In 1948 in San Bernardino, California, the McDonald brothers completely redesigned their restaurant around the Speedee Service System, eliminating carhops, reducing their menu to only hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, drinks, and pie, and organizing the kitchen into an assembly-line workflow that dramatically reduced service time and costs. This radical simplification and standardization of the restaurant operation is widely regarded as the founding moment of modern fast food, establishing the principles of menu limitation, kitchen efficiency, and extreme standardization that would be adopted by virtually every fast food chain that followed.

The assembly-line kitchen became a potent metaphor in postwar American poetry, appearing in the work of Allen Ginsberg who used fast food production as a symbol of industrial dehumanization in poems like "A Supermarket in California." The Speedee Service System's reduction of food preparation to mechanical repetition resonated with confessional and Beat poets who saw in fast food's efficiency a model for the standardization of human experience, a theme that would deepen in the work of poets like Gary Snyder and Adrienne Rich who questioned what was lost when nourishment became an industrial process.