McAtlas: A photographer's global odyssey to document McDonald's in over 50 countries
Author Gary He sits down with The Retrologist to discuss his masterful 420-page book, whose delicious cover design is inspired by a hamburger.
I suspect it’s been years since you’ve needed a travel atlas, thanks to the ruthless efficiency of smartphones and GPS. Satellites and cell towers collude to make it a snap to get around, but we do lose a certain sense of adventure and charm that used to come with wrestling with an atlas while on the road. The world, however, now has an atlas unlike none other, one that, like in the old days, you need to hold in your hands, a book that will infuse a renewed sense of charm, adventure, and, yes, flavor into your travels.
I’m talking about McAtlas.
My friend, the award-winning food writer Gary He, did a thing — a remarkable thing. He traveled to over 50 countries to visit (and sample the cuisine) of local McDonald’s restaurants. And my what unique dishes — and architectural delights — he turned up, all captured in the monumental McAtlas, an achievement so impressive it’s garnered press in the New York Times, CNN and other publications.
I’m delighted that Gary took some time to chat with The Retrologist about his tome. Gary is a triple threat: a wonderful writer, photographer and all-around good guy. We’ve broken bread (but interestingly never at McDonald’s) over our shared love of the chain and its fascinating role in society, not just in the United States, but as he demonstrates so vividly, around the world. Grab your passport — or McDonald’s coupon book — and join Gary and me for a little Q&A about the McAtlas.
Gary, you are a man after my own McHeart. The McAtlas is a fabulous feat of ingenuity and dedication and should be mandatory reading because who doesn’t go to (or know of) the cultural and culinary impact of McDonald’s? Congratulations! Let’s begin by setting the table – please trace for us your interest in McDonald’s. How did it evolve over the years?
Hey thanks for having me! So like everyone else, I’ve had a relationship with McDonald’s my entire life. When I was a kid, it was a treat for getting good grades, and at NYU, I ate dollar menu double cheeseburgers and chicken fajitas to sustain me through the all-nighters. Eventually I would become a roving food journalist, hitting overseas McDonald’s and occasionally eating local menu items. But one year during Ramadan, I encountered an iftar meal in Morocco, consisting of dates, harira soup, a honeyed pastry, and a yogurt milk drink. It was so localized and felt completely off brand (at least, at the time!) that I thought to myself: what else is out there? And why?
You write about food, and people often associate that with high-brow restaurants and innovative chefs or bespoke greasy spoons. How do your colleagues in this slice of the journalism world react to your interest in McDonald’s?
Oh there’s no resistance from my colleagues, because they all know that I yap!! Listen, I get it, there’s a long-held bias against McDonald’s for whatever reason, especially from the so-called cultural elite. And the nutrition stuff, that’s a horse that’s been beaten to death over decades, and the business is stronger than it has ever been. I don’t care about all of that—I’m here for the social anthropology. And it’s just impossible to ignore the cultural impact, not just in the United States, but around the world as the book demonstrates. I think that it’s a mistake to not take the subject matter seriously.
It’s one thing to write a book about McDonald’s history, or produce a photo book about its heritage, or even its presence across the United States. But you made the entire planet your beat, biting off a lot (and doing it brilliantly, I might add.). How did this book project evolve and become so ambitious in scope?
Originally, the project was going to be these regional zines, with kind of the same concept of storytelling using the chain in a tangential way to get some fun social anthropology concepts across. The budget and the travel would be way more manageable that way. But while working on the first one, I realized that it would start tying into stories from other regions. It was all interconnected. And so I eventually decided to bite the bullet and come up with a plan that included as many of the major markets that I needed to tell this story.
If you had to choose your top 5 McDonald’s locales around the world, what are they and what makes them so special?
McSki in Lindvallen, Sweden was my personal favorite—it was isolated, on the side of a mountain, and just allowed for some of my favorite pictures from the entire trip.
The Airplane in Taupō, New Zealand is iconic, and also a total pain in the ass to get to. There was real joy walking up to it after seeing so many photos online.
The first Chinese McDonald’s in Shenzhen, China is beautiful and historically significant, once a major experiment in an economic sand box that now feels frozen in time, as every other building around this area is a modern glass and steel structure.
UFO McDonald’s in Roswell, New Mexico—the location is cool enough, but they’ve also got a gift shop. Who doesn’t love merch??
The Denton House in New Hyde Park, NY is one of the harbingers of localization on the architectural front. It kind of kick started the rest of Long Island insisting on demure and mindful buildings that better fit into their communities than the standard Mansards of the time—and they got them.
Part of what makes your book possible – and gives you such rich material to explore – is the wide variety of architectural styles, the distinct quirks of McDonald’s across the planet. In the US, however, the forces of architectural homogenization have been stripping the restaurants of character. Do you see this push toward the “McBox” happening worldwide? Are the places you documented doomed because of this trend?
Standardization has always been the norm when it comes to chain restaurants—you had the Googie design when Kroc took over from the brothers and then the Mansard roofs that dominated for decades before the more recent wave of redesigns since the early 2000s. There’s a lot of nostalgia for those designs now as they get eliminated, but I am not convinced there were the same feelings back when they were the norm. In fact, you had stores like the Gore House in Freeport, Maine the McMansion in Independence, Ohio that still stand to this day because the communities protested the impending arrival of the mansard structure and all of its accoutrements. As for “non-standard” McDonald’s, cool ones are still going up (or existing buildings are being moved into) over the past several years, just off the top of my head in Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Qatar, the Netherlands, etc. So yeah, from an architectural standpoint I think it’s merely evolving. And twenty years from now when everyone is getting their orders by drone from commissary kitchens, future retrologists may yet lament the demise of the current McBoxes and the communal spaces they provided.
To pick up on this idea of McBoxing, it seems a number of restaurants in the United States have dodged this trend, like the UFO McDonald’s in Roswell, New Mexico. (Which I also visited for my book.) Roughly how many quirky McDonald’s are left in the US and which are your favorites?
There are so many non-standard McDonald’s in the United States that I couldn’t even include them all in McAtlas, just about a dozen that helped tell the story of localization the best—I mean, you even have a really good one in your book from Alamogordo, NM that I skipped altogether. Though I think that we’ve really got to separate the replacement of the Mansards into one category and the disappearance of the truly non-standard McDonald’s into another. And even within the latter you are mostly just seeing the themed Mansards get eliminated—the truly localized stores like the UFO in Roswell, Barstow Station, Fort Dells, Sedona—many of those stores are still very much thriving and have been modernized without changing what made them culturally significant.
Of all the McDonald’s you visited, which one was the most difficult to get to, and what was that trip like?
Taupō, New Zealand, and it’s not even close! It’s an 18-hour flight if you go direct from New York (where I’m based) to Auckland. Once you’re there, you can either drive five hours to a lake in the center of the north island, or take a prop plane. I opted for the latter. Here’s the thing: there’s almost no other reason to do the trip—you can enjoy the wonders of New Zealand way closer to Auckland. But being able to see and document the decommissioned DC-3 myself after spending so many years staring at pictures online, there was a lot of joy in that.
In taking on so ambitious a task, how did you keep yourself motivated and going? How did you finally decide you had enough material to hit publish, so to speak?
It’s funny you say that, because I probably went overboard. It took every ounce of self control to stop where I did with Latin America—there were all of these large markets that I hadn’t visited yet like Colombia and Venezuela, but they were functionally the same because they were all controlled by Arcos Dorados. I did an 11th hour trip to Puerto Rico because I felt it helped transition the book better, even though the project was already in PDF reviews at the time. So I don’t think self-motivation was ever an issue. There’s definitely some faulty wiring in my brain that just wants to keep collecting and the only thing that stopped me was running out of time and room in the book.
We’ve spoken an awful lot about architecture and design, and that has always been at the heart of the genius of McDonald’s – its compelling design program through the decades. But what about the food? Tell us about some of the different meals you had at these outlets and what makes them so unique.
I mean, even a former corporate chef for the company has come out and said that the overseas product is better than in the US. If you’ve been here your whole life, you should just throw out everything you think about the product—the supply chains are different, the food safety and quality standards are different, and of course the menus are different. For the purposes of a journalistic work, I obviously focused on the menu items since a deep dive into, like, the Tyson meat processing facilities in Malaysia wouldn’t be as compelling. You will find the most different stuff in Asia, from the McSpaghetti in the Philippines to the Macaroni Soup in Hong Kong, to the Gohan burgers in Japan, but don’t sleep on the Italian market—they’ve got a line of burgers there designed in collaboration with Joe Bastianich that are very tasty.
If McDonald’s corporate gave you the green light to introduce a handful of international dishes to the standard American menu, which would you choose and why?
We don’t have a lot of these overseas menu items here in the US because we’ve got 14,000 stores, and adding any new product is probably a supply chain and logistics nightmare. Also, Americans are so habitualized in our on-the-go ways that often we only order any novel product once or twice before just switching back to a regular one. That being said—I think the Biscoff McFlurry in the UK and Pistachio McFlurry from Italy are probably the best flavors in the world and could be deployed relatively painlessly in the United States. If we want to get ambitious, I think the McVegan from the Nordic countries and the McAloo Tikki from India are tastier than the McPlant that they tested here and we’re overdue for a plant-based burger with staying power in the states.
This book will undoubtedly inspire many people to visit these places. What advice do you have for the McTourist?
Leave behind your preconceived notions, and try to resist the expectation that foreign cultures need to be stuck in some fetishized past era. Food is constantly evolving, and fast food is local food. So eat like the locals do and go to a McDonald’s.
What’s the best way for readers to keep up with your writings and adventures?
They should definitely get a McAtlas! I also have a free newsletter where I delve deeper into items in the book, occasionally run stuff from the cutting room floor, and talk about new developments in the realm of McDonald’s-driven social anthropology and localization. For any new adventures, follow my Instagram @garyhe.