Like we say the McDonald Brothers "invented fast food" but even back then what they actually phrased it as was *modernizing* fast food, making it "clean" and corporate
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"Fast food" in general was always a thing -- hot dogs and hamburgers -- but it was that environment that turned it into this specific thriving industry And so like everyone just says "Chinese food" to mean deep fried chunks of meat sparsely mixed with rice
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To, I think, an even greater degree than "Mexican food" got absorbed in the American imagination by Taco Bell, or "Italian food" by Pizza Hut and Chef Boyardee
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Now I'm just thinking about how COMRADE DETECTIVE plays with this, like it imagines that Cold War Romanians equated everything about America with McDonald's Every American character is literally constantly eating hamburgers
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Like they go to visit the American embassy and there's just this big table piled high with hamburgers and everyone in the office is eating hamburgers and they all grab a fresh one as they walk by mid-conversation Ugh it sounds like the Trump Administration
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I guess I will say that I see people take this too far sometimes, saying "Oh egg rolls and fried rice and lo mein aren't real Chinese food, they don't exist in China" And that's obviously false, most of these menu items are at least based on something centuries old
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Like "instant" lo mein noodles (which became ramen noodles in Japan) are one of the oldest "instant" foods in the world, sold in marketplaces in the Song Dynasty But I mean hamburgers and fries were a thing before the McDonald Brothers too
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That's the funny thing, like McDonald's *created* the negative reputation that stuck to the foods the McDonalds decided were the cheapest and easiest to turn into assembly-line manufacture Which is why the early McDonald's ads feel so weird now
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The original Ronald McDonald could look right at the camera and say "A hamburger, French fries and a milkshake, the perfectly balanced lunch" partly because nutrition was a young science then and partly because no one particularly thought of those as trashy cheap foods yet
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Like it wasn't a big deal for Thomas Jefferson to introduce French fries to the White House and serve them with steak because it was just a new way to make potatoes (Nowadays you have to call them "steak fries" or "frites")
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Now I'm thinking of that Onion article where a McDonald's executive tries to get them to change their whole menu because he thinks those foods are obsolete And he keeps insistently saying "hamburger sandwich" and "French fried potatoes"
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Ah yeah that was it
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End of conversation
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