The great philosopher John Travolta once observed that, in France, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is known as a "Royale with Cheese", while they call a Big Mac "Le Big Mac" and allow you to wash it down with beer. That's the "funniest thing" about Europe, he concluded, during the often quoted opening scene of Pulp Fiction: its people have embraced American culture without entirely losing their soul. "A lot of the same shit we got here, they got there. But there, they're just a little bit different."
Another thinker, Thomas Friedman, has also used McDonald's to riff about globalisation. In his bestselling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman famously ventured that: "No two countries that both had a McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's." Once a nation dines under the golden arches, he argued, it buys into freedom, democracy, and the American way. Children who grow up eating Happy Meals would rather spend their lives scoffing mass-produced burgers than making war.
On Saturday, the golden arches that provided Friedman, Travolta and legions of other modern opinion-formers with food for thought will reach an important milestone: their 70th birthday. On 15 May 1940, two brothers, Richard and Maurice (Dick and Mac) McDonald, opened their first restaurant, in San Bernadino – an unlovely city fringed by mountains, an hour's drive east of Los Angeles. Today more than 32,000 outlets in 117 countries bear their name. Three new ones open each day. China has over a thousand. The company that dreamt up "Le Big Mac" has managed, in the span of a single human lifetime, to devour the world.
Somewhere along the way, of course, McDonald's picked up quite an image problem. In fact, the ever expanding burger brand became a byword for Yankee imperialism. Critics accused the firm of exporting factory farming and obesity to an unwitting world; books such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001) and films such as Super Size Me (2004) raised public scepticism about where junk food comes from and what it does to you. It became an unfeeling corporate villain, giving us McLibel, along with one of society's creepiest clowns, and seemed to be sending humankind the way of those lard-arsed caricatures in the film WALL-E.
Yet despite the PR difficulties, McDonald's kept on expanding (much like the world's waistbands) and in the past couple of years it has entered a sort of golden era. The other day, its shares touched an all-time high of $74, up from $12 in 2003. Across the world, its sales are sky-rocketing. The UK, where its brand was widely considered dead and buried in 2005 – with sales that had been flat for five years, and profits that had just collapsed by two thirds – is now the most successful foreign market in the US firm's history, with sales up £450m in 2009. This trend lays bare a long-standing fact: it's easy to knock McDonald's and everything it stands for, but when you hold your nose and peel back the greaseproof paper a surprisingly progressive institution sometimes emerges.
In the UK, for example, the firm puts its recent financial success down to a £95m "re-branding" exercise to reinvent itself as a touchy-feely retailer, where customers can now use free wi-fi , drink rainforest-friendly coffee with organic milk, and eat free-range eggs. Many of its 1,200 British restaurants are now painted green. In the US, meanwhile, recent years have seen a different kind of McMakeover. Here, your average suburban drive-thru now pays lip service to the very un-American concept of sensible eating, selling a vast range of vegetable wraps, salads, yoghurt, bottled water and fruit along with the usual salty fries and lardy burgers. In a departure from tradition, some of these supposedly healthy new meals even require customers to be able to handle a plastic knife and fork. Today, its biggest growth area is not beef patties or chicken nuggets, but gourmet coffee.
drive from www.independent.co.uk