The History of Fast Food

The original fast food was the apple, but nobody has ever liked apples so it just became the punchline to a joke all the time. Some self-important ass would run in and shout "I'm in a hurry, I need some fast food!" and somebody would toss him an apple, like "I got yer fast food right here" and everyone would laugh because it's not like he was going to actually eat the apple.

Back in those days nobody did anything fast. Water even took two days to boil. And you had to schedule vacation time to get your hair cut, because the barbers only cut hair when they felt like it. So you had to sit there for hours or days while they took breaks to read the paper and kept stopping to go take a shit or whatever they were doing. The newspaper came out once a year and was filled with news the writers hoped would happen, since if they covered actual events it would be hopelessly outdated by the time it came out.

In a word, back then everybody was fuckin' lazy. People had been fuckin' lazy all throughout history, and it had worked out fine for them so they had little incentive to change. Things stayed this way until the Industrial Revolution, when manufacturers wooed workers with tall tales of the vast riches they could earn through honest, hard work. This didn't fool people at all, but when the government started putting cocaine in the water supply production increased tenfold, and being an asshole became fashionable. Little has changed in the last 100 years.

America became a hard-working, industrious nation, while the rest of the world laughed at us behind our backs and took their six-week vacations and afternoon naps. Except for the Japanese, who started working 168 hour weeks and sleeping in desk drawers because they really wanted little telephones that took pictures and played video poker.

The last vestige of the lazy, half-assed spirit of previous generations had always been the restaurant industry, whose motto was "You'll get your food when we're done jerking off in it." This all changed in 1954, when Ray Kroc and his eight-glass-a-day water habit blew into San Bernardino, where he threw a colossally violent tantrum over not being able to find any decent French fries. After biting the head off a live parrot, he loudly declared ownership of the entire restaurant he happened to be standing in and proceeded to turn it into a hamburger factory, churning out burgers and fries by the hundreds around the clock, and convincing his employees that they didn't need sleep because if they did he'd kill them, electroshock them back to life and then kill them again just to make his point. People from miles around who'd heard the commotion hung around to buy hamburgers, which was lucky for the town since the burgers were starting to pile up and would have surely created a staggering beef stink within a few days.

Kroc employed production techniques he'd learned after violently overtaking a rubber nipple factory in Bakersfield, and his unpredictable coked-up pirate persona kept staff mutiny to record-low levels, leading to a revolution in the food service industry. Over the next ten years Kroc created a chain of these burger stands across the country by barging into existing restaurants and challenging their current owners to a face-biting contest, which he usually won. He called the restaurants McDonalds, because it kept people guessing as to whether he had an even tougher Scottish business partner behind the scenes or if he was just that crazy.

Kroc eventually became known as much for his exacting quality-control standards as he was for his berserk fits of rage. He was particularly anal about his French fries, and if he could cram an entire order of fries in his mouth at once it was sent back for being too small. Eventually he grew dissatisfied with traditional French fry technology, since it left the fries tasting too much like potatoes, and the last time he'd checked, nobody was beating their grandmother to death with a shoe to get their hands on some potatoes. After extensive experimentation, he devised a process that involved cooking the fries four different times and infusing each one with enough oil to kill a cocker spaniel. Nobody ever confused Kroc's fries with a potato product ever again, and the modern French fry was born.

Over the last 40 years fast food hasn't changed much, though after Kroc's death from a projectile stroke in 1988, his employees have become noticeably more lackadaisical. Trends have come and gone, like the "bun made of meat" and the "vegetable". But the meat and potatoes of the industry have remained meat and potatoes, though in unrecognizable heart-attack forms. Over time other types of restaurants caught on to the concept, and eventually we had fast Mexican food and, regrettably, fast Italian, which was a phrase that hadn't been heard since the 1916 summer Olympics. Other foods, such as stew and bologna loaf, failed in the fast-food format, but may still catch on in the South given time.

Today the popular trend is to decry fast foodery for the epidemic of heart disease it has spawned, but what special interest groups fail to mention is that all such deaths still add up to less than half the number of people who used to die every year while waiting for their appetizers in traditional restaurants. Modern Americans simply choose to go out with a coffee-table-collapsing bang rather than a whimper.

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