The brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald revolutionized the restaurant industry by introducing the 'Speedee Service System' at their drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California, applying Henry Ford's industrial assembly-line principles directly to food preparation. Streamlining their menu to cheap hamburgers, french fries, and milkshakes, they eliminated the need for skilled cooks or waiters. Subsequently acquired and aggressively expanded globally by Ray Kroc, the company pioneered the multi-billion dollar modern fast food industry, transforming urban architecture, global nutrition, and labor structures.

The golden arches and the uniform assembly-line hamburger evolved into the ultimate global literary shorthand for the mechanical homogenization, cultural imperialism, and hyper-accelerated velocity of late-twentieth-century capitalist life. Poets worldwide weaponized the fast-food franchise in their verses to critique the rapid destruction of local culinary heritages, environmental degradation, and the synthetic automation of human dining.