McIntoshes, McDonald’s, and Our Changing Landscape

By Chloe Yang, January 21, 2018

Think of an apple. Now think of the McDonald’s menu. These are both stereotypical staples of the American diet, as present in our culture as they are in our stomachs, and though an apple orchard and a McDonald’s may seem like polar opposites, their paths to prominence tell a common tale: when people strike out to new places, the food stays one step ahead. In the process, America’s physical and cultural landscapes are changed forever.

Let’s begin with the apple. You may have heard of Johnny Appleseed, the nature-loving man who traipsed through the country with a tin-pot for a hat and a cut-up sack for clothing. Looking past this idyllic image, we find that the real Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman, was born in 1774 in Leominster, MA. Though history embellished certain details of his life, he did love nature, his attire was shabby, and he did plant apple orchards in over 1000 acres of land from western Pennsylvania to Illinois.

Before Chapman’s birth, pilgrims had already brought over their favorite grafted forms of the apple tree, which promptly died in the alien environment. The trees were grafted because apples grown by seed rarely resemble their parents in flavor or appearance, due to extreme genetic diversity. No matter how delicious the parent is, its seeds likely produce apples so sour and bitter, they are referred to as “spitters.” Though spitters are awful for eating, they’re ideal for making hard cider.

John Chapman was a member of the Swedenborgian Church, which forbade grafting. Chapman, then, transported 16 bushels of apple seeds on his travels, spreading spitters and booze across the country. This is not so scandalous as it sounds; cider was often safer to drink than water, which was swimming with bacteria. Chapman’s endeavors resulted in vast propagation of apple seeds, which, given the diversity in traits, allowed the apple to find sets of features optimal for thriving in America.

However, Chapman was likely motivated by something more than the health of the apple population: money. In the early 1800s, settlers were granted 100 acres of land to form permanent homesteads on the unclaimed property beyond Ohio. To prove commitment, one rule required settlers to plant 50 apple trees in three years, as the average apple tree bears fruit in 10 years. Chapman realized that he could plant an orchard, legally claim the land, and then sell the property to frontiersmen. In this way, Chapman advanced just ahead of homesteaders, turning his orchards for profit, and leaving iconic apples we know and love today in his wake.

John Chapman knew to stay one step ahead, quite literally, of his customers. He could not have known that fast food chains would also employ this strategy nearly a century after his death. As the rise of the apple can be linked to migration West, the rise of fast food can be linked to a new form of transportation. The car ushered in a new lifestyle of convenience and freedom, a new way of eating. Drive-in restaurants with loud signs, designed to be spotted from the road, cropped up in response, and McDonald’s started as one in 1937.

Then came the Interstate Highway Act in 1956, which called for the construction of 46000 miles of road. Fast food restaurants, smelling opportunity, blossomed near new freeway off-ramps. Traffic brought customers, and chains sought to build their restaurants where traffic was likely to increase, on land that was still cheap but promised future development.

As McDonald’s grew, the chain used helicopters to analyze growth patterns, scanned highways and roads for locations that would become the eye of suburban development storms, and developed the software Quintillion, which automatically chose optimal restaurant sites using information from satellite images, demographics, and sales from other stores. McDonald’s made sure to stake their flags where people were sure to go, to the extent where other fast food restaurants would parrot their moves and open establishments nearby, trusting in McDonald’s to find the best locations.

Though the apple and McDonald’s have little in common, their histories reveal parallels that cannot be ignored. Their ascensions to food stardom in this country were contingent on human populations stretching their legs, on the settlers who cultivated apple orchards, on the entrepreneurs who launched their own fast food restaurants in their hometowns. After the dust settles, we find ourselves with changes in our health, our land, our policies, our habits, our image. If there is one thing to be learned, it’s that we would do well to know the consequences of our growth and collective actions, because they can, and will, outlast us.