Sex, Bombs and Burgers

by Peter Nowak

  The company put the same amount of scientific and engineering effort into ensuring the quality and uniformity of its other food offerings. To speed up milkshake production and save space in restaurants, Kroc introduced a new machine that mixed a concentrated liquid mix rather than a frozen ice milk base. The liquid mix was poured into the machine, frozen and automatically dispensed, much like Dairy Queen’s soft-serve ice cream. The new system was faster than the old, which required making milkshakes manually, and the cans the liquid mix came in—similar to concentrated orange juice cans—took up less storage space than the frozen ice milk.

  Before McDonald’s, hamburger was the meat industry’s poor cousin, a veritable repository of meat packers’ unwanted parts. That didn’t suit Kroc, who not only wanted reliability from his burgers, but also preferred to avoid the sort of large-scale lawsuits that would follow if he served people mystery meat. So the company’s labs dissected and experimented on ground beef as if it were an alien from another planet. The result was a fifty-item checklist that was passed on to franchisees, who could then test the meat they received from suppliers to see if any shortcuts had been taken.

  By the late sixties, McDonald’s restaurants received hamburger shipments three times a week from a variety of the company’s 175 suppliers. With that much movement coming from so many sources, it would have been easy for some shipments to be overlooked for inspection or for some suppliers to cut corners, a fact that deeply frightened Ray Kroc. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night from dreaming that we had bad beef and thousands of customers with upset stomachs. I wondered how the hell we’d get over something like that.”42

  The solution was to shift the chain’s focus on technological innovation from the store level up to the supplier level. In the late sixties, a trio of small meat suppliers formed a small company called Equity Meat with the goal of solving McDonald’s beef problem. They came up with a process that was similar to freezing fries—the beef patties were flash frozen cryogenically to below two hundred degrees, which sealed in their juices. The group experimented with different coolants, freezing speeds, meat-grinding techniques and cooking times, and even came up with the first computerized system for ensuring that the right blend of meat went into the burger. While McDonald’s executives scoffed at using frozen patties initially, much as they had with frozen fries, after testing they found that the burgers tasted just as good if not better than fresh ones, and shrank less when cooked on the grill.

  All of a sudden, the company’s quality-control problems with meat were solved. By 1973, just two years after testing Equity’s burgers, almost every McDonald’s restaurant had converted to frozen patties. As per its agreement with McDonald’s, Philadelphia-based Equity was required to share its technology with any other supplier the chain saw fit. Four other meat packers were chosen and in one fell swoop McDonald’s pared its beef suppliers down from 175 to 5, creating huge efficiencies by consolidating its quality-control management to only a few points. The company was thoroughly grateful to Equity and gave it a good chunk of its burger business, rapidly transforming the small company, now known as Keystone Foods, into one of the biggest beef suppliers in the world. Today, Keystone employs more than 13,000 people and services 30,000 restaurants worldwide, handling 388 million pounds of beef and 1.6 billion pounds of poultry products a year.43 The other beef suppliers who got Equity’s technology, including Golden State and Otto & Sons, also became industry giants in their own right.

  McDonald’s ushered in a similar transformation of the chicken business. In the late seventies, after realizing there was growing customer demand for poultry, the company hired Rene Arend, an acclaimed chef from Luxembourg, to come up with a chicken product. Arend actually happened upon the chicken McNugget by accident. His Onion Nuggets, which were battered and deep-fried chunks of onion, failed to catch on, but McDonald’s CEO Fred Turner suggested he try the idea out with chicken. Arend cut some chicken into bite-size pieces, then battered and fried them up. Turner loved them, but both he and Arend knew that mass-processing chicken in the numbers McDonald’s needed was difficult because there was no automated way of removing the bones. KFC might have been selling chicken by the bucket-load, but the rival fast-food chain wasn’t chopping its poultry up into the little bits required by McDonald’s, which meant the burger chain would have to innovate once more.

  Keystone again came to the rescue by modifying a hamburger patty machine so that it cut deboned chicken into the now-familiar McNugget shapes. The poultry still had to be deboned by hand, but the invention greatly sped up production lines. Chicken McNuggets entered test stores in 1980 and were an immediate hit, rolling out company-wide a year later. Keystone shared its technology again, this time with Tyson Foods, which was already one of the largest chicken producers in the world.

  Tyson introduced its own improvement to the McNugget process by creating an entirely new breed of chicken. “Mr. McDonald,” as the breed was dubbed, was nearly twice as large as traditional broiler chickens; its size didn’t just mean more meat, it also made the deboning process much easier. Within three years of their introduction McNuggets accounted for 7.5 percent of McDonald’s U.S. sales, and they brought in more than $700 million in 1985, making them one of the most successful products in the company’s industry.44 McDonald’s is now the second-largest purchaser of chicken in the world, after KFC.

  The poultry industry jumped on the bandwagon and reaped the benefits. The McNugget contract helped Tyson surpass rival ConAgra as the largest U.S. chicken producer in 1986. Deboned chicken, once the ugly duckling of the poultry business, took off and others piled on. KFC jumped on board with its own nuggets a few years after McDonald’s. Tyson rivals, meanwhile, responded to this shift in the market by growing their own bigger chickens, a trend that continues to this day as suppliers try to get more bang for their buck with ever-larger birds. As Bud Sweeney, one of the developers responsible for coming up with McDonald’s deboning process, put it back in the eighties: “We absolutely revolutionized the chicken business.”45 The trend has angered animal rights activists, though, who are horrified by images of the bloated chickens, unable to support their own weight.

  The technological innovations, however, helped McDonald’s build big sales volumes and profits, which attracted franchisees eager to make a fortune. McDonald’s easily outpaced its competitors in the early days and is now the biggest fast-food operation in the world, with more than 31,000 locations.46 While Kroc is often praised for his business acumen and his ability to sell and manage franchises, he rarely gets credit for his recognition and use of technology. Without all of the advances Kroc pioneered—he even had Schindler build the world’s first rooftop heating and air-conditioning unit—McDonald’s may never have grown past the handful of restaurants set up by its founders. Moreover, Kroc’s use of technology did more than just drive McDonald’s growth, it created a measuring stick for the rest of the industry. While some chains understood that innovation was the chief driver of sales volume, some did not. Those that fell in line prospered while those that failed to grasp the concept either dropped off or remained small. Kroc established the bottom line in the fast-food industry: innovate or die.

  McDonald’s also revolutionized supply logistics by pioneering the “just-in-time delivery” model that would later be attached to companies such as Walmart and Dell Computer. In 1970 a typical McDonald’s restaurant received about twenty-five shipments a week from two hundred different suppliers, ranging from burgers and potatoes to paper cups and straws. As a result, restaurants were becoming mini-warehouses. The company responded by encouraging suppliers to consolidate and become “one-stop shops” that could provide all of its needs, from foods to dry goods. These consolidated companies could then set up their own regional distribution centres and storage warehouses, which would in turn supply all of the nearby McDonald’s restaurants whenever supplies ran short. McDonald’s was thereby able to cut its network of distributors down to about ten companies, and
by the mid-eighties, shipments to restaurants were down to about two a week. The new system meant more efficiency, less paperwork, tighter control over purchasing, less waste and fresher food.47 Virtually the entire food production system in the United States subsequently followed this model.

  Critics have raised concerns over this McCentralization of distribution. With large suppliers responsible for entire geographic regions, an outbreak of contaminated food is likely to be more widespread than it would be if smaller companies were dealing with smaller territories. While those arguments have proven to be partially true, McDonald’s has carefully preserved competition between its suppliers by steadfastly demanding improvements in quality, and it has not been shy in switching when it catches a supplier cutting corners. The company didn’t hesitate to move its sauce-production business from Conway to Golden State, for example, after quality complaints began to mount. The threat of losing a large McContract, which often accounts for much of any supplier’s business, has usually been enough to keep them honest. As for contamination issues, while large-scale outbreaks certainly do happen, many food scientists believe such events would be far more frequent, albeit smaller in scale, without the centralized food system McDonald’s helped usher in. The proof may very well be in the pudding, or meat and produce—anyone who has taken a vacation in a developing country, where food is grown locally without much inspection, knows how easy it is to get food poisoning. While such infections are usually not serious, they can certainly turn a person off eating.

  By the sixties, the food revolution was complete. In the grocery store, consumers could choose from a plethora of ready-to-eat meals—instant soup, TV dinners, frozen fries—that they could heat up with their microwave ovens and store as leftovers in their Tupperware containers. Outside the home, families could drive to the local McDonald’s, Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken and eat without spending a fortune or taking a long time. Both scenarios gave consumers more time and money to spend on the things they really wanted to do, whether it was hobbies, travel or other leisure activities. With the biggest real necessity—eating—taken care of, consumers were free to indulge themselves in ways they never had before. Is it a surprise that the sexual revolution soon followed?

  3

  ARMING THE AMATEURS

  War is, after all, the universal perversion. We are all tainted: if we cannot

  experience our perversion at first hand we spend our time reading war stories,

  the pornography of war; or seeing war films, the blue films of war; or titillating

  our senses with the imagination of great deeds, the masturbation of war.

  —JOHN RAE, THE CUSTARD BOYS

  The most surprising by-product of the Second World War has to be the creation of the modern pornography industry. That may sound like an odd statement, so an explanation is in order. The war brought technological standardization to smaller film cameras and trained a horde of amateurs in their use. After the war, these budding filmmakers, shunned by Hollywood as outsiders, took their new-found technology and skills and made their own movies. Many of them were sucked in by the sexual revolution that was unfolding across all media, and a proper industry for pornographic movies was born. The sexual revolution and the film revolution unfolded in tandem, each influencing and furthering the other.

  Before the war, the market for films featuring sex and nudity, known as “blue movies” in Europe, was a cottage industry that catered mainly to brothels.1 Movies were shot and shipped to private buyers, mostly in England and France, but also to distant places such as Russia and the Balkan countries. As a 1967 Playboy article pointed out, “By the end of la belle époque, no self-respecting brothel on the Continent considered its facilities complete without a stock of these films.”2 The movies were also made in the United States, where the main audience from the twenties through the forties was men at stag parties. Social groups such as the Legionnaires, Shriners, Elks and college fraternities held screenings by quietly renting projectors and a few reels of “stag films” from camera stores in the trade.3 Both American and European markets for the films hit their peaks in the years before the Second World War as newly introduced 16-millimetre cameras lowered the costs of producing the movies.4 Still, the market was small—Playboy estimated that by 1970, only about two thousand stag films had been made.5 Up until the war, film production was haphazard, low-profit and high-risk. In many countries the movies were also illegal, barely tolerated by authorities.

  Film historians generally regard France as the birthplace of stag films since the country had the early lead in movie projection with Louis Lumière’s cinématographe, which made its debut in 1895. But evidence of early pornographic movies has been found virtually everywhere around the globe, including Germany, Russia, Argentina and Japan. The movies—black-and-white, silent and usually ten to fifteen minutes long—were typically shown only in the regions where they were made, because producers feared being prosecuted for distributing obscene materials. They featured amateur participants in a variety of settings and were surprisingly graphic for the time, often showing hard-core penetration, homosexual sex and even bestiality. A Free Ride, thought to have been made around 1915 and generally considered to be the first American pornographic movie, featured a man and two women going for a naughty car ride in the country. When the man stopped the car to pee, the women spied on him and became aroused. The man, in turn, spied on them and made sexual advances, culminating in three-way sex.

  Despite its carnal content, A Free Ride and many other stag films of the time had surprisingly high production values, suggesting that professional moviemakers were secretly behind them. As film historians Al Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin noted in their book Dirty Movies, “This professionalism was understandable in an era in which film equipment was expensive and cumbersome, hence unavailable to the amateur.”6

  That changed after the war, when film technology and techniques underwent a boot camp of sorts that greatly decentralized moviemaking from Hollywood and opened the industry for amateurs. The military had a great need for films, which served three key wartime purposes: they recorded enemy forces and weaknesses, helped train soldiers and served as morale-boosting propaganda for viewers back home. Cameras were “as necessary as radar,” as one film historian put it.7

  Hollywood was drafted en masse—fully one-sixth of workers, or forty thousand people, in the production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures ended up in the armed services. That figure included directors, writers, camera operators, electricians, technicians and machinists.8 Actors enlisted, Hollywood professionals helped trained camera operators for the Army Signal Corps, and feature-film directors including William Wyler, John Huston and Frank Capra shot combat footage and training movies. As with every other industry, Hollywood saw helping the war effort as its patriotic duty.

  But while the Signal Corps welcomed Hollywood’s expertise and manpower, it didn’t necessarily want the industry’s technology. At the time, feature films were shot using 35-millimetre cameras—big, hulking monstrosities that rolled on wheels if they moved at all. The equipment was impractical for war conditions, where compactness and mobility were absolute necessities. Hollywood studios also needed to shrink their large film crews into small, mobile, flexible units that could work in the field. The adjustments weren’t easy. “The technical requirements of such a small production unit are rather confusing to those accustomed to Hollywood standards,” said the American Society of Cinematographers at the time. “The first requirement is absolute mobility, to travel cheaply and quickly under any conditions—plane, auto, boat ... Equipment must be reduced to a minimum.”9

  Sixteen-millimetre cameras had hit the market back in the early twenties, but they were shunned by studios, who felt they produced inferior pictures. The smaller cameras also packed in less film than their larger 35-millimetre relatives, which relegated them to shooting shorter-length footage such as newsreels. In 1925 Bell & Howell designed the Eyemo, a rugged 35-millimetr
e camera that was a fraction of the size of others like it, but it too saw limited use by studios because of its short film capacity. Lastly, 16-millimetre cameras were usually hand-cranked, which made them impractical for use on sets. Manufacturers such as Eastman Kodak and Bell & Howell therefore marketed their respective Cine-Kodak and Filmo smaller-gauge cameras to amateur users, but sales were poor since the gadgets were still relatively expensive. In 1932 Kodak developed an even smaller and cheaper 8-millimetre camera for the amateur market, but it too sold modestly because shooting film was still too complicated for the average person.

  Sixteen-millimetre film cameras were, however, perfect for military purposes. Front-line units trained by the Army Signal Corps were armed not only with guns but Filmo and Cine-Kodak cameras to capture combat footage for later study. Eyemos were modified to sit on machine-gun tripods while Filmos were equipped with gun-stock attachments so that they could be aimed in much the same manner as rifles. B-17s were equipped with cameras to film bombing runs and fighter planes used them to shoot dogfights. The navy was well equipped to screen training films, where gunners used actual footage to prepare for battle. Some navy ships were nicknamed “floating studios” because of their processing and production facilities.10

  Manufacturers repurposed their products and ramped up production to meet the sudden massive demand. While Cine-Kodaks were used to shoot family get-togethers during the twenties and thirties, wartime ads from the company proclaimed them “the fighting Cine-Kodaks.” Bell & Howell, meanwhile, touted its Eyemo camera as “the air corps super snooper.”11 Camera makers also stepped up their innovation and development to meet the military’s needs. In 1943 Bell Telephone Laboratories produced the Fastax, capable of shooting eight thousand frames per second on either 8- or 16-millimetre film, to document the “split-second action of our high-speed war machine.”12 Since cameras broke down easily in war conditions, the standardization of parts became critical. In 1943 the industry, along with the Army Signal Corps, Army Air Force, Army Engineer Corps, the Navy and the Marine Corps, formed the War Standards Committee to oversee camera production. As one historian noted, “Experienced motion picture engineers who formerly solved Hollywood technical problems now answered military needs.”13 The standardization and interchangeability of parts ushered in by the committee helped bring manufacturing costs down, which introduced savings for the buyer.