Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,57

as the “Evil Death Star,” he called the Filet-o-Fish “perfection on a bun” and a “miracle of food science,” and recalled that “the first thing I wanted to eat upon returning to the States after spending ten months in a South Indian village sleeping on a mat and eating a strict vegetarian diet was a Filet-O-Fish sammy. They are that important to me.”

This brand of I-can’t-quit-you ambivalence sums up the primal, complicated temptation of fast food in all its shame and glory. The Filet-O-Fish sits alongside the Jack in the Box taco in the sanctuary of inventions that summon the deepest allegiances and most violent disgust. But the story of the weird piscine concoction also demonstrates fast food’s complex relationship with evolving American identities—or vice versa—as well as the efforts taken by the industry to remain meaningful to its customers.

Despite its profane reputation, the Filet-O-Fish was actually designed for a spiritual purpose. In the early 1960s, a McDonald’s franchisee named Lou Groen faced a dire crisis. Sales at his Cincinnati store would routinely tank every Friday, when his Monfort Heights customer base, nearly 90 percent Catholic, would abstain from eating meat. “On Fridays, we only took in about seventy-five dollars a day,” he told the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2007.

Observing the popularity of a fish sandwich at a nearby Frisch’s Big Boy, Groen crafted a sandwich of his own, made with battered fish and tartar sauce. He presented the concept to McDonald’s chief Ray Kroc, a man not exactly known for his open, ecumenical spirit. “Hell no! I don’t care if the pope himself comes to Cincinnati,” Kroc told him. “He can eat hamburgers like everybody else. We are not going to stink up our restaurants with any of your damned old fish!”

But with his livelihood on the line, Groen persisted. He convinced two of Kroc’s lieutenants to advocate for the sandwich. Kroc eventually agreed to consider the fish—with a catch. Groen’s invention would have to square off against the Hula Burger, a meatless, grilled pineapple-and-cheese sandwich that Kroc had been working on. A challenge was set: On Good Friday in 1962, both sandwiches would be tested and the customers would decide. (The ever-confident Kroc made a side bet with his chief of operations that the Hula Burger would prevail; the winner would get a new suit.) “Friday came and the word came out,” Groen recalled. “I won hands down. I sold three hundred and fifty fish sandwiches that day. Ray never did tell me how his sandwich did.”*

Pumped as the “fish that catches people,” the Filet-O-Fish quickly grew from a Friday offering to an everyday item and from regional to national to international, even as the company struggled to market it on its merits.† The sandwich saved Groen’s business and aided in the be-all and end-all of rags-to-fishes stories: Groen, who had battled through homelessness as a teenager in the 1930s and had found out about McDonald’s franchises through a magazine ad, would go on to open over forty new stores in the area, hire thousands of employees, and churn out millions in sales.

A recent company estimate put the annual sales of Filet-O-Fish at 300 million, a quarter of which are sold during Lent, when the company devotes a healthy advertising push to the sacred sandwich. Several fast-food chains now have specialty items and menus during Lent. To name a few: Wendy’s, Arby’s, KFC, Jack in the Box, Checkers/Rally’s, White Castle, Del Taco, Carl’s Jr., Culver’s, Krystal, Church’s, Whataburger, and Taco Bell.

But the symbolic life of the Filet-O-Fish extends far beyond its Good Friday embrace and subsequent triumph. What started as a local Catholic operator’s solution to a local Catholic business problem helped galvanize the chain’s expansion of menu items and a fuller consideration of the diversity of American markets. The Filet-O-Fish wasn’t just the first nonburger addition to the original McDonald’s menu, it was the first of a few pantheonic products—the Big Mac (Pennsylvania), Egg McMuffin (California), and apple pie (Tennessee)—to be dreamed up by individual franchisees, tested, and then brought to market nationally.

The Filet-O-Fish is more than a compelling piece of business trivia; it’s a relic of living history and a social through line that carries us across the decades from 1960s America to the present day. Nestled among such artifacts as the original Star-Spangled Banner and the John Bull steam train, a blue polystyrene clamshell package that once held a Filet-O-Fish sandwich can be found at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.* That’s right.