In early 1993, contaminated hamburger patties served at Jack in the Box – a personal favorite of mine, though for locational reasons not one I get to visit often – sickened more than seven hundred diners. Four children died. It was a disaster, a mass poisoning carried out inadvertently and in plain site. A fast food franchise had deployed biological weapons against its own citizens. Jack in the Box made amends by running a series of ads through 1993 and early 1994 that showed a mascot-headed terrorist annihilating a boardroom full of corporate types who, it was implied, bore all blame for the contamination. I remember the ad where the mascot dynamites the boardroom with particular clarity, because it seemed to me at the time to predict the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City later that year. I was eleven and prone to draw imaginary connections. But I wasn’t wrong: as fast food goes, so goes the country.
America imagines itself as a land of freedom, but food is metaphysically the opposite of that. What more frequent reminder is there of our fundamental unfreedom, our inescapable submission to the laws of nature, than that we have to take the time to feed ourselves or else we’ll die? That’s not freedom, that’s constraint, the background human condition and also why capitalism, using “free labor,” manages to work people about as hard as slavery did. You have to buy food from the Man: he pays you with one hand and takes your money with the other, and, in the middle, you work.
Fast food is America’s way of obscuring that grim truth. The Americanness of the solution is as follows. First, minimize the time it takes to eat, minimize the role that eating plays in people’s lives; make food always be ready to hand. That way, you can almost forget the iron necessity of eating. Then, take advantage of the speed of fast food to shorten lunch breaks and its cheapness to cut real wages. Finally, monetize fast food as another object of consumer choice, a marketing ploy that people have been trained to misrecognize as the very substance of freedom. Necessity reappears as branding. That’s the American Way.
Repressed necessity has a way of reasserting itself and reappearing at inconvenient moments. Necessity is an choice between life and death; fast food branding obviously wants to hide the second option, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. When you eat at a fast food restaurant, you’re putting your life into play.
The fast food restaurant is a characteristically American way of death. You can do an eating fail, for instance, as did the victims of the great Jack in the Box burger contamination and those of countless other similar disasters over the last half-century. They thought they were eating, but they were doing something different – the stakes perhaps obscured from them by the fact that they were doing it in the presence of one or more giant cartoon clowns. Or, like Rayshard Brooks, you can get executed by cops for gumming up the wheels of commerce. Or, like people throughout the supply chain during the coronavirus pandemic, you may be forced to risk your life as an “essential worker” in close contact with customers and other employees, any one of whom may give (or take) a COVID infection.
Yes, you’re an essential worker, even though nobody respects you and you make minimum wage or less. That’s America, baby! You’re stuck in a work environment that, by way of branding, all at once infantilizes the customers and trivializes the workers. Nobody’s going to take you seriously as long as you’re working next to a cardboard standee of a clown or a Kentucky Colonel or an illiterate cow. But your job is serious: you’re mediating survival for maybe hundreds of people every day.
This frantic haste to eat and forget eating leads, inevitably, to accidents. Yet carelessness gets encouraged at every turn, a carelessness that is at once casual and metaphysical. In McDonald’s, nobody cares about the food you’re eating and you don’t care about your own mortality, something of which hunger and the need to eat and the everyday difficulty of finding food might in other circumstances remind you.
An architecture student from the moon might have a hard time telling McDonald’s apart from a children’s hospital: same harsh fluorescent lighting, same vinyl or plastic furniture, same garishly cheerful decor. Could we blame them for not realizing that color schemes make all the difference? McDonald’s makes money by getting you in and out the door as fast as possible, something allegedly encouraged by painting every surface yellow and red; Children’s hospitals decorate in blues and greens that invite you to stay a while, because they make more money that way. Both enterprises only turn a profit by economizing death.