. How is it that our food choices affect the nature around us I guess is the big question that my research asks. 

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 a photograph like this? Heart attack, okay. [LAUGHTER] Fantastic fries. >> Easy. >> Cheap. >> Cheap. Salt. Easy. You guys didn't say what I wanted you to say. 

[LAUGHTER] Which is okay, because most people don't. 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 think of today. When we see this type of food we think banal or commonplace, 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 eating and it was a radical and revolutionary mode of food 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. And what I mean by that is 9, 10, 11 items, all prepared to order and served year-round at a restaurant. That, in the 1950s and 1960s, was revolutionary. You guys, many of you may remember Burger Chef. At one time one of the great competitors of McDonald's. 

A series of bad business decisions ended their career in the early 1980s. Although, Hardee's has the rights to Burger Chef's burgers and is bringing back the Triple Chef now at some selected Hardee's. Here's Hardee's. 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 1963. This is the opening ad for the McDonald's, Ray Kroc's first McDonald's in Des Plaines. But what I really want to encourage you to think about is not only how radical and revolutionary this is but how this type of food would not have been accepted in the 1920s, 1930s. 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, and the agricultural production, the agricultural system necessary to produce potatoes, 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 time supplying itself with meat and potatoes. And so this was a big, big deal in some ways from a cultural standpoint, from an institutional standpoint and from a food standpoint. This 9 item, 10 item limited set menu. But when I first began this research, which is now six years ago more or less, I was kind of under the impression that a lot of people are. 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 Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, of course it still sometimes cracks 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. 

It's actually pretty amazing. But I was told this story and it was how I originally envisioned my dissertation research going, which this book is based off of, and what I soon discovered after about a year of research was that the cultural battles, the institutional capacity, the food ways itself, all of that was decided by the time we get to what the birth of fast food actually is analyzed in a book like Schlosser. And so I began to start asking 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 was actually the end? What if by the time we get to the Des Plaines McDonald's in 1955 that the important debates that people had about food and this type of food way, 9 item, 10 item, 11 item set menu, what if those had already been decided? And I've become convinced after doing this now for a long time and reading a lot of articles on this industry that all the really cool stuff happened before the beginning of the story. And I think oftentimes that's one of the things that you find out as a historian, and even 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 the cooler stuff, the really rich textured history happens before our history sometimes 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 as far as the prohibition of alcohol and the Volstead Act and 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 for American food and eating outside of the home, prohibition is an important way post because it ends a couple important food stories and it also begins a couple important food stories, particularly the birth of the modern quick service restaurant industry. And what I mean by that is that for the vast majority of working and middle class Americans, and maybe the middle class is pushing it, but for the vast majority of working class Americans if you were to eat outside the home in 1915, 1913, 1910, 1890, you usually did so in a way that was participating in this great tradition that we used to have in this country called free lunch. 

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 sandwiches. With that whiskey came your, a lot of times they'd have salted meats or cheeses or breads or in 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. And these free lunches were extravagant events. It wasn't just, for most restaurants and for most diners, 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. But one Chicago journalist mentioned that one lunch at a Chicago saloon, which seems to 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 of bread, 35 pounds of beans, 45 dozen eggs on some days, 10 dozen ears of sweet corn and $1.50 to $2 worth of vegetables. Actually not that different from a fast food supply chain. A lot of times these were supplied actually by the brewers 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 turned about 300,000 saloon owners out of work and put millions upon millions of American working class into a new world in which they would now become consumers of food or purchasers of food. 

And one of the things that we don't think about from an 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 just close their doors and never to reopen, because that's kind of the story that I had been told, that's the story that I always thought of. A third of them reopened their doors as restaurants, particularly restaurants that cater to the working and middle class and increasingly to the middle class Americans that use these spaces as places to consume food. And with prohibition comes a tremendous professionalization project of all of these former saloon owners and now new restaurateurs, and 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 National Restaurant Association. We should all know about that important NRA now because of Herman Cain. That's why he is so good. He knows his culture better than anybody. He's in charge of one of the most powerful, for 10 years he was in charge of a very powerful 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 emerging industry's identity on three key elements which I'll tell them to you right now and you'll say, well, this actually, I don't know any of these, which is funny because it's an industry looking in the future and, ironically, they turn out to be totally wrong. It stakes its professional 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. The cafeteria, all-women workforce and a significant portion of that workforce being skilled labor often trained in universities like Wisconsin. The future of food. 

The future of food would be, in the quick service restaurant industry, would be created by women. And women had always been a significant part of the workforce of kitchens in urban areas, especially in the Midwest 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 classes, to two-thirds. So you get a significant 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 professionalization project the industry leaders were staking out this claim to a type of domestic cuisine. If you see old restaurant advertisements 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 the University of Indiana, like Kansas State, like Iowa 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 institution which sought to reinforce gender hierarchies and 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 for women in the workforce seen through home economics departments. And in fact, home economics departments in the 1920s all develop a curriculum called institutional management or institutional administration. And what institutional management and institutional administration, among other things that that type of training prepared women for, was work in the restaurant industry. Particularly restaurants that catered to the middle class and working classes. The elite restaurants, those were still male space. Those were still, the Palmer House in Chicago, that was still manly territory. But for working class restaurants, for middle class restaurants, this is where women would come in, trained in home economics departments, trained in understandings of food and nutrition and diet and create home-like cuisine for working class people who at one time took all their meals in saloons. At one time took all their meals in saloons. You guys have probably all heard of Howard Johnson's, probably with Fred Harvey which does the same thing. The first great restaurant chain, particularly the quick service restaurant chain or one aimed toward the middle classes on the road. 

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. But in the 1920s and 1930s they only hired women, and most of the time they hired skilled women. Women who had degrees from the University of Wisconsin. Women who had degrees from Indiana University, Kansas 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. It's remarkable to think about early fast food being dominated by skilled women with home 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 moves across the country at a rapid pace in the 1920s and that's the cafeteria. That's the cafeteria. And the cafeteria is more than 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, table d'hote, or steam table, table d'hote. Can you say that one time so you remember it? Steam table, table d'hote. 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 of serving food and steam table table d'hote would be essentially taking a bunch of food, preparing it, and it was usually complicated dishes, preparing it all ahead of time. You cook your beef stew, your veal cutlets, your spaghetti and meat sauce an hour before the rush happens, big batches, and 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. If you cook food early, an hour before it's served or two hours before it's served, it lent itself to a more complicated 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 to come in and at 11:00, 11:30, 12:00 you begin moving all that cooked food from the kitchen to the steam table to the consumer. And in interesting ways that emulates domestic cuisine. It emulates domestic cuisine. My favorite example that I love to give to people is one of the more famous restaurants or 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. It was considered one of the best restaurants in America. 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 in these quick service spaces and we want to have a little 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, 1930s, 1940s. Have you guys heard of Duncan Hines' famous guide books? The early Jane and Michael Stern in some ways mimic the early Duncan Hines guide books. Duncan Hines praises Richards Treat cafeteria for its great food, for its great service, for its home-like food, for its home-like service, 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 technologies in the kitchen and technologies in the home kitchen and technologies in the institutional kitchen were very much the same. They all used pots. They all used pans. There wasn't an elaborate cold chain set up yet. So they didn't have very good refrigeration even in the finest restaurants in the 1920s and 1930s. And they were also the same for 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 grandmothers were considered such good cooks because they could take leftovers and recreate them into a new type of food. And that's the basis of home 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 system. Because when you look at the restaurant industry you've got five cents on the dollar, three cents on the dollar, two cents on the dollar is what you're making. In a great restaurant system it will be 10 cents on the dollar. And the difference between using leftovers wisely and not is the difference between your restaurant thriving and your restaurant closing down. 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 in the 1920s and 1930s are foods that are leftover, that are being cycled through the system. The chicken becomes the chicken pie. The turkey the next day becomes the turkey tetrazzini. 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 going to allow an increasing 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 service restaurant industry and almost no home cooks have are what I call the holy trinity of restaurant food production. And that's the high powered freezer, the griddle, the high powered griddle, and then my favorite, you guys know what that is? The deep fryer. There's no more important invention in the American food system in the 20th century than the deep fryer. Comes from England where its 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. It doesn't burn the oil and it's incredibly easy to use. It's fast, efficient. 

It's powerful. It's quick. Like the griddle, like the freezer. All technologies that are foreign to any kitchen in the 1920s become foreign to home kitchens in the 1950s yet dominate restaurant kitchens, particularly quick service restaurant kitchens, by the 1930s. The average restaurant of today involves a much more considerable outlay for equipment than the average eating place of even 10 years ago. From a cafeteria owner in Cleveland. And what this new holy trinity of restaurant food production does is it remakes the paths through which food travels in an institutional kitchen. Instead of having a path that is based upon recycling leftovers, not much of a cold chain involved, most restaurants, quick service restaurants don't have high powered freezers. So it's all about getting the food into the system and then you keep it hot. And if you keep it hot, that's how you keep it from spoiling. 

Because heat does the same thing as cold. 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 reshape the way and rewrite the way that food travels through a restaurant kitchen. And it produces a whole new type 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 things immediately for consumers. 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 birthed by this new system. They're all based upon this new technology. All technologies are in place by the 1930s. It's dangerous food to Wimpy, right? 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 home cooking in cafeterias. Because in this new model you no 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. It's what Burger King 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 really glad you guys all came. And I'm thankful for the Historical Society having me. So do we have any few questions, time for some questions? [APPLAUSE]