How Did Fast Food Become an American Favorite?

And we continue here with our American stories. Pulling up your favorite drive-thru and grabbing a quick, familiar meal is a part of everyday American life. That this idea was once unheard of. So how did fast food and drive-thru restaurants come to be such appealing and significant aspects of American culture? Here’s Adam Chandler, author of Drive Through Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast Food Kingdom, with the full history and evolution of fast food in our country.

The history of fast food is a fascinating one, in part because it really is the history of America. You can look back one hundred years. That’s basically when fast food started as we know it in Wichita, which is where we have the birth of White Castle. And what White Castle does is create this experience that is very standardized. It looks the same wherever you go. And that is a large part because people were very suspicious of food and ground beef, especially at that time in American history. That infamous book The Jungle had come out fifteen years earlier and really kind of riled people up about what was in the food.

they were eating.

So they made a big show of emphasizing that this food was affordable, but also cleaned and prepared expertly in very sterile environments, because there was a real fear about the health and safety of what you’re eating. White Castle’s old slogan was “buy them by the sack,” which meant you’d buy all these small sliders for nicola pop, and you’d walk out and you’d have food for however long you wanted. Billy Ingram is the kind of marketing pie behind White Castle who wants to make the hamburger something that you would serve to your family safely, as opposed to something that was thought of as just for factory workers and people who didn’t really have a lot of regard for maybe the health and safety of what they were eating in, you know, factory commissaries.

And things like that.

So the idea of eating something that’s affordable and cheap and easy to kind of take with you is an American story in a way that’s casual and approachable.

The history of it really speaks to

this idea that we are a country that likes to keep moving, that we’re hyper-efficient, that we are constantly on the go, and, you know, that starts with small hamburgers. And eventually that becomes a food that you can take with you, and it becomes eating in your car, and cup holders in your car drivers. So the context for how we got White Castle and burgers and fast food in general was because of mobility. There are these portable little items you can take with you wherever you go. And that directly links to the rise of the car. One hundred years ago, the Model T was becoming more affordable as for assembly lines were

producing them for cheaper and cheaper.

And where fast food really takes off, where we start seeing the beginning of drive-thrus, is in Southern California.

right after World War Two.

There’s this moment where the world is coming back from war. America’s power and standing in the global order is strong, the economy is booming, and there are no more regulations on gasoline and steel. Cars are being built again. During the war, there were all these rations and you couldn’t create new cars.

And car culture takes off.

They’re building the suburbs, they’re building the highways, and so all of this kind of creates this convenience culture where people are on the road; they want to take food with them. Drive-thrus become an upshot of this whole movement to eat on the go and explore the country and be out in the world.

The rise of

fast food really happens in Southern California, where all of these big American features that we’re developing after World War Two happen everywhere, but happen in California

on steroids.

We’re talking about the space program, defense spending, the building of the highways, the creation of the suburbs, all of these big things, and so that really influences the fast food industry. And from Southern California, we get Taco Bell, we get McDonald’s, In-N-Out Burger, we get Del Taco, we get Jack in the Box. We have a lot of these major chains: Bob’s Big Boy, Durener Schnetzel is another one that’s a little bit lesser known, but these all influence all the other chains that come about after. White Castle may have started and been a pretty big success, but the real explosion of fast food happens in Southern California, and that is because of economic prosperity after the war. And what’s really interesting about this is we’re coming out of the shadow of the Great Depression at this time. You know, World War Two has just ended, but we’re not that far back from, you know, breadlines. And there wasn’t a really established culture of dining out in America among working-class people. It was mostly reserved for wealthier folks. And so what fast food really does is give American dining culture, and the way that, you know, drive-ins and drive-thrus do, an entree in an affordable, accessible way to kind of start dining out. And so what In-N-Out Burger does. This is a mom-and-pop operation started by Harry and Esther Snyder in 1948. So these are literally a newlywed, married couple; they start this hamburger chain in a working-class suburb of Los Angeles, and part of the technology that they rely on is a two-way speaker, and they’re the first ones to do it in 1948. You drive up and you give your order through the speaker, and you drive it to the window and you get the food and you pay for it. This is the most normal thing in the world to us now, but back then, nobody knew about it.

Nobody had any idea what the story was, what the history was. People were perplexed.

They had no idea what they were doing when they drove up because they’d never seen something like this before.

They’d constantly have

to explain it over and over again, and so these little innovations are a big part of the story. McDonald’s. The McDonald’s brothers move out to California from New Hampshire to work in show biz, and it doesn’t quite work out that way for them.

But what happens is they

open a barbecue stand in 1940, and this is in San Bernardino. It’s on Route 66, and along the way, they find success, but they’re still not happy. They want it to be better. They see these inefficiencies, and even though they have a successful business, they decide, “We can do something different with this.” So they close the restaurant in 1948, and they spend three months totally refitting it, totally remastering and reassembling and reformatting all the way that they were going to do business. And everyone thought they were crazy. And what they do is they streamline the whole operation. They get rid of car hops, they got rid of the cups that were in plates that were disappearing, and they set up this hyper-efficient kitchen where the food is served really quickly, and they make it cheaper for customers by getting rid of all of the extra real estate and all the extra employees and just creating this assembly

line, but for hamburgers.

And the results of that are this hyper-efficient, extremely popular hamburger chain, and everyone from all over the country comes around to see it because they’ve heard about this place that is making burgers by the dozen in a matter of minutes and just turning over so many customers so fast, and not dealing with any of the inefficiencies of the business. One of the people who comes to see this is Ray Kroc, who is a milkshake machine salesman and a lifelong industry person, and he’s shocked by what he sees. He’s stunned at the efficiency and the success of this place, and he says to himself, “I want this to be everywhere.” “This should exist everywhere across the country, dotting the landscape.” And he devotes himself to convincing them to let him open McDonald’s franchises. Eventually he buys it out from under them, and McDonald’s becomes this juggernaut that we all know today, not just in America, but around the world. It’s synonymous with American life, and it’s an impressive story of what vision, an understanding of human appetite and trends, can really take you. And it was copied ruthlessly by everyone. The founders of Burger King came by all the way to California, and they were from Florida to check it out. There were so many chains that dropped by, that San Bernardino steward saw what the McDonald’s brothers are doing and said, “We got to do this the same way.”

“We got to copy this.”

There were so many knockoffs and imitators, and it really influenced

how we eat today.

You grab the food, it’s wrapped up in paper and you can take it with you, and that was something that was revolutionary at the time.

And you’ve been listening to Adam Chandler, author of Drive Through Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast Food Kingdom. And it all started in Wichita, Kansas, with White Castle, and the founders there made, well, they made food standard and safe, affordable and cheap, most importantly, easy to take with you for a country that was always on the go and was casual. In other words, it fit the American character completely. When we come back, more of this remarkable story of how fast food and the drive-thru swept the nation and came to define the nation. Here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories and with Adam Chandler, the author of Drive Through Dreams. We just heard some of the firsts of fast food, In-N-Out Burger introducing the two-way speaker for ordering, and McDonald’s doing away with car hops, servers, and reusable utensils. The rise of success within these businesses, well, it’s astronomical, and everybody wants a piece of the pie.

Back to Adam. You didn’t need a college degree or really great connections to make it in the fast food industry when it was starting out.

Looking at the early stories of the founders, most of them didn’t graduate high school, much less go to college. They were salespeople. They were salesmen driving around the country trying to sort out a way to create a business model that would be sustainable. A lot of them served in the Armed Forces at some point and kind of learned what the meaning of regimented service and operations is.

And they just worked hard and created

a system that was very popular. So all of these really big American ideals that we cherish as hard work and that part of the American story really come to bear in fast food. And it’s not just the big recognizable names, you know, there are also these small entrepreneurs who open franchises and are able to become wealthy in a way that you would think you would need connections or advanced degrees to get. And that’s just not the story of fast food. There are so many different people, all ages, all backgrounds, all ethnicities that managed to create something special in that post-war era.

The story of

Colonel Sanders and KFC is one of the best stories there is in fast food. There’s nothing else like it. This is a guy who was born into poverty, grew up on a rural farm.

He’s basically an orphan.

He raises his own family while his mother’s working after his father dies at a very young age, and he works every job imaginable for the first six, seven decades of his life. He’s selling tires, he’s working for the Chamber of Commerce, he’s building ferries, he’s working on trains, he’s trying to become a lawyer. He does all of these different things, and he finds success in some of them, and he fails at other ones, and he just—he keeps trying, and he ends up in a small gas station that he owns in southeastern Kentucky, and basically his entire focus is trying to beat out the other gas stations for customers on the newly built roads that are happening in southeastern Kentucky, the Dixie Highway, and he ultimately succeeds by having excellent service and excellent food.

He loves it.

He creates an electric pressure cooker, patents it to make fried chicken faster than anyone has ever made fried chicken before, and it is a hit. He gets written up in national publications, and eventually he turns this idea into a franchise. He goes around and patents the recipe and sells the idea on handshake deals to small mom-and-pop shops and diners all around Appalachia and the Midwest, basically just saying, “Here’s the recipe for my chicken.” “I’ll send you the seasoning, and you give me five cents for every chicken that you cook.” It’s the most homespun thing imaginable. It sounds completely insane today, but this is how he built his empire, and eventually he started opening these standalone stores.

And, mind you, he was 66 when this happened. He was old.

That was the standard age that you were suspected to possibly pass

on at that point.

That was the life expectancy where he was basically at when he decides to turn KFC into an empire. And he could have just retired, he would have been fine doing it, but instead he goes out on the road and he just creates this brand that everyone falls in love with, and it expands around the world, and he becomes one of the most famous men in the world after living in obscurity for so long, because he’s got this big personality, he’s got this drive, and he’s got this really strong belief in his product. And, you know, the white planter suit with the tie, that’s all something that he came up with as a way to kind of brand himself. He was a Kentucky colonel, which is an honorary title in Kentucky, and he uses this to market himself as the Colonel. There are thousands of Kentucky colonels out there; there’s only one Colonel Sanders, and everybody knows who he is.

So this story of sort of perseverance

and a real belief in self and in your own invention is a huge reason why we know KFC the world around. He gets on television, he’s in movies, he becomes this character. He becomes the second most recognizable figure in the world according to one poll in the 1970s, and that’s not something that happens to a lot of people. But through sheer force of will and a lot of skill, he manages to do this, and that idea is still a cherished part of the brand’s motto: “doing things the hard way, the way that the Colonel did it.” As the industry grew, it became so popular that everyone kind of wanted a piece of it. So as the country was growing and as these small mom-and-pop shops became recognizable figures on the roadside, you had a lot of big interest kind of swoop in and take an interest in it. Jack in the Box is an example of a chain that was eventually bought out by Ralston Purina, which is a big food conglomerate, and it’s passed hands since then. KFC also was bought from Colonel Sanders by a group of investors and eventually was spun off into a lot of different owners over the years. Burger King was bought by Pillsbury.

So there was a big

moment where industries realized that this is an enormous opportunity for them. McDonald’s goes public. There are all these sort of markers that show fast food is big business. And when you go from being a small founder-led organization with a couple of restaurants or, you know, a small kind of framework in place, and you become part of a big corporate machine, sometimes you lose the focus, and a lot of these chains had that happen to them. Burger Chef grew to become the second biggest fast food chain in the country.

It’s based in the Midwest.

They patented the combo meal and the kids’ meal. These are things that are huge parts of the fast food experience. But it was eventually purchased. And what ultimately happened to it was their operation suffered, and consistency, which is a key aspect of the success of fast food restaurants, eventually undercut its success, and there aren’t any more Burger Chefs anymore, and it was the second biggest one. So there are stories of big chains that really made it, and ones that, during the shakeout that happened in the 1970s and 1980s, didn’t survive as

a result of it.

When you think about in the 1970s and 1980s, we’re talking about a time when people are working more than ever, and drive-thrus have become more of a norm in the American sort of landscape, and there’s a moment where McDonald’s kind of recognizes, “We need to create a breakfast menu because this is a huge opportunity,” and the birth of the Egg McMuffin and the birth of breakfast is something that changes basically the way that

Americans eat breakfast.

There were no breaks fists eating outside of the home. There wasn’t really a model for that. And so to create this item that, again, you can hold in one hand and eat in your car while you’re driving to work. You can put your coffee in a cup holder. These are innovations that happened because consumers demanded it. They were in a rush, and they wanted to grab food that was cheap and delicious and go on their way, or…