A love letter to FAST FOOD
In the most iconic scene from John Lee Hancock’s 2016 movie The Founder, Dick and Mac McDonald sit across a dinner table from travelling milkshake mixer salesman Ray Kroc and explain to him the pure euphoria of the moment they perfected their ‘Speedee system’ of fast food delivery. With childlike innocence, the two brothers describe an afternoon spent on a California tennis court with employees rehearsing movements around a chalked out kitchen; moving from grill to prep station in what Dick calls ‘a symphony of efficiency.’ In a flashback, we see Dick aloft a ladder, barking instructions like a happy drill sergeant, coming down from his perch only to scrub out and redraw sections of his hypothetical kitchen. The scene, and movie as a whole, provide a damning contrast between Kroc’s descent into greedy duplicity and the McDonald brother’s smalltime aspirations to bring people delicious food in as little time as possible. It is a contrast that sits at the heart of our love affair with fast food and the McDonalds brand, to this day, a contrast exemplified by the fact that there are ‘first McDonalds’ museums at the sites of both the McDonalds brothers’ original BBQ restaurant in San Bernedino, California and Ray Kroc’s franchise, the first of many, in Des Plaines, Illinois.
Fourteen years after Kroc had bought out the McDonald brothers completely, cars christened the freshly-laid asphalt at the company’s first-ever drive-thru restaurant in Sierra Vista, Arizona. The quiet event on the 24th of January 1975, was nestled a few years between the invention of the quarter pounder and the advent of the Happy Meal. The chain had installed a sliding window through which soldiers from the nearby Fort Huachuca Army Base could order their food without having to break the decorum of staying in their vehicle when in uniform. Speaking into a Ronald McDonald-shaped intercom, customers could now order meals without leaving the comfort of their vehicle. History was made. It might have been this Sierra Vista franchise that we were approaching in our beat-up, air-conditionless 1990 Ford Aerostar the first time my brother made a peculiar noise. Upon seeing the yellow arches in the distance, long before anyone else, he began making a wordless groaning noise, signaling his desire to reach burger nirvana. In a religious context, this type of behaviour might fit into what theologian James W. Fowler called ‘primal, undifferentiated faith,’ in which a baby acquires an innate sense of the harmony of the universe through the exterior experience of being cared and catered for. A bodily response to the wordless sage of our secular age, Ronald McDonald. This was a regular experience in the year that my family lived in and traveled extensively around the US; the same year in which the first McDonald’s franchise was to open back home in Belfast.
Scrolling back through Google Maps images of 24-28 Bradbury Place, I come to a dead end in July 2008, the three-story building looking exactly as I remember it from my uni days; an ever-present, triangular lease sign and battered facade covered in graffiti and gig announcements. A fluorescent green poster for the long-defunct nightclub ‘Milk’ cryptically tells passers-by that BBQ’S ARE BACK. The opaque glass upper reaches of the building stretch a considerable distance above its neighbours (a guitar emporium and fish and chip shop) capped by an ugly half-dome. A search for ‘Bradbury Place’ on the NI screen digital film archive provides evidence of the area’s regeneration, a black and white silent film from 1964 showing a coiffured young labourer pulling a residential building apart with the bucket of a sun-trac excavator, dust swirling around his cab as chunks of brickwork and patterned wallpaper disintegrate into nothing. And yet for 12 years between 1991 and 2003, this was the home of Northern Ireland’s first McDonald’s (the UK’s 400th.) In a year in which the Troubles dragged on, claiming the lives of 97 people, Belfast’s public could, for the first time, enjoy a Big Mac. One photo shows NIO minister Richard Needham, suit and combover intact, looking sheepish as he is one of the first to try and fit a burger into his mouth, framed by a faceless, tie-clipped employee holding out a tray of golden fries. The franchise closed in 2003, two years after that rare example of an apocryphal story that turns out to be true; the death of a student who touched a live wire in a toilet hand dryer.
Like all capitalist behemoths, McDonald’s has gone to great lengths to institutionalize itself as central to the cultural lifeblood of wherever it lands, with Northern Ireland being no exception. My childhood memories of the brand revolve around sponsored football stickers (the McDonalds ‘shiny’) the golden arches emblem on summer camp paraphernalia and asking to put the change in perspex-clad boxes of coins earmarked for the Ronald McDonald children’s charity. As an adult, this has only been further embedded; the clarion call to assuage your hunger on the way home from a drunken night out; the safety blanket between a wedding service and reception meal; the stolen small-r romantic moment of grabbing a breakfast wrap with my wife after the school run; the spiders-web of wifi-hotspots used to traverse the French countryside on our summer holidays. Like any co-dependent relationship worth its salt, my love affair with McDonald’s is not likely to ever end with a clean break.
In his 1996 New Yorker essay, ‘Sifting the Ashes’, Jonathan Franzen goes to great lengths to outline the various reasons why one would be insane to smoke cigarettes, before admitting that it is a vice that he has routinely tried and failed to kick. He sums it up in the allure of the Marlboro man; the call to a rugged, sensualised, cavalier version of personal freedom. These are not the exact adjectives I would use to describe the allure of Ronald McDonald (maybe the hamburglar) and yet despite my head knowledge and best intentions, I must admit that, like the Marlboro man, the yellow clown has won; a future without a fillet-o-fish wrapper stuffed into the sidepanel of my car? I don’t see it anytime soon.
