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大街小巷，似乎随处都能看到快餐店。生活的节奏越来越快，人们有时不得不在快餐店将就一下。快餐因其美味，颇受孩子的青睐。在吃快餐的时候，你有想过它是怎样发展起来的吗?下文就为您简单介绍一下。
Unless you're in a particularly remote area, you can't go far in most
developed countries without finding a fast-food restaurant. You also can't go
far without seeing cars, even if most of those cars are taxis. Much of the time,
fast-food restaurants and cars seem to be everywhere. This is really no
coincidence - without cars, we wouldn't have fast food.
The fast food phenomenon evolved from drive-in restaurants built in
southern California in the early 1940s. Restaurateurs wanted to take advantage
of the rising popularity of cars, so they designed restaurants that let people
order and eat without leaving their vehicles. Drive-ins were busy and
successful, but they generally used the same short-order style of food
preparation that other restaurants did. The service wasn't speedy, and the food
wasn't necessarily hot by the time a car hop delivered it.
Richard and Maurice McDonald owned such a restaurant. After running it
successfully for 11 years, they decided to improve it. They wanted to make food
faster, sell it cheaper and spend less time worrying about replacing cooks and
car hops. The brothers closed the restaurant and redesigned its food-preparation
area to work less like a restaurant and more like an automobile assembly
line.
Their old drive-in had already made them rich, but the new restaurant -
which became McDonald's - made the brothers famous. Restaurateurs traveled from
all over the country to copy their system of fast food preparation, which they
called the Speedee Service System. Without cars, Carl and Maurice would not have
had a drive-in restaurant to tinker with. Without assembly lines, they would not
have had a basis for their method of preparing food.
Before the McDonald brothers invented their fast-food production system,
some restaurants did make food pretty quickly. These restaurants employed
short-order cooks, who specialized in making food that didn't require a lot of
preparation time. Being a short-order cook took skill and training, and good
cooks were in high demand. The Speedee system, however, was completely
different. Instead of using a skilled cook to make food quickly, it used lots of
unskilled workers, each of whom did one small, specific step in the
food-preparation process.
The McDonald brothers' changes also applied to the design of the restaurant
kitchen. Instead of having lots of different equipment and stations for
preparing a wide variety of food, the Speedee kitchen had:
A very large grill where one person could cook lots of burgers
simultaneously
A dressing station where people added the same condiments to every
burger
A fryer where one person made french fries
A soda fountain and milkshake machine for desserts and beverages
A counter where customers placed and received their orders
Instead of being designed to facilitate the preparation of a variety of
food relatively quickly, the kitchen's purpose was to make a very large amount
of a very few items. For example, when Ray Kroc, who founded the McDonald's
corporation, visited the restaurant for the first time in 1954, he was selling
milkshake machines that could make five shakes at once. The McDonald brothers
wanted eight of them.
Copies of the Speedee Service System spread throughout California and the
rest of the United States as restaurateurs adapted the techniques for their own
restaurants. Many of the chains that copied the McDonald brothers' ideas still
exist - they serve everything from tacos to chicken. Even though they serve
vastly different types of food, they have some basic traits in common:
When you visit one of them and go inside, you almost always place your
order and collect your food at a counter
When you drive through, you place your order at a speaker or a window, and
someone hands it to you through a window
The food arrives individually wrapped and in a bag or on a tray
You can eat most of the food without using a knife or fork
The food is relatively inexpensive
Individual restaurants in the same chain physically resemble or are
identical to one another
When you visit different restaurants from the same chain, the menu and food
are pretty much the same |
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发表于 2016-7-9 23:54:12