Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

families could finally afford to feed their kids restaurant food.”
    San Bernardino at the time was an ideal setting for all sorts of culturalexperimentation. The town was an odd melting-pot of agriculture and industry located on the periphery of the southern California boom, a place that felt out on the edge. Nicknamed “San Berdoo,” it was full of citrus groves, but sat next door to the smokestacks and steel mills of Fontana. San Bernardino had just sixty thousand inhabitants, but millions of people passed through there every year. It was the last stop on Route 66, end of the line for truckers, tourists, and migrants from the East. Its main street was jammed with drive-ins and cheap motels. The same year the McDonald brothers opened their new self-service restaurant, a group of World War II veterans in San Berdoo, alienated by the dullness of civilian life, formed a local motorcycle club, borrowing the nickname of the U.S. Army’s Eleventh Airborne Division: “Hell’s Angels.” The same town that gave the world the golden arches also gave it a biker gang that stood for a totally antithetical set of values. The Hell’s Angels flaunted their dirtiness, celebrated disorder, terrified families and small children instead of trying to sell them burgers, took drugs, sold drugs, and injected into American pop culture an anger and a darkness and a fashion statement — T-shirts and torn jeans, black leather jackets and boots, long hair, facial hair, swastikas, silver skull rings and other satanic trinkets, earrings, nose rings, body piercings, and tattoos — that would influence a long line of rebels from Marlon Brando to Marilyn Manson. The Hell’s Angels were the anti-McDonald’s, the opposite of clean and cheery. They didn’t care if you had a nice day, and yet were as deeply American in their own way as any purveyors of Speedee Service. San Bernardino in 1948 supplied the nation with a new yin and yang, new models of conformity and rebellion. “They get angry when they read about how filthy they are,” Hunter Thompson later wrote of the Hell’s Angels, “but instead of shoplifting some deodorant, they strive to become even filthier.”

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    AFTER VISITING SAN BERNARDINO and seeing the long lines at McDonald’s, Carl Karcher went home to Anaheim and decided to open his own self-service restaurant. Carl instinctively grasped that the new car culture would forever change America. He saw what was coming, and his timing was perfect. The first Carl’s Jr. restaurant opened in 1956 — the same year that America got its first shoppingmall and that Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had pushed hard for such a bill; during World War II, he’d been enormously impressed by Adolf Hitler’s Reichsautobahn, the world’s first superhighway system. The Interstate Highway Act brought autobahns to the United States and became the largest public works project in the nation’s history, building 46,000 miles of road with more than $130 billion of federal money. The new highways spurred car sales, truck sales, and the construction of new suburban homes. Carl’s first self-service restaurant was a success, and he soon opened others near California’s new freeway off-ramps. The star atop his drive-in sign became the mascot of his fast food chain. It was a smiling star in little booties, holding a burger and a shake.
    Entrepreneurs from all over the country went to San Bernardino, visited the new McDonald’s, and built imitations of the restaurant in their hometowns. “Our food was exactly the same as McDonald’s,” the founder of a rival chain later admitted. “If I had looked at McDonald’s and saw someone flipping hamburgers while he was hanging by his feet, I would have copied it.” America’s fast food chains were not launched by large corporations relying upon focus groups and market research. They were started by door-to-door salesmen, short-order cooks,