050421 McDonald's Is 50 Years Old

McDonald's Is 50 years old. In that half-century, the ubiquitous franchise has, for many, become such a symbol of everything that's right and everything that's wrong with America, that the actual burgers and fries sometimes seem almost incidental.

The company is everywhere, with more than 30,000 restaurants serving nearly 50 million people in more than 119 countries each day.

Not bad for a company that started out when a guy named Ray Kroc wanted to sell milkshake machines to a hamburger joint in California.

Kroc was 52 years old in 1954. He had mortgaged his home and invested his life savings to become the distributor of a five-spindled milkshake maker. He traveled to California to visit a burger joint that used eight of the Multi-Mixers. With visions of being the milkshake machine king, he convinced brothers Dick and Mac McDonald to expand. Kroc returned to the Midwest and opened the first franchised McDonald's restaurant in Des Plaines, Ill., on April 15, 1955.

From there, the burgers, fries and milkshakes sold like, well, hot cakes, and the franchise business took off. McDonald's franchises still are available in this country. But it costs a pretty penny to get your foot into the Golden Arches. An initial investment in an existing McDonald's restaurant usually runs about $200,000 in nonborrowed funds. This figure represents about 25 percent of the cost of an existing restaurant.

McDonald's is a uniquely American phenomenon, one in which capitalism, comfort food and speed all combine in a red and gold facsimile of the American dream.

Of course, any company that continues to grow after a half-century has got to keep up with the times and the culture, or at least not lag more than a half-step behind the spirit of the times.

Do they even count the burgers any more? Now, it's just "billions and billions" on the marquee of the golden arches sign.

Although these days, McDonald's also wants you to know that in 2004 they served more than 200 million Premium Salads, which equals 400 million (U.S. government suggested) servings of leafy green vegetables.

They also served more than 35 million pounds of fresh apples. (Kids are now free to pick apple slices and caramel dipping sauce instead of french fries with their Happy Meals.)

The apples, much like the salads and bottled water, are recent additions to the menu. It's a way of pleasing - or at least appeasing - the health-conscious people among us, who have become shy of artery- clogging and high-in-cholesterol burgers and french fries.

It's as if McDonald's is saying: "Here you go - salads and apples. Let's try healthy."

What its new advertising campaign actually says is this: "It's what I eat and what I do . . . I'm lovin' it."

Which, translated, apparently means something like: "Look, if you're gonna eat this stuff all the darn time, at least get out there and exercise a little, would you?"

Some people, of course, are never happy. Deep pockets and big shoes (Ronald McDonald's shoe size, according to the company's Web site, is 14 "extra long, by extra wide, by extra red") make the company a convenient target for people who want to blame the chain for making Americans fat.

That's not an easy case to make. Nobody, least of all the folks who man the grills and fryers, are forcing consumers into McDonald's to scarf down too many Quarter Pounders.

Even when McDonald's leaves itself open to charges of, at the very least, insensitivity, much of the country rallies to its side.

Take the infamous hot coffee incident of 1994. An 81-year-old woman received third-degree burns when she spilled a cup of coffee on her thigh. She needed skin grafts and a weeklong stay in the hospital. Most of America was asking itself: "What part of HOT did the woman not understand?"

It seemed as if this was one more example of a frivolous lawsuit at the expense of a beloved corporation. Yet, McDonald's already had received 700 previous complaints of scalding during the previous decade. And the woman finally was awarded more than $500,000.

McDonald's survived. Of course, it did. How could it not? It's an icon.

That's one of the great things about McDonald's: It's all over the place.

Wherever you go in this country, and pretty much in the world, McDonald's means that you are never far from home, from all that is familiar.

You order a Big Mac, and you know that you are going to get "two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, pickles, cheese and onions on a sesame-seed bun."

There are no surprises with the Big Mac. Same thing with Quarter Pounders, and since 1973, with the poor man's Egg Benedict, the Egg McMuffin.

And that sameness exists worldwide. The same basic menu is offered from Canada to Kuwait.

It's true that you can find unique additions to the international McDonald's menu, including, according to the corporate Web site, rice dishes and fried chicken in Japan; beer in Germany; Kiwiburgers in New Zealand; spaghetti in the Philippines; and in Islamic countries, like Saudi Arabia, their restaurants offer a "Halal" menu, sanctioned by Islamic law.

But the Big Mac is there as well, in all its messy glory. So, too, the Quarter Pounder, even if, as pointed out by Quentin Tarantino in "Pulp Fiction," it's called the "Royale" in countries that use the metric system.

The universality may be comforting, but there's also something unsettling about all that familiarity, all that homogeneity. Some have felt that the mulligan stew of the American melting pot gets transformed into a cookie-cutter society, where diversity is gradually eliminated, where Ronald McDonald becomes Big Brother.

But the need for conformity is more than American. It's human.

And so is occasionally eating something that we know isn't good for us in the long run.

But maybe there's room enough for gastronomic adventure as well as the same old cornucopia offered by Ronald McDonald.

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