Fancy a McFalafel? A global guide to McDonalds

Part of the global appeal of McDonald’s is its cultural flexibility. Meatless burgers are offered in India, while Czech diners can order a beer to go with a Big Mac.

The sign at the first McDonald's franchise, opened by Ray Kroc on April 15, 1955 in Des Plaines, IL.

Rare is the book that makes the brain tick, the heart soar and the mouth water. But McAtlas, by Gary He, pulls off that sensory trifecta with aplomb. Subtitled A Global Guide to the Golden Arches, his book is “a visual social anthropology” of Mc­Donald’s, the largest restaurant chain in the world. It is also “a snapshot of globalisation and capitalism”, of which the company is an incomparable paradigm, with nearly 42,000 stores that serve a combined 65 million customers a day across more than 100 countries on every continent bar Antarctica (where its absence cannot, surely, last forever).

Annual sales “systemwide” in 2024 exceeded $US130bn. “Not bad for a franchise,” says He, “that started as a humble hamburger stand on Route 66.”

McAtlas: A Global Guide to the Golden Arches By Gary He

He is a Brooklyn photographer whose Chinese-immigrant parents worked as a day labourer and a sweatshop seamstress. They still wonder, he writes, what he’s doing with his life, “instead of being a doctor or a lawyer”. Those are eternal questions for old-fashioned Asian parents, a breed notoriously hard to please; but the rest of us will marvel at the fact that He spent three years, until the spring of 2024, conducting “fieldwork” in more than 50 countries, an impressive feat not only because his research involved the all-too-frequent ingestion of McDonald’s food but also because his book is self-published on a shoestring budget.

He couch-surfed his way on an obsessive odyssey across six continents, photographing eye-catching outlets (such as the one located in an Art Deco building in Melbourne, Australia); interviewing franchisees, managers and customers; and sampling items on every McDonald’s menu. “This is not a corporate book,” he says. McDonald’s Corp had no editorial control over his work. The killjoy (and, it must be said, obtuse) company did not permit him to consult the corporate archives in Chicago.

So he did what any journalist worth his monosodium glutamate would do and went from restaurant to restaurant, boots on the ground, elbows on the table: from Cincinnati, Ohio, where the first Filet-O-Fish was served to prevent the hemorrhaging of Catholic customers to the competition on Fridays; to Delhi, where the company’s trademark “iconic” beef-based Big Mac isn’t even on the menu; to the Czech Republic, where McDonald’s serves beer (like any self-respecting restaurant in Europe where diners aren’t hampered by the “family” values that prevail in American franchises); and The Philippines, where the company’s outlets serve a product called McSpaghetti, which goes down a treat with Filipino diners and helps McDonald’s compete with the local fast-food powerhouse Jollibee.

A Moroccan man holds a McDonald's street sign in Fez.

McAtlas kicks off with He queuing up to order food at a McDonald’s in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. The customers, having fasted all day, were in McDonald’s for iftar, the meal by which starving Muslims break their fast at sundown.

The author describes the process as “a game of chicken”: “timing your own order against everyone else so that the food will be ready to consume just as the sun sets”. Some families order early and sit alongside their food, salivating until the words “Allahu Akbar” are heard over the speaker.

“Lukewarm McNuggets”, the author observes, “are better than no McNuggets.”

He’s affection for McDonald’s is clear. He is no Morgan Spurlock, the maker of the documentary Super Size Me (2004), who set out to portray McDonald’s as an anathema-food, the enemy-in-a-bun of wellbeing. While acknowledging that there was a time when people the world over – especially in Europe – ­perhaps legitimately feared the “McDonaldisation” of their food (and by extension their culture), He makes it clear that ­McDonald’s is now merely “a buzzword for society’s inevitable march toward modernisation and the search for peak ­performance”.

He tells us that even the great French chef Paul Bocuse – who once reviled the chain – says “there’s a need for this kind of thing”, by which he means demotic food, not without taste, ­hygienically delivered and affordable.

He wants the “McHaters” to calm down and to acknowledge that the global success of McDonald’s owes a great deal to the company’s commercial humility. It has localised its menu wherever it’s gone: potato-croquette burgers in India; McFalafel in Egypt; Nasi Lemak (a rice dish) in Malaysia; the McSpicy chicken sandwich in Singapore; marinated chicken bones in China; McBaguettes in France; pão de queijo in Brazil.

McDonald’s started as a classic American get-rich scheme based on that most American virtue: efficiency. It has thrived on American obesity: Get the customer in, fed and out as quickly as possible, cheaply and addictively. But He, bless him, isn’t sneering at McDonald’s. He’s celebrating this export of American culture. It’s an export that pays respect to the ways in which other societies absorb, adapt and tweak McDonald’s to suit themselves.

McDonald’s is made to go native. And the company is A-OK with that.