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By Root 1356 0

city where ground-beef steaks were popular in the early nineteenth century. The hamburger was born when Americans added the bun. Mc-Donald’s Deutschland uses German potatoes for its fries and Bavarian dairy cows for its burgers. It sends Ronald McDonald into hospitals and schools. It puts new McDonald’s restaurants in gas stations, railway stations, and airports. It battles labor unions and — according to Siegfried Pater, author of Zum Beispiel McDonald’s — has repeatedly fired union sympathizers. The success of McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and T.G.I. Fridays in Germany has helped spark a franchising boom. Since 1992, the number of franchised outlets there has doubled, and about five thousand more are being added every year. In August of 1999, McDonald’s Deutschland announced that it would be putting restaurants in Germany’s new Wal-Mart stores. “The partnership scheme will undoubtedly be a success,” a German financial analyst told London’s Evening Standard. “The kiddie factor alone — children urging their parents to shop at Wal-Mart because they have a McDonald’s inside the store — could generate an upsurge in customers.”

The golden arches have become so commonplace in Germany that they seem almost invisible. You don’t notice them unless you’re looking for them, or feeling hungry. One German McDonald’s, however, stands out from the rest. It sits on a nondescript street in a new shopping complex not far from Dachau, the first concentration camp opened by the Nazis. The stores were built on fields where Dachau’s inmates once did forced labor. Although the architecture of the shopping complex looks German and futuristic, the haphazard placement of the buildings on the land seems distinctively American. They would not seem out of place near an off-ramp of I-25 in Colorado. Across the street from the McDonald’s there’s a discount supermarket. An auto parts store stands a few hundred yards from the other buildings, separated by fields that have not yet vanished beneath concrete. In 1997, protests were staged against the opening of a McDonald’s so close to a concentration camp where gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, and political opponents of the Nazis were imprisoned, where Luftwaffe scientists performed medical experiments on inmates and roughly 30,000 people died. The McDonald’s Corporation denied that it was trying to profit from the Holocaust and said the restaurant was at least a mile from the camp. After the curator of the Dachau Museum complained that McDonald’s was distributing thousands of leaflets among tourists in the camp’s parking lot, the company halted the practice. “Welcome to Dachau,” said the leaflets, “and welcome to McDonald’s.”

The McDonald’s at Dachau is one-third of a mile from the entrance to the concentration camp. The day I went there, the restaurant was staging a “Western Big Mac” promotion. It was decorated in a Wild West theme, with paper place mats featuring a wanted poster of “Butch Essidie.” The restaurant was full of mothers and small children. Teenagers dressed in Nikes, Levis, and Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts sat in groups and smoked cigarettes. Turkish immigrants worked in the kitchen, seventies disco music played, and the red paper cups on everyone’s tray said “Always Coca-Cola.” This McDonald’s was in Dachau, but it could have been anywhere — anywhere in the United States, anywhere in the world. Millions of other people at that very moment were standing at the same counter, ordering the same food from the same menu, food that tasted everywhere the same.

at the circus

THE MOST SURREAL EXPERIENCE that I had during three years of research into fast food took place not at the top-secret air force base that got its Domino’s pizzas delivered, not at the flavor factory off the New Jersey Turnpike, not at the Dachau McDonald’s. It occurred on March 1, 1999, at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. Like an epiphany, it revealed the strange power of fast food in the new world order. The Mirage — with its five-story volcano, its shark tank, dolphin tank, indoor rain forest, Lagoon Saloon, DKNY boutique, and Secret Garden