Red Scrapple says soon all cows will look alike, all burgers will be steaks.

                                                           Hamburger Helper


Fast food is getting a whole lot faster. McDonald’s recently announced it
had reduced the frying time of french fries from 210 seconds to 65 seconds,
which means the average consumer will be served in 33.7 seconds flat.

The company hasn’t stopped with the venerable fry.  Also underway are plans
to totally automate restaurants, eliminating every position except the
person who cleans the bathroom. And even that position is threatened. The
company is planning to automate bathrooms by 2002. 

In time company officials hope that the familiar arches will be replaced by
kiosks where everything is automatic. The only hurdle to date is how to get
a triple whopper through the order slot that has to be kept relatively
small to discourage theft and vandalism--and to keep out rodents that could
take over the place if no humans are on hand to reduce the population. One
plan that has been tested, though not perfected, is to display large
moveable cutouts of Sylvester the Cat that would have enough streaming
media to discourage any rat or mouse from setting up house. McDonald’s
hopes to license the image of Sylvester well into the next century.

Also on the drawing boards is a plan to make the hamburgers even more tasty
and uniform--if that is possible. This work necessarily begins at the
feedlot level and is in the hands of Red Scrapple, head of the Beef Carcass
Research Center near Waco, Texas. In short, Mr. Scrapple’s objective is to
build a better burger. 

To accomplish this he must inspect the hide of  the animals within precious
minutes after the slaughter. Any longer and the “evidence goes down the
blood drain,” as Scrapple puts it.  He measures carcass weight, the rib-eye
area and the fat inside the body cavity. Mr. Scrapple then feeds this data
into a computer which spits out the number of T-bones, chuck roasts and
hamburgers the animal provides. 

In time this veteran hide hunter thinks that “we will be able to deliver to
slaughter cattle that are all T-bone with no more than 10% wastage. In
effect, no one will be eating hamburgers anymore. Even burgers will be
T-bone steaks.”

Scrapple thinks the industry can reach this meaty objective within five or
six years. What needs to be done, he argues, “is to cull the weak, low
birthweight, unpromising calf at birth and sell it for pet food, where
standards are very low. Then we’d cull those animals that are slow to
convert food to edible tissue. This can be done quite surgically given our
computer prowess.”

The Beef Carcass Research Center thinks that cattle need to lead a more
sheltered, controlled existence during their 14-24 months of life, more
like chickens and pigs. Though this might mean putting millions of cattle
in crowded chicken pens, the end product would justify this type of
herding.

When asked whether these breeding methods would significantly increase the
cost of hamburgers, Scrapple preferred to let the “market do the talking.”
He did suggest that most red-bloodied Americans would gladly pay more for
steaks and burgers that have more marbling and texture.

His fantasy, through a weird kind of reverse genetic engineering, is to
develop cows that all look alike. “This is the guaranteed path,” he argues,
“to the perfect steak and burger, no matter where you are in the country or
the world.”

McDonald’s has had little public comment on these developments. However, in
such a low margin business, the potential of selling T-bones instead of
hamburgers holds great prospects for aggressive pricing.

Scrapple is not concerned about these economics. He sees a tremendous
opportunity to bring beef back to the heart of the American family. He and
others have picked up a growing sense of “chicken fatigue” in the country.

“I consider this fascination with a puny chicken almost un-American,” he
notes.

“It’s time for the cow to come out of hiding.”