McDonaldization: Examining the Effects of the International Fast Food Industry

In my last post, I chose to explore the blogosphere and to comment on fellow scholars who have written recent entries regarding popular culture in the international community. One of these articles included “Finding Hanoi in Paris,” a piece which described a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, to which I responded with a commentary on the ways Western countries tend to take bits and pieces of other cultures rather than experiencing them as a whole. This week, I have chosen to continue this exploration, while also examining the role that the American food industry has had in developing popular culture in other countries. My journey began as I studied the basic facets of American culture that accounted for the rapid development of the fast food. Since its inception in the 1940’s, the fast food industry has boomed. The business of providing quick, tasty meals with the utmost convenience has been a top priority for entrepreneurs like Carl Karcher and Richard and Maurice McDonald. By the 1970’s, separate fast food chains each had hundreds of restaurants open across the United States. However, domestic success was not enough to satisfy these companies – not in a constantly changing world that continued to grow more globally connected each day.
These fast food establishments, both in America and abroad, fill a specific niche in the market: they satisfy the needs of a country that is constantly in pursuit of wealth. They cannot be blamed for making the most of their opportunities. Companies like McDonald’s are simply trying to make a profit while offering a product that is useful to its consumers. However, the problem that most anti-globalizationists see with the growing fast food movement in other countries is that it is becoming a lifestyle there as it has become in the United States, rather than simply providing a once-in-a-while fix.

Such is the environment in which our modern story begins. In this age of rapidly increasing globalization, the fast food industry has capitalized on the movement of Western cultural values into other countries. The McDonald's Corporation has restaurants in over forty countries including Yugoslavia, Japan, Peru, and New Zealand, to name a few. Part of the rich strategy employed the McDonald’s Corporation is its ability to adapt its menu to suit the specific tastes and wants of each region into which the company expands. For example, in India, customers can order the Chicken Maharaja Mac (pictured to the right), which features chicken or lamb, because most Hindu people do not eat beef. Thirsty Germans can enjoy a beer with their burger and fries, while the Japanese sip on Green Tea-flavored milkshakes. McDonald’s takes into consideration the most popular food trends and the stereotypical cultural eats, finds ways to quickly reproduce their own versions, and makes them available in a convenient location at a low price.

Although personalized to match the cultural differences of each country, these restaurants feature the same facets of American fast food that make the industry so successful: self-serve facilities that offer meals at affordable prices that are ready whenever customers are ready to eat them. This type of restaurant originally catered to those that were constantly on-the-go and did not have the time to even stop their car to get food from Carl Karcher’s hot dog stand. The typical fast food consumer was also the image of the average American in the 1940’s. People worked hard to pursue the American dream of being wealthy and successful while at the same time raising healthy families. These people continue to be the target market of fast food chains today. It seems, however, that the very existence of “fast food,” not just in the form of McDonald’s or Taco Bell but also in meal replacement shakes and microwavable dinners, has made this type of living on-the-go not only possible, but commonplace. In America, the average person works approximately 45 hours a week, while some executives clock in about 70 hours. In busy areas like Los Angeles and New York City, an employee has to leave early and often in a rush to beat the morning traffic to make it to the office on time. Then after work, parents drive to pick up their kids from school, take them to soccer practice and tutoring, and countless other activities. It is no wonder that Americans spend so much money on fast food: it is easier to swing by on the way home and pick up a hot meal than to go to the grocery store, purchase all the ingredients to a recipe, then spend over an hour making the food oneself. In a world where fast food is available at every street corner, instant gratification provides a much more efficient way for Americans to try to fit everything possible into their day without having to sacrifice the luxury of time.

Along with the cultural standards of speedy, instantly gratifying meals comes the deterioration of food quality. Restaurants like Taco Bell, for instance, take the most stereotypical aspects of a dish and mass-produce them in an assembly line fashion. No special family recipe that goes into making a Chalupa Supreme. Their tacos feature ground beef that is supplied frozen in bulk from a warehouse and cheddar cheese with hot sauce that is nowhere near the authenticity of something like Tapatio or homemade salsa. Taco Bell’s food has been tested to appeal to the masses: there is nothing extreme about it – it is designed to be enjoyed by as many people as possible. McDonald’s has done no less in other countries. They takes the most popular food trends, strips them of their intricacies, and waters them down to their shells. For example, in feeding off of the traditional Chinese rice consumption habits, McDonald’s in Hong Kong (pictured below at left) sells Rice Burgers in which meat is sandwiched between two rice patties instead of burger buns. In Greece, their burgers are made of patties wrapped in pita bread. All in all, multinational fast food corporations promote mass-consumerism that is modeled after the American capitalist market.

Evidence of the cultural infection that globalizationists so avidly protest is manifesting in two very prominent aspects. First, companies in other countries are tapping into their people’s obsession with the fast food industry by opening their own chains modeled after their American counterparts. In Hong Kong, for instance, entrepreneurs opened the restaurant Little Sheep, its own version of fast food. Little Sheep, along with other recently opened chains, continues to grow and influence the way the Chinese eat their meals. The fast food industry itself is growing so much that it is suspected to be about worth about $66 million. The second piece of evidence indicating the rapidly increasing prominence of fast food in the international sphere is the existence of a strong counter-movement. Not only are anti-globalizationists against the pressured spread of American cultural influences into civilizations abroad, but there now exists a “slow food” movement that developed as a way to bring people back to the cultural roots of their food and maintain their traditions and values. Slow Food is an organization that was founded in 1989 “to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.” Today, they focus on starting movements in countries where the fast food industry has taken hold and trying to revive the cultural importance of food and revive people’s interest in what they eat. Their very existence is proof that the fast food industry’s move into the international community is a significant one.

But is it possible for the fast food industry to exist while cultural values persist? It seems that the success of the industry not only promotes a faster-paced lifestyle and the adoption of the modern in exchange for the sacrifice of tradition, but also that it is indicative of the growing trend towards a more global market in which consumers prefer an increasingly commercial and universal norm rather than one that is individualistic or regionalized. It is no longer enough to be popular in one’s own country – the true measure of success in this modern world is by becoming globally recognized and appreciated. Thus, I predict that it will become increasingly difficult for real culture to perpetuate itself as it falls victim to “McDonaldization.”