In 1921 in Wichita, Kansas, Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson founded White Castle, the first fast food hamburger chain, pioneering the standardized restaurant format that would define global fast food for the next century. White Castle introduced innovations including open kitchens visible to customers, standardized bun-and-patty sizes, and a fortress-like building design meant to reassure customers about the cleanliness of ground beef following Upton Sinclair's exposé of the meatpacking industry. The chain's small, inexpensive square hamburgers sold for five cents each, establishing the economic model of high volume, low margin, and extreme standardization that all subsequent fast food chains would follow.

White Castle's founding coincided with the rise of modernist poetry's fascination with mechanization and standardization, themes that appear in the work of poets like William Carlos Williams who found beauty in ordinary American commercial landscapes. The fast food hamburger's transformation of eating into an efficient, standardized process resonated with modernist poets exploring how industrial culture reshaped intimate human experiences, a concern that would deepen in the work of postwar poets like Allen Ginsberg who used fast food imagery to critique American conformity and spiritual emptiness.