David Jett Explains Fast Food
E. Coli free.
In 2016 Michael Keaton starred in a wonderful, hidden gem of a movie called The Founder. It’s the story of salesman Ray Kroc who hooked up with brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald. The brothers had opened an innovative burger joint in San Bernardino, CA and when he first saw it, Ray was already counting the money they could make. (Not only does The Founder star Michael Keaton, but features Nick Offerman, John Carroll Lynch, Linda Cardellini, BJ Novak and Laura Dern.) This is one of those movies that you shouldn’t watch on an empty stomach as you’ll want a burger and fries and a milkshake and another burger. It’s like the fast-food version of The Big Night, a movie about the grand opening of an Italian restaurant, that will drive you insane with food cravings.
I don’t eat fast food much anymore. Before covid, I ate fast food for lunch at work on a regular basis. I ate fast food for dinner several times a week. But when covid hit, I was working and eating all my meals at home. When I went back into the world, one of the things I wanted to do was to learn something positive from a mostly negative experience. One of those things was not going back to fast food. I realized that I enjoyed not having the annoying fast-food experience…the bad employees, the hassle, the wrong orders. I realized I could cut out that stress from my life. But every now and then, I want some fast-food. The problem is that I usually crave food from someplace we don’t have in town anymore or never had. Danvers, Jack In The Box, Backyard Burger, Long John Silver, Panchos.
One place I miss is Pizza Inn. When I was a teenager, a big group of us went to a Pizza Inn to watch the famous “Who Shot JR” reveal episode of the tv show Dallas on the big screen projection tv. Pizza Inn had the best pizza and the best buffet. You could get pizza, fries, and corn on the cob. And they had a jukebox. On another occasion, we got into trouble when a few girls in my group decided to start dancing to the music I played on the jukebox. Pizza Inn wanted you to have fun, but not too much fun.
When I was growing up, fast food jobs were held primarily by high schoolers. It was a “first job” situation. This still holds true in fast food places in small towns (where you typically get the best service.) At some point, more and more adults started working non-managerial fast-food jobs, especially in the bigger cities. A teen doesn’t need much money, but an adult does, especially if this is his 2nd or 3rd job he’s holding down to make ends meet. So eventually wages became an issue. Some cities wanted to raise fast food wages to almost $20 an hour. There are lots of office jobs, ones that require college degrees, that don’t pay this much as a starting salary. Do I think fast food workers in my area deserve to be paid this much? They are generally some combination of rude, clueless and apathetic, not to mention the high probability that they will screw up my fucking order. So on one hand, I don’t think they even deserve what they are currently paid since they are not doing their job. On the other hand, would paying them a decent wage improve their attitude? Maybe. Maybe not. One thing I am in favor of is raising wages across the board at all companies. Wages have stagnated over the years and it’s now difficult for someone holding down one full-time job to even afford a decent one-bedroom apartment on their own.
Two similar, yet vastly different, hamburger joints first opened in California in the 1940’s. You can probably guess one of these, the other you will not.
The McDonald brothers opened their first McDonald’s in 1940 and featured “speedie service,” which was so quick that they misspelled “speedy.” They pre-cooked hamburgers and kept them warm under heat lamps (yummy!) They painstakingly designed their kitchen for maximum efficiency. Ray Kroc came along and convinced them to open franchises. The key profit stream was owning the land that franchises were built on. So they are getting franchise fees and rent. Great effort was put into standardization across all locations so that the McDonald’s burger you had in Nebraska would taste the same as the one in California.
One time my brother and I went on a trip to see a concert in another city. On the way back, hungover, we went to a McDonald’s. I’m very efficient at drive-thrus. I don’t tolerate multiple people yelling out what they want into the speaker. I find out what they want and then I do the ordering. As we pulled up to the drive-thru, I asked him what he wanted. He said, he actually said, “I need to see the menu.” What the fucking fuck?? Did he think that McDonald’s all of sudden added tacos or filet mignon? 90% of their menu has stayed the same for decades! I can’t even with this.
Numerous comedians have routines dealing with the country’s fascination and addiction to McDonald’s.
In 1948, eight years after the first McDonald’s, Harry and Esther Snyder chose a spot in Baldwin Park, CA to open the first In-N-Out. It was literally 45 minutes down the highway from the original McDonald’s, but was figuratively a world apart. In-N-Out does not franchise their restaurants and until this past year, have rarely expanded outside of California. This strategy has kept them from making as much money as the juggernaut McDonald’s, but their quality has not declined anywhere near as much over the years.
In-N-Out Burger is a California staple. For years I had people tell me that it was the best fast-food burger in the history of ever. Yeah, ok, whatevs. And then I had a work trip that took me to San Diego (the best city in California. Fight me.) Of course, I had to try In-N-Out. I took one bite of that burger and immediately thought, “this is the best goddamn fast-food burger I’ve ever tasted and no one else is close.” The beauty of In-N-Out is the simplicity of the menu. No salads, no rib-shaped mystery meat. If Ron Swanson from Parks And Recreation ran a fast food place (and he kind of did as Nick Offerman was one of the McDonald brothers in The Founder) this is the menu he would have.
As far as menus go, the exact opposite of In-N-Out would be the ridiculous, headache-inducing Cookout. Look at this thing:
It’s not so much a menu as it is a math problem. You may need a calculus degree to successfully order a combo. And then there’s the situation where, as far as crimes are concerned, Cookout is the Family Dollar of the fast-food world. I’m sure crimes happen at other fast-food places, but I see soooo much stuff about Cookout. Employee shoots another employee after argument over cleaning duties, woman busts out customer’s car window, 8-person brawl in the parking lot, etc. Then there is this video: a group of University of Tennessee students get into an altercation. After the idiot, douchebag looking white guy breaks out the N-word, he and his friend get taken down by the dude they were arguing with more cleanly and dominantly than MMA fighter Jon Jones could have done.
Depending on where you live, you may have both, or only one of these similar fast-food restaurants. And there is a debate on which is better: Krystal (founded in 1932) or White Castle (founded in 1941.) You can like one, or the other, or both, or neither but anyone who says they are the same thing should be punched right in the fucking face just like that dude in Cookout. They may look the same, but they are not. And for the record, White Castle is far superior. Here’s why: both offer crappy but craveable food. Especially when you’re drunk or high. (One of the best moments of my life was when I went to a bar in St. Louis and noticed that there was a 24-hour White Castle next door. That particular White Castle was probably the highest grossing franchise location in the United States. They certainly got plenty of my money that night.) The main difference between the two is the hamburger patty. Both are tiny and square. But the White Castle patty has holds in it so the steam can seep through, thus melding the onion flavor with the burger. It’s genius.
When I was a kid, McDonald’s was the only place you wanted to go. When I was a teen, it was Taco Bell all the way. At the time, Taco Bell seemed hipper. I don’t know why, it just did. You could get a lot of food for not much money. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t authentic Mexican food. It didn’t matter that the names of some of the food were just made up in the corporate office and didn’t actually exist in Mexico. Here’s a Taco Bell menu from back in the day.
Taco Bell has gone in the toilet, so to speak, in quality over the years. In an effort to keep prices down, Taco Bell started using lesser quality cheese and lettuce. The ground beef went from being seasoned ground beef to some kind of liquid goo. The beef in their tacos now is a cross between a Sloppy Joe and something a bird ate, digested, and then spit back up for her nestlings.
Let me end things with a video most wrestling fans are well aware of, but probably not you. Former wrestling manager and then owner of Smokey Mountain Wrestling, a small territory in Kentucky and Tennessee, was driving a van of young, up and coming wrestlers down the highway in search of food after a show. They are out in the middle of nowhere, probably driving down a two lane road. They come across a Dairy Queen. If you are not familiar with Jim Cornette, he’s funny, he’s got a short fuse, he yells a lot and he’s been recorded saying a lot of racist things. His first mistake in the following video is that the whole van full of wrestlers go through the drive-thru instead of going inside. The second is that Jim Cornette is gonna Jim Cornette. Note: the wrestler hiding in the back of the van and taping this whole incident was future WWE/WCW/AEW superstar Chris Jericho.