The question is hardly a new one. In December 1996, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman famously posited a “Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention,” which stated that no two countries hosting a McDonald’s had ever gone to war with each other. In those days, at the pinnacle of the contemporary global era, fast food was a near-perfect metaphor for the advance of capitalism around the world if only because it so clearly illustrated the essentially American nature of globalization. As Bill Clinton described the world to come during his inaugural January 1997 inaugural address—the starting pistol of the era, if there ever was one—“ports and airports, farms and factories will thrive with trade and innovation and ideas, and the world’s greatest democracy will lead a whole world of democracies.” Globalization was a phenomenon sustained by American-based, American-dominated rule-making groups like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. Any nation that wished to be part of the emergent world order had to adopt not just its rules into its legal system, but incorporate the cultural values which undergirded them as well.
Yum! Brands (parent company of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Huts) is a case in point. At the time of its spin-off from PepsiCo in 1997, 80 percent of the company’s profits came from the United States, with most of the remaining 20 percent coming from other wealthy nations like Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Fifteen years later, those numbers had nearly reversed, with 70 percent of profits coming from overseas, and most of those from so-called “emerging markets.” Still-poor but fast-growing regions in Africa and Southeast Asia—the leading edge of globalization’s advance—now serve as hubs for both the sale of fast food and the production of its raw materials, while more affluent countries like China and India are treated as reliable mainstays and the United States is yesterday’s market. McDonald’s, and now even Burger King, Dairy Queen, and Dunkin’ (formerly Dunkin’ Donuts) are following a similar pattern.
For all these companies, the essential mission of selling meat cheaply and quickly, in roughly identical forms and in roughly identical settings, remains the same, but it’s one advanced by a network of local franchise partners and suppliers who have little to do with the United States. Even as patrons can recognize something essentially American in the biggest fast food chains, there is less reason than ever to call fast food the culinary front of American expansionism. Just as global capitalism is no longer an exclusively American project, fast food is no longer one, either.
Perhaps then we shouldn’t abandon the fast food metaphor of global capitalism, but revisit it. Even as a regional American phenomenon, fast food represented the last link in a chain connecting every stage of economic development, from agriculture to industry to services. As a global phenomenon, that chain connects soy fields in Brazil to poultry farms, slaughterhouses, and customers a world away. (...)
In 1987, as China emerged from a long period of isolation, KFC opened its then-largest outlet in the world in Beijing, one block from Tiananmen Square. McDonald’s followed in 1990 with a restaurant in Shenzhen before opening its own largest-in-the-world outlet in Beijing two years later. Even a few years after the Golden Arches arrived in the Chinese capital, anthropologist Yunxiang Yan observed, many Chinese considered a visit to McDonald’s a special occasion worth saving for in advance. Lower-income patrons often invited their families for the occasion and splurged on a cab to pick them up to create a more memorable experience. Tourists from distant provinces considered McDonald’s one of the essential stops on the capital circuit, and one which they were quick to boast of when they returned home. Often, Yan observed, these patrons would take their used clam shell containers and drink cups home with them as souvenirs.
To people who grew up in the United States or Europe, the idea that anyone (but adults, especially) could be so enamored with fast food might be surprising. The high cost of a fast food meal compared to the standard streetside food options in China partly explains the excitement. In the mid-1990s, a typical meal for a family of three cost one-sixth the average Chinese worker’s monthly wage, making it a luxury for most patrons. But as in Hong Kong, the experience of being in a fast food restaurant was always a bigger draw than the food itself, even for those who could afford to go multiple times per week. Chinese news during this time typically associated fast food’s success with its “atmosphere of equality and democracy,” Yan noted. Servers at McDonald’s and KFC were polite by training, and a patron ordered from the counter, facing a uniformed official as an equal. No matter who they were, patrons could expect to be treated with dignity and respect. Many went merely to experience “a moment of equality,” Yan wrote in Golden Arches East. (...)
That “moment of equality” came with a real sense of possibility—and power. In the way that a Chinese restaurant is many middle class Americans’ first encounter with a foreign culture, for Chinese people in the 1990s, a KFC or McDonald’s was a first brush not just with the United States, but with capitalism. At a time when the state provided every essential service, fast food offered Chinese people the rare chance to use their money to buy something useless but fun. And in that way, it gave people a chance to be a new kind of person—a consumer—and to be recognized as that before anything else. (...)
Global homogeneity is a feat that only a truly global company can pull off, and if only for that reason, it’s also one of the industry’s biggest selling points, particularly in developing countries where new consumers are unlikely to take such displays of international synchronicity for granted. For many of the industry’s newest loyalists in Addis Ababa, Dakar, and Astana, the idea of eating the same thing and in the same way as other people around the world is as exciting a culinary possibility as there is.
What is true for patrons is often more true for employees. In one 2005 study, sociologist Carolyn Hsu found KFC employees in the city of Harbin, China, who had given up better-paying jobs at state-run companies in the small cities of their upbringing to scrub countertops and mop floors at a fast food restaurant in the bigger city up the road. What Americans derisively called a “McJob” in the United States was, in this still under-developed corner of Asia, a chance to participate in the global economy for the first time.
“Working in a western restaurant allowed them to participate in the world of the center and cast off the taint of the periphery,” Hsu wrote. “As employees, they could participate in ‘scientific’ rationalized practices”—frying chicken in deep purpose-built machines according to exacting health standards—“meet foreigners, eavesdrop on da kuan (big shots) making deals, and taste the same food that people were eating in New York, Tokyo, and Paris.”
by Alex Park, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
