What do you get when you take McDonalds to ....

One of my favorite tracking devices about the directions of globalization is seeing what people in various places do with the idea of fast food. The very appearance of U.S. style fast food indicates that globalization is reaching in, in the form of ideas that circulate. There is one popular book that talks about the McDonaldization of Society, a standardization or homogenization of culture around the world. It gets more complicated, however. Here is exhibit A, the current most advertised McDonalds sandwich in Finland. It features a basic cheeseburger on a very Finnish form of round but very grainy rye bread. Someone has decided that Finns prefer to think outside the bun.

I think McDonaldization of a sort is indeed taking place at a deep level of structure. The economic and technological ways of doing things around the world become more standardized, like the proliferation of automatic teller machines and television advertising everywhere. However, at another level, the content that fills in those forms of globalization can be pretty varied, reflecting the culture that was already there. So we get McDonalds on rye, or as in the next photo, the Big Rösti, a McDonald's burger on a bun, but the bun has cheese baked in, with melted Swiss cheese and Swiss style Rösti (a sort of hash brown patty), still in Finland, not Switzerland -- maybe they borrowed it from the Swiss Mickey D's, which is sort of regionalization on top of globalization.

Things get more interesting if you go beyond the belly of the beast, or at least away from McDonald's itself. My personal favorite is Habib's in Brazil. In a way, when you take McDonald's to Brazil, what you get is both McDonald's and Habib's. McDonald's does very well in Brazil, it has 541 restaurants, 556 kiosks, and 47 McCafés as of 2007 (according to an information page on the US Embassy website--why they are flacking for McDonald's is another question).

But the idea of fast food has sort of run away from McDonald's control, producing Brazilian versions of fast Lebanese, Japanese, French, Italian and various sorts of more local fast food, too. Habib's is fast Lebanese, kibe, esfiha, tabouli, etc. There are over 260 Habib's in Brazil and it has jumped to Mexico, too.

And throughout Europe, the most popular form of fast food, dwarfing McDonald's and all things burger-related everywhere we have been this year, is various locally run kebab houses, mid-Eastern fast food featuring the classic kebab or gyro (as is often called in Greek versions in the U.S.), beef or lamb, sometimes mixed, cooked on a big rotating spindle. Here we see another powerful piece of globalization that works sideways with or even against McD's, the migration of hundreds of thousands of middle Eastern or Mediterranean people to Europe, many thousands of whom seem to have decided to open kebab restaurants.

I am thinking about this because analogous issues came up in several of my talks and seminars in Tampere today. People were despairing because of the spread of fairly standardized capitalist, commercial ways of doing television. It is certainly true that those approaches are becoming standard globalized ways of doing things -- which makes it much harder to find some of the more worthwhile forms of TV that are not inherently profitable, such as one off dramas, documentaries, education and high culture, unless government or public broadcasting decides to do such things. Just like McDonald's is probably driving out some much more interesting Finnish and Brazilian eateries.

However, within the new forms of television and fast food, interesting things can still happen. The cup is not full but it is not empty either. Particularly since other forms of television and food do persist or even start anew, the way that public broadcasting in the USA grew after commercial broadcasting was already dominant.