Meals on Wheels

NOTE: The following transcript corresponds to an earlier version of this show. Some passages may not match the rebroadcast audio above.

ED: As it turns out, I eat a lot of meals outside of the home, because I travel a lot. But a strange facet of modern life is that those meals have a strange consistency to them. Actually, a reassuring consistency. Wherever I am in the country, I know that I can go to Panera and have the Sierra Turkey Sandwich, and have the chicken with wild rice side. And wash it all down with an iced tea that I know is going to taste exactly the way it did the last time I went there.

Now, a lot of people would probably peg the beginning of the standardized way of eating to the middle of the 20th century, with the advent of fast food. But those people would be wrong.

BRIAN: I’m one of them.

ED: Reporter Meg Cramer has the story of America’s first chain restaurant, an innovation of– get this–the 1870s, known as the Harvey House.

MEG CRAMER: In its early days, railway travel out West was an unpleasant business. People were treated a lot like cargo. Railroad companies just kind of put them on the train and sent them off. Trips could take up to week. But of all the indignities of rail travel– smoke and dust in the cars, cramped quarters, dizzying climbs through the mountains– the most miserable part was the food.

STEPHEN FRIED: It might disgust your listeners I described it really well, because honestly, in those days, the railroads only grudgingly carried passengers. Their motto was “freight doesn’t complain. ”

MEG CRAMER: This is Stephen Fried, author of “Appetite for America.”

STEPHEN FRIED: And basically the food that people in the West on trains– there were no dining cars in the West, just restaurants at the train stations. It was considered so terrible that the “New York Times” suggested at one point that there was more danger eating the food than there was from train wrecks of fires in the West.

MALE SPEAKER 2: The Exasperating Coffee, which, naturally unfit for a Christian to drink, is served so scalding hot as to make that feat impossible.

MEG CRAMER: This is how the “New York Times” describe rail food in 1873.

MALE SPEAKER 2: The leathery beef steak swimming in grease. The homicidal biscuits. The antediluvian sandwiches. The indescribable pies. All these inflections the traveler has endured until a trip of any length through this happy land has come to present to his desperate mind the alternative of dyspepsia or starvation.

MEG CRAMER: Under these circumstances, anyone with a halfway decent biscuit recipe could have run a profitable restaurant. But there was one guy who made it his business to do it best– Fred Harvey. Harvey worked in a Kansas railroad office, but he also had experience working in restaurants in New York and New Orleans, so he knew what a good meal could be.

In 1876, Harvey opened a small lunchroom for passengers on the second floor of the train depot in Topeka, Kansas. He shipped in specially roasted coffee and fresh ingredients, and cut bigger slices of pie than anyone else. It was a success, and a few years later, he cut a deal with the Santa Fe Railroad to run all the restaurants along the line. Passengers could get a Harvey House meal every 100 miles, and Fred Harvey could expect to train full of customers, right on schedule.

Now, if what you’re imagining is a folksy Old Western kind of place, like Cracker Barrel, you’re totally wrong. The Harvey Houses had class.

STEPHEN FRIED: There was a white tablecloth dining room with imported linens. Crystal, silver. Perfect, hand-done service, attached to what would look to you today like a diner, with curved counters and stools, and some tables where people ordered a la carte. And then takeout coffee.

MEG CRAMER: When the Santa Fe Railroad opened service to Los Angeles in 1887, it advertised meals by Fred Harvey all the way. Whenever a new Harvey House opened, it changed the character of a town. This might be the first restaurant that anyone in that town had ever been to. Harvey Houses hosted parties and Friday night socials, and one of the biggest changes was that every restaurant came with a new team of Harvey Girls.

JUDY GARLAND: (SINGING) First comes the plate, then cup and saucey, the knife and fork, and here’s your spoon. The nappy by the glassy.

MEG CRAMER: That song is from the 1946 Hollywood musical The Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland as a waitress in one of Fred Harvey’s restaurants.

[SINGING]

Beginning in the 1880S, thousands of single white women were recruited for this job. They traveled hundreds of miles from Eastern and Midwestern states to work in Harvey Houses. In a lot of frontier towns, men outnumbered women two to one. A train full waitresses was a big deal. Here’s Fried again.

STEPHEN FRIED: Think of any social situation you’ve ever been where everybody’s already dated everybody in the social situation. When somebody new comes into that social situation, it’s really big news. Whether it’s an office, or at school, or something like that. So imagine a regular system that delivered new, single people to these towns– in many cases, very small towns. There was an incredible amount of expectation when the new Harvey Girls came to town.

MEG CRAMER: And what the Harvey Girls were serving was incredible. Rare steak, Blue Point oysters almond souffle pudding, and the perfect cup of coffee. Some of the best food you could find anywhere in America was being served a Harvey Houses in places like Dodge City, Kansas, a town with more cows than people.

The Harvey House system was the first chain of anything that spread across America. His infrastructure was ready-made. Hundreds of miles of track delivered lobster, steak, and fresh fruit right to his kitchens in refrigerated cars. Nobody else in the business could operate on this scale. In one year alone, he used 88 train cars just to move potatoes.

He served thousands of customers every day– basically every passenger on the Santa Fe Railroad– and every meal had to meet the Fred Harvey standard.

STEPHEN FRIED: Their goal was to be really high end, to have everything perfect, to have the service be perfect. And perfect service was not something that was really available much in America, except to rich people. And part of what was interesting about the Harvey story, in many ways, is that he was really the first person to serve democratically, in that the people on the trains came from all backgrounds. First class, second class, all classes.

They had to serve people who couldn’t speak English. They had to serve people who had never eaten a restaurant meal before, as well as people who had had chefs taking care of them their whole lives.

MEG CRAMER: Fred Harvey’s service was legendary, and railroad travel throughout the Southwest became a lot easier to stomach. But Fred Harvey did more than just serve good food. He helped to make the frontier a nice place to be. Americans started going on vacations not to Europe, but to Arizona.

STEPHEN FRIED: There’s something very perfect about the idea of building a train line to the edge of the Grand Canyon, so instead of having to hike there, you could take a train there, and you could sit in a four star restaurant right at the edge of the Grand Canyon. And that’s very much what the Harvey Company always stood for, so that people could have that experience of the unfolding West in comfort.

MEG CRAMER: Fred Harvey saw a whole nation on the move, and he knew that when people left home, they wanted more than the basics. They wanted comfort, a decent meal, and a good cup of coffee. And that’s what we expect now when we travel throughout America, that wherever we’re going, we can find everything we need along the way.

BRIAN: That’s reporter Meg Cramer. You can have a look at some Harvey House menus on our website, backstoryradio.org.

ED: Yeah, Brian. I feel really vindicated that almost everything significant about the 20th century began in the 19th. And as soon as people are leaving home and looking for comfort, looking for a little bit of certainty. Standardization emerges as a result. In the 21st century, it’s coming full circle. It’s not enough to have standardization, which we’ve grown to distrust. Now it has to be standardization that bespeaks the language of the locale.

So Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Boston Market. We create little micro environments. A little bit of Seattle in every Starbucks, a little bit of Tennessee in every Cracker Barrel. So the Harvey House, the whole idea of a guaranteed experience, is the beginning of what we live for today, is that we know not only what the food’s going to taste like, but what it’s going to be like. When we get out of our car, get off the train, get off the plane, and walk into one of these restaurants, and it’s a dirty little secret of the modern era that we like that.

BRIAN: You know, Ed, listening to that piece, I was thinking about my own experience with expectations for food. And we came of age in a generation where everything standardized. That’s just what we expected. You had your McDonald’s, you had to Howard Johnson’s. And so by the time I was an adult, when I went a traveling, I was looking for local color, that diner that had the Blue Plate Special.

ED: So authentic.

BRIAN: Exactly. And I remember traveling as a young adult–actually your neck of the woods, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina. I was traveling with my friend, a Japanese-American, Kuniko, and her British husband. And they kept vetoing all my spots that I thought I’d find local color.

And I finally said, hey, what’s up? And Kuniko said, we’ve had some really bad experiences at these local restaurants. And of course she wasn’t just referring to the food. What she meant was that she hadn’t been served. She had actually been insulted in another one, and to her, standardization meant not only predictable food. It meant predictable service of that food, and it meant a kind of social norm that these chains really needed to pursue that transcended local social practices. And I really learned a lot from that moment.