We Do Ron Ron Ron, We Do Ron Ron
James Meek
- Fast-Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
Allen Lane, 356 pp, £9.99, April 2001, ISBN 0 7139 9602 1
In 1917, a pair of teenagers who had lied about their ages to join an ambulance unit destined for the Western Front found themselves in the same training camp in Sound Beach, Connecticut. One of them was Walt Disney. The other, only 15 years old, was Ray Kroc, the man who later made McDonald’s an empire. When Kroc and his comrades went off to the nearest town on furlough to look for girls, Disney stayed in camp, drawing. Disney served in France and Germany, but the First World War ended before Kroc was sent to Europe. Had he gone, it might have changed the history of fast food. The mode of operation in the trenches fascinated both Kroc and Disney: the assembly line. Everyone – the ammunition worker, the machine-gunner, the infantryman – played their small, repetitive, unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses.
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Vol. 23 No. 10 · 24 May 2001 » James Meek » We Do Ron Ron Ron, We Do Ron Ron (print version)
Pages 3-6 | 3474 words