The birth of fast food: how McDonald's and other fast-food chains changed the way America eats--and lives.

• Author: Wilson, Charles
• Position: TIMES PAST 1955

The first McDonald's franchise, now a museum in Des Plaines, Illinois

When a traveling salesman named Ray Kroc visited a small hamburger restaurant in San Bernardino, California, he couldn't have known that he'd set in motion a chain of events that would help change the way an entire nation eats.

The year was 1954, and Kroc sold milkshake machines. He flew from Chicago to Southern California because he was curious why a restaurant run by brothers Mac and Dick McDonald was so popular that it needed eight of his machines. Most of Kroc's customers bought just one.

When he arrived, Kroc saw that the brothers had created a radically new kind of food business. Their menu had just nine items--including their signature 15-cent hamburger--and food was available only for takeout. Workers prepared the food on a mini assembly line, and cleanly dressed young men delivered burgers, fries, and shakes to customers with near-military precision.

"That night in my motel room I did a lot of heavy thinking about what I'd seen," Kroc later wrote. "Visions of McDonald's restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain."

Kroc, who was 52 at the time, persuaded the brothers to let him pursue his dream and opened the first McDonald's franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois, on April 15, 1955. Today, 60 years later, McDonald's has more than 35,000 restaurants in 119 countries. On any given day, 70 million people visit a McDonald's-- more people than the whole population of France.

But the fast-food model has also sparked broad changes in our diets--and our food system--that Kroc couldn't have fully foreseen. Critics argue that the industry has spurred the industrialization of farms and fueled an epidemic of youth obesity. In response, fast-food chains are under pressure to adapt to new demands.

Ray Kroc's dream of McDonald's restaurants "dotting crossroads all over the country" was an idea perfectly matched to a historical moment.

Car Culture

In the years following World War II (1939-45), America underwent a radical transformation made possible by the automobile, consumerism, and new mass production techniques. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the federal government provided massive highway funding, including for an interstate highway system, which for the first time allowed people to live considerable distances from their jobs. Between 1946 and 1955, the total number of cars produced each year in the U.S. quadrupled.

"From Boston to Los Angeles, vast new subdivisions and virtually new towns sprawled where a generation earlier nature had held sway," writes Kenneth T. Jackson in his book Crabgrass Frontier. Builders figured out how to mass-produce houses, and families stocked them with modern conveniences like refrigerators, dishwashers, phones, and washing machines. Americans still ate most meals at home. But cars now made possible "the notion of 'grabbing' something to eat," Jackson writes.

In the next few decades, the appeal of food on the go continued to grow in response to other big changes, namely in the American workforce. By 1980, more than half of adult women participated in the labor force, up from only a third of women in 1950. Increasingly, both mothers and fathers commuted and worked away from home, turning takeout food into more of a necessity than a treat.

The growth of the McDonald's franchise, and of other fast-food chains like Burger King, KFC, and Wendy's, also shaped the economy, providing millions of entry-level jobs to Americans. The industry relied for decades on teenagers to serve as the fry cooks and cashiers. But today, many of those jobs are held by adults, prompting debates about whether they're being paid a fair wage. (Fast-food workers across the U.S. have recently launched strikes demanding higher pay.)

As McDonald's kept growing, it also gained influence over--and eventually reshaped--entire agricultural sectors, like chicken and beef.

In 1983, McDonald's introduced the McNugget, a thumb-size boneless piece of fried chicken. Its popularity soon made McDonald's the second-biggest purchaser of chicken in the U.S. To meet the demand for inexpensive meat, McDonald's supplier, Tyson, developed "an entirely new breed of chicken it called 'Mr. McDonald,"' writes John Love in McDonald's: Behind the Arches, an official corporate history of McDonald's. Mr. McDonald was specifically bred to grow quickly and have a lot of breast meat.

Competitors began copying McNuggets, making deboned pieces of chicken one of the fastest-growing segments of the poultry industry, according to Love. By 2014, the average American ate nearly 85 pounds of chicken per year, more than twice as much as in 1970. It's now common for chickens to be raised in cramped houses with 30,000 other birds, and to go from birth to slaughter in just six weeks.

Cattle production also became more industrialized to meet the growing demand for burgers--with consequences for the environment. Cows that supply meat to fast-food restaurants typically spend the months preceding slaughter in giant feedlots, where they eat huge quantities of grain to gain weight. As part of their digestive process, cows emit a powerful greenhouse gas called methane that contributes to climate change.

Just as chickens and cows grew larger to supply the fast-food industry, portion sizes increased over the years as McDonald's and its rivals competed for customers.

"You get into this calorie race," says Harvey Levenstein, author of Fear of Food, with fast-food chains...